I glow, therefore I am

Today on the show: a double feature — two mysteries in one episode. First, it seems like all living things emit a faint glow that disappears when they die. Then, is the International Space Station ... too clean? Guests: Daniel Oblak, professor of physics at the University of Calgary; Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez, scientist at SPT Labtech Links: Daniel's paper with mouse and leaf images; Rodolfo's paper on the ISS For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. If you listen to this show, you probably enjoy discovering new things. It is built into the DNA of the show that curiosity is its own reward and that there's always a deeper dive to do. And one place to explore some of the topics we've covered here is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs, TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hello, Bird.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Hello, Noam.

• 1:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  How's it going?

• 1:27Speaker 00

  It's going great. I'm happy to see you.

• 1:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Me too. So a while back, I came to you with this idea, or more like a question, right? What's better than one unexplainable?

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Nine unexplainables.

• 1:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  I was thinking more like two.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know. I think we do a little two in one. Maybe I tell you a little thing, you tell me a little thing.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  And we do a little double feature?

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I like double features.

• 1:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Maybe we do like a Barbenheimer. One of us can be Barbie, one of us can be Oppenheimer.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know which of us will be which.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  I'd like to be Barbie, I think.

• 2:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Maybe we'll do the stories, we'll see who's who at the end, we'll check in.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Okay, that sounds good.

• 2:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Do you have yours? Do you have your unexplainable nugget?

• 2:10Speaker 00

  I have my unexplainable. I am ready.

• 2:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  And we'll see who gets to be Barbie.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Great.

• 2:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I want to start with a question.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  What would you say is the difference between something dead or alive?

• 2:23Speaker 00

  One's dead and the other's alive.

• 2:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Good, good analysis, Bird.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  But we did also, like, we did a whole episode about this. That was sort of like, where is the line between life and death? You know, we had heart death. Then we created this definition of brain death as well. But that line is less obvious than I think it might initially appear.

• 2:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  OK, so what if I were to tell you there was a way to tell whether anything is alive or dead? You know, even like a leaf. And all you need is a camera, like a really sensitive camera.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Is this like vampires don't show up on cameras? So you can like identify the undead like?

• 3:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  OK, that actually might be a better way of doing this than my idea. But no, this comes from this guy, Daniel Oblak. He's a professor at the University of Calgary in Canada. He works on quantum physics. So, you know, the physics that happens at a subatomic level.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 3:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  And he got really interested in looking into ways quantum physics might interact with biology.

• 3:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know if you've heard of any of these possible ideas. There is a theory that the thing that explains how smell works is quantum physics.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 3:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's this other idea that birds, the way that they can sense Earth's magnetic field and get around is by some kind of weird quantum effect in their eye.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 4:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  So Daniel was looking into questions of quantum physics and biology. And a colleague told him about something called a biophoton.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Sorry, photons are like the sort of particle form of light.

• 4:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  But then we're saying biophoton, like, alive? Part of light, like a living?

• 4:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  No, no, no, the photon is not alive, but the photon is related to life.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  OK.

• 4:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  So it's a kind of light that all living things give off. It's not heat. You don't need a thermal camera, an infrared camera to see it. It's visible light. It's also not bioluminescence, which is another type of light. I know you've done reporting on that has a particular molecular reaction that creates tons of light that you can see from far away. It's just the light of life.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  What? Wait. So, okay, to clarify.

• 5:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  What you are supposedly telling me is that each of us is shining with like a mild aura.

• 5:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yes.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Of life?

• 5:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  That is not even metaphorical. That is literally true.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Is it like a visible aura of life?

• 5:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  So it seems like all metabolic reactions create visible light. Every cell, you know, the smallest possible bit of what is alive as it is doing stuff, as it's making stuff, as it's just existing, it's giving off light, like a teeny, teeny, tiny amount of visible light. So Daniel told me, for a comparison.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  If you were to turn on a light bulb, and the other day I was just out of curiosity figuring out the number, it's something like 10 to the power 18 photons. It's a billion, billion. That's how much light comes from a light bulb.

• 6:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Want to guess how much we're talking here? How many photons metabolic reactions give off?

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Nine.

• 6:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, my God. That is such a good guess.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Here, we're talking about a few photons, like 10 photons.

