SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast. I am joined by science correspondent Katia Riddle and Short Wave host Regina Barber. Hey, there.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: Hi.
DETROW: So you have, as you do, brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. Let me know where they are.
BARBER: A new study that shows teens are getting less and less sleep.
RIDDLE: A detailed look at a potential megathrust earthquake in the Pacific Northwest.
BARBER: And ancient recipes discovered in prehistoric pottery.
DETROW: OK, so let's start with sleep. How is it even possible for teens to get less sleep than before?
BARBER: Yeah. So researchers studied the sleep habits of high school students from 2007 to 2023, and they found that the number of teenagers getting insufficient sleep - that's less than seven hours a night - is on the rise. Now it's more than three-quarters of these high school students.
RIDDLE: These bad sleep habits were true across most demographics, races, genders, grades. And, Scott, some of these kids are getting less than five hours of sleep a night.
DETROW: Urgh (ph).
RIDDLE: The results are in the medical journal JAMA.
DETROW: Any sense why this is happening?
RIDDLE: Well, the researchers tried to get at that. This data is from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior survey. This is a survey that more than 120,000 U.S. high schoolers take every two years, answering questions about health risk behaviors like alcohol use, cannabis use and sexual activity.
BARBER: Yeah, and lack of sleep seemed to be a problem across the study groups in teens with and without behavioral issues, although the paper noted that the teens who reported depression or suicidal thoughts tended to sleep less than the others in the group.
DETROW: I can speak from experience 'cause I, shockingly, got enough sleep last night, which does not always happen. I assume it is very bad to not get enough sleep, but I'm curious, like, what are pediatricians saying in quantifying this? Like, what specifically are they worried about?
BARBER: Yeah, I was wondering the same thing because I have a teenager in high school. So I reached out to a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital, Dr. Cora Collette Breuner. She didn't work on this study, but she thought this study was fascinating. She told me she had seen the effects of insufficient sleep firsthand in her practice. She says that if teens don't get enough sleep...
CORA COLLETTE BREUNER: They're more depressed. They get in more car accidents. They do worse at school. They don't get good jobs. They don't maintain relationships. They don't have happy and productive lives.
DETROW: None of that is good.
BARBER: No. No.
DETROW: That's bad.
BARBER: Yeah. Yeah.
DETROW: So next question then is, like, what specific suggestions do doctors have to try and turn this around on the individual level or the broader level?
RIDDLE: Well, the study authors say, since insufficient sleep seems to be a problem plaguing most teens, there must be structural environmental factors at play here. And they suggest broad interventions that could potentially reach most kids.
BARBER: For example, they point out that later school start times are linked to longer sleep and improved mental health. So interventions like that might help students across the board get better sleep.
DETROW: All right. Let's shift to the next topic. A megathrust earthquake. Sounds kind of metal. Sounds scary.
BARBER: (Laughter).
DETROW: Tell me more.
RIDDLE: It is scary, especially if you're a person like me, who lives in the Pacific Northwest above the Cascadia subduction zone. That's a big fault. It's normal around here to keep a supply of earthquake emergency things in your garage, like bottled water and batteries.
BARBER: Yeah, this is that big one I would always hear about growing up. And that fault, the plates are pushing towards each other and moving closer at a rate of about an inch or more a year. Think of it like a slowly compressing spring that could eventually snap in a massive earthquake.
DETROW: Seems like we are learning more about how that might unfold, though, if it does happen.
RIDDLE: That's right. Researchers at the University of Washington published a study in the journal Science Advances. They looked at the mechanics of the plates in the Cascadia fault. The challenge is the fault is beneath the sea floor, which makes it hard to access and to study.
MARINE DENOLLE: We talk about going to the moon and Mars, but the deep ocean is hard to get to, and it's right next to our coast.
RIDDLE: That's Marine Denolle, one of the researchers who worked on this. She and her colleagues listened very closely to the Earth using sensors that are on the sea floor. These sensors measure tiny changes in seismic signals, and that gives us some idea of what's happening inside the fault.
BARBER: That data was gathered over a decade, and it gives us one of the most nuanced pictures yet of the Cascadia fault. They found that the northern part of the fault may be more tightly locked and it's storing more stress, while the central section seems to allow more fluid movement along the fault, which means an earthquake along the fault might unfold differently than they originally thought.
DETROW: So what does that mean for life and society on the surface, then?
RIDDLE: Well, it's probably too early to tell. There's a lot of other factors to think about - population density and proximity to the ocean, for example. We talked to another earthquake scientist not involved in this study, Chris Goldfinger. He says that the potential for catastrophe because of this earthquake zone wasn't really understood until the mid-1980s. And these kinds of studies will help us better understand and prepare for earthquakes. We just need more of them.
DETROW: All right, let's shift to our third and final topic...
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: ...Prehistoric diets.
BARBER: Yeah, I'm excited about this one because scientists know a lot about agricultural societies and, like, the way they used to eat back then, but not much about what hunter-gatherers used to eat. And a new study in the journal PLOS One takes a look at that. A group of scientists analyzed ancient pots from roughly 4,000 to 8,000 years ago.
RIDDLE: These pots were from all over northern Europe, from what is now Denmark to western Russia. And what they were looking at specifically was old food remains caked on the inside of these ancient pots.
DETROW: I've got to say, I feel better that our ancient, ancient, ancient ancestors were...
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: ...Also not washing their dishes.
BARBER: But it's good for science because...
DETROW: Yeah. You're welcome.
BARBER: Right, because the researchers found food crusts leftover from a whole bunch of ancient meals. But one of the ones they found the most interesting was a stew of fish mixed with guelder rose berries. These bright red berries are normally bitter, but they taste totally different - they have a totally different flavor - once they're cooked.
RIDDLE: It's a dish that existed even in more recent European history. Crystal Dozier, an archaeologist at Wichita State University, says these berries are an example of how...
CRYSTAL DOZIER: There's a lot of plants and even animals that we used to eat in the past as humans that have fallen out of our culinary traditions. And these kind of studies remind us that sometimes we need to look back to look forward.
BARBER: Case in point, Scott, people might even find these guelder rose berries in their neighborhood if they live in the northern United States. They often are grown as decorative plants, but these berries are edible once you cook them. Although, like, please, listeners, don't eat random berries unless you know what they are. Like, for real.
DETROW: I'm wondering, though, did the scientists end up cooking any of these ancient dishes themselves?
RIDDLE: They did. Oliver Craig, a senior author on the paper at the University of York, felt that while some of the dishes were a bit flavorless, he thought the berries were tasty. But he says...
OLIVER CRAIG: What people see as tasty changes massively depending on the cultural context.
RIDDLE: So true. It brings me back to childhood (laughter).
DETROW: That's Katia Riddle and Regina Barber from NPR's science podcast Short Wave, which you can follow on the NPR app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks to you both.
BARBER: Thank you.
RIDDLE: Thanks, Scott.
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