UNIQUE -STUDENTS- PATTERNS : EVOLUTION ESSAY

' Every breath you take may tell a story " : Your thumbprint, the pattern of lines in the Iris of your eye. These are known to be more or less unique to each person.

But in a paper in Current Biology, researchers report that your patterns of breathing through your nose are so distinctive that it may be possible to identify you by breath alone, suggesting we have '' breath prints.''

The study was conducted in 100 people who wore sensors for 24 hours, and the technique proved effective in distinguishing among individuals more than 90 percent of the time.

Certain quirks of breaths were linked to people's scores on questionnaires about anxiety, suggesting that breath monitoring may provide a window into mental states and disorders.

Most people rarely think about breathing, but for researchers who study smell, like Noam Sobel and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, that regular cycle of in and out contains tantalizing information about the brain.

EACH inhalation comes with a firing of sensory neurons and other cells involved in monitoring the environment.

Dr. Sobel and Timna Soroka, a graduate student, wondered whether it would be possible to identify individuals from long-term recordings of their breathing patterns.

Ms. Soroka developed a wearable sensor that fit on volunteers' upper backs, with tubes running around to capture the airflow out of each nostril.

It was found that by using software to analyze a day's worth of sensor information, they could tell people apart.

One person might have a very consistent pause just before each inhalation. Another might pause some of the time and barely at other times.

Someone might tend to exhale very quickly, or sigh more frequently. For many people, one nostril might have a greater flow than the other for some of the day.

The World Students Society thanks Veronique Greenwood.