MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave. That is NPR's science podcast. I'm joined by two of the show's reporters, Regina Barber and Berly McCoy. Howdy, you two.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey.
BERLY MCCOY, BYLINE: Hey.
KELLY: So thank you, once again, for bringing us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
BARBER: The accuracy of TikTok videos about ADHD.
MCCOY: How life may have come from little bits of lightning.
BARBER: And why neuroscientists are studying parakeets to understand human speech.
KELLY: Wow, I can't wait. OK, let's tackle them in order, which means we're starting with ADHD, so attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I mean, I'll start by asking, is that actually a common topic of discussion on TikTok?
MCCOY: Yeah, it's super common. So here's just a little sampling of what you might hear.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED TIKTOKKER #1: For those of you who have ADHD, who is your favorite...
UNIDENTIFIED TIKTOKKER #2: Five less well-known ADHD behaviors with doodles. Let's go. No. 1...
UNIDENTIFIED TIKTOKKER #3: ADHD behaviors you didn't know about, part two.
BARBER: Yeah, and researchers wanted to take a closer look at some of these videos to see how accurate they were.
KELLY: And how did they go about doing that?
MCCOY: So they had clinical psychologists rate the 100 most popular ADHD videos at the time on accuracy, and they found less than half of the claims made in these videos aligned with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM. This is a tool that mental health experts use to help diagnose and treat their patients.
BARBER: Yeah, and none of the videos got a perfect score from clinicians. Many lacked nuance. Like, just because you listen to a song on repeat or you forget to text your friend back does not necessarily mean you have ADHD. It could be a lot of things like stress or sleep issues or a learning disability.
KELLY: Sure. So what is the concern here? Is it that people are going to these videos - going to TikTok - trying to get real information about their mental health and finding stuff that is not necessarily actual, real information?
MCCOY: Yeah. Well, the researchers also looked at how accurate young adults with and without ADHD perceived these videos to be. And even though they gave the less accurate videos correspondingly lower ratings, they still believed the content in the video was more accurate than the clinicians said it was. So the researchers published the details this week in the journal, PLOS One. And the lead author, Vasileia Karasavva - she's from the University of British Columbia - said, this can be problematic.
VASILEIA KARASAVVA: It can create tension between the health care professionals and the people who come in for help.
BARBER: She says that if people are adamant they have ADHD based on these videos, it could prevent them from getting the help they need, since these symptoms could be rooted in, say, depression or anxiety.
KELLY: What is the guidance, then, for people who have been going to TikTok for mental health advice?
MCCOY: Well, first, she says see a therapist if you can. A lot of times, people are going to TikTok because it's easy, free, and it builds community. She also cautions against watching too much TikTok because her team also found that people who consumed more TikTok are more likely to feel worse about their own symptoms. And she says check the credentials of the TikTokkers who are sharing medical advice.
KELLY: Check the credentials. Excellent advice for all kinds of things. OK.
MCCOY: Yes.
KELLY: Next topic. Let's talk about lightning creating life.
BARBER: Yeah, so a recent study in the journal Science Advances gives new life to, like, an old hypothesis on how life was created on Earth, with a spark of lightning. It's based on the Miller-Urey experiment from the 1950s. In this experiment, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey tried to recreate, like, a mini version of our atmosphere in a glass bulb. And this had hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water vapor. And then they shot sparks into that mixture. And over time, chemical reactions created some of the building blocks of life, like amino acids.
MCCOY: But there are problems with this hypothesis.
KELLY: Cue moody music. OK, what are the problems with the...
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: ...Hypothesis?
MCCOY: Well, lightning is intermittent and unpredictable. And the atmosphere is really, really big. So all of those new amino acids created could have just dissipated.
KELLY: OK, so let's bring in the new study, which weighs in here, I'm guessing.
BARBER: Yeah, totally. So scientists at Stanford notice that when water breaks into droplets - like the spray of a hose or a crashing wave - those droplets become charged. You get bigger droplets that are positively charged and smaller ones that are negatively charged. And this difference in charge can result in a spark that lead researcher, Richard Zare, coined as microlightning (ph).
RICHARD ZARE: It's the first time that anybody has reported luminescence from water droplets. You know, water is something that people have studied for, you know, a long time. And you might think, well, everything about water is known. Well, no (laughter).
MCCOY: So microlightning is a spin on that old Miller-Urey experiment that demonstrates a kind of lightning could be partially responsible for the beginnings of life.
KELLY: I hear the emphasis on could be partially...
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: ...Responsible. Sounds like we still got a ways to go before we get a definitive answer about how life first came to be here on Earth.
BARBER: Yeah, we do want to stress that there are other hypotheses that could have contributed to the origins of life on Earth, maybe more than microlightning. Some scientists think asteroid strikes or hydrothermal vents played a role. Plus, nobody knows the exact combo of gases in the early atmosphere. So how life began on Earth is still a very highly debated question.
KELLY: Third item - and I'm not going to lie - I have been looking forward to this one.
BARBER: (Laughter).
KELLY: The final story, why are neuroscientists studying parakeets?
MCCOY: So researchers have been trying to find an animal model they can use to study human speech because millions of Americans have some kind of communication disorder, be it difficulty producing words or planning out sentences in the brain. And a new study in the journal Nature says parakeets - that's a type of parrot - could help highlight what happens when these systems break down.
KELLY: I am already learning 'cause I will confess, I did not know parakeets were a type of parrot.
BARBER: Yeah (laughter).
MCCOY: Yes.
KELLY: Are we talking - I don't know - like, Polly-want-a-cracker-type stuff?
BARBER: OK, not quite. The parakeets roamed around these, like, little arenas doing their usual squawks and chirps like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF PARAKEETS SQUAWKING)
BARBER: And as the parakeets squawked, the scientists recorded the birds' brain activity.
MCCOY: One of the study authors at NYU Langone Health, neuroscientist Michael Long, said one of the big questions was whether a parakeet's brain had any similarities to humans when it came to the production of sound.
MICHAEL LONG: And the answer resoundingly was it looked more like the kinds of circuits that we use in order to produce flexible speech.
KELLY: More like the kind of brain circuits we use - what are the similarities between my brain and a parrot brain?
BARBER: Yeah, so for parakeets, there seems to be brain cells that represent different vowel sounds and brain cells that represent different consonant sounds. And that's sort of how it works in humans. And they found that the activity in the parrots' brains while they were making sounds was more similar to what happens when humans make sounds than it was to the other bird they looked at, zebra finches.
KELLY: So how useful a model might this be for studying human speech?
MCCOY: We talked to a neurogeneticist in the field who wasn't involved in the work, Erich Jarvis. He was excited about the paper and says it helps move us closer to finding the most useful model for human speech. He did say spoken language exists on a spectrum, though.
ERICH JARVIS: Spoken language is a continuum. The parrot species they looked at is further along that continuum - closer to humans - than zebra finches are. But it's not like these principles are absent in the zebra finch.
BARBER: Which means future research may find another bird with a brain even more similar to humans. But again, this is a great step toward better understanding human speech.
KELLY: Absolutely fascinating. That is Berly McCoy and Regina Barber from NPR's science podcast, Short Wave, which you can follow for new discoveries and everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. Thanks, you two.
BARBER: Thank you.
MCCOY: Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE DIP'S "EASY LOVE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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