This week's Short Wave news roundup

NPR's Short Wave team talks about how air pollution affects the brain, what ancient squirrel poop reveals about prehistoric fauna, and a whale graveyard on the ocean floor. NPR Science LISTEN & FOLLOW Science This week's Short Wave news roundup June 11, 20264:15 PM ET Heard on All Things Considered By  Angela Zhang ,  Emily Kwong ,  Mary Louise Kelly This week's Short Wave news roundup Listen · Transcript Toggle more options Download Embed Embed <iframe src="https://www. npr. org/player/embed/nx-s1-5846600/nx-s1-9807082" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> Transcript NPR's Short Wave team talks about how air pollution affects the brain, what ancient squirrel poop reveals about prehistoric fauna, and a whale graveyard on the ocean floor. MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: It is time for our science news roundup from Short Wave. That is NPR's science podcast. I am joined , Angela Zhang and Emily Kwong. EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise. So y'all have, as you always do, kindly brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. ZHANG: Well, the first is how air pollution might be making your memory worse. KWONG: The second is the discovery of an ancient whale graveyard. ZHANG: And finally, what prehistoric mysteries are revealed . We have a lot of ancient animals going here. Let's start with the serious one - air pollution and memory? ZHANG: So the study I have for you today is about these really, really tiny particles of air pollution, like 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. And these particles are released , and they're bad for your heart and your lungs, and they can also get directly to the brain through the blood. What do we know about how they affect, say, a person's memory, though? KWONG: Yeah, so to study how air pollution affects the brain, researchers used a database containing information about Black Americans living in California. The researchers looked at how much air pollution someone may have experienced based on their home address and then looked at their cognitive test scores. And while we know pollution is bad for the brain in general, what the researchers found is that it also affected a specific type of memory. KATHRYN CONLON: The people who had been exposed to more pollution over the years had weaker semantic memory. So really, that long-term pollution looked like it was aging the brain's memory ahead of schedule.