• 6:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  You're one photon off.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Never been wrong in my life.

• 6:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Quintillions of photons and you got one photon off.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Okay, great.

• 6:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  But you'd never be able to see my bio photons with the naked eye. So you'd need a really, really, really dark room and a really, really sensitive camera. And there have been examples of people that have looked for bio photons in living tissue before. But Daniel doesn't think anyone's ever looked at a full living organism until his team.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Now, this is not the funnest part, but you know how lots of scientific experiments use mice that end up having to be euthanized?

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 7:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so Daniel figured that if they were going to be euthanized at the end of an experiment anyway, they might as well do something positive with it.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  So a mouse died?

• 7:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so his team got a mouse before it died, put it in this super dark box, kept the temperature at a constant 98.6 degrees. So, you know, things get colder when they die, and they didn't want the heat to impact the image at all, so they kept it constant. And then they took a photo with this super sensitive camera in this really dark box. Then they euthanized the mouse, and they took another photo. And I want to show you what they found.

• 7:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Here is a picture, and I just want you to tell me what you see.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Okay, there's a picture of a alive mouse and a picture of a dead mouse. And the alive mouse, it looks almost like a brain scan in some ways. It's got like blue and green and red, and it's sort of the outline of it from above is illuminated in blue and green and red.

• 8:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  And then if you go down to the dead mouse, you can still sort of vaguely see the shape of it, but it's no longer filled in. It's like a pointillist, like little dots of blue.

• 8:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  But other than that, it's like it's disintegrating.

• 8:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  I wish people could see this image. We can link this in the show notes, but it's just nuts. Like, it looks like you have the shape of a mouse on the top glowing with light, and then on the bottom, you have this mouse just kind of... Dissolving.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 8:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  It just feels like it's a picture of life fading away. And it's just so stark. You know, there's all these processes associated with life, you know, like the heart, the brain. But you have this picture here where you can just say, life, not life.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  It's like a window into whether the being is alive or not.

• 9:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know if your brain goes here, but when I saw this picture of just sort of this weird glow of life disappearing, I was initially just like, Daniel, did you take a picture of the soul? But he was just saying like, no, this is just a chemical process. They're taking a picture of, you know, the end of all the processes of life for this mouse.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  You take a glow stick, you know, a glow stick is like two chemicals. You break it and they start emitting light. It's a chemical process that emits light, you know? It doesn't show that this glow stick has a soul.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  I don't know, just looking at this. I think I'm still fundamentally hung up on the idea that we're all very, very faintly glowing.

• 10:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  And, and there's more to this that could be kind of more potentially useful. So he did this other experiment where he took a leaf. And he did the same thing, put it in a dark, temperature controlled place. And then he made some tiny scrapes on it.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  And I just want to show you what this looks like.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'm looking at some leaves. And then there are these white streaks, like gashes across them.

• 10:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and that's where

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 10:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  the leaves were scraped.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Is it like the cells are trying to heal so they have more intense metabolic practices? So they're glowing more?

• 10:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yes. What Daniel says is he thinks this is showing the leaf trying to heal itself.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  They're like firemen running to the fire and throwing buckets. Like, throw this out, right? Yeah, something like that.

• 11:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  It shows what's going on in the leaf metabolically. And he wonders if there should be maybe some more research on how metabolic activity seems to sort of spread out from an injury site.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Well, it also makes sense in terms of when you look at, I mean, I know it's different because when you look at an image of the brain, it's not literally being like your brain is glowing in this way, right? But you

• 11:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  When we look at an image of the brain, all the blood going to one part of the brain lights it up in that way. It looks very similar of like, oh, there's a lot of activity there. And so that's something that we've translated into light, but this is just like, things are literally maybe glowing.

• 11:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, there's a lot of confounding factors. I think we're very far away from this research being particularly useful.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 11:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  He did this analysis recently showing that it would be pretty hard to get any useful bio photon information on a brain without going like inside the skull, just because of all the other bio photons coming from the skin and stuff. We're still very, very early days in this research. The photons coming out of this stuff is just so, so, so, so slight. Daniel said that they weren't even planning to release anything about this mouse until they saw the picture and they were just like, oh, my God, this is so stark. Like this mouse is dissolving. We have to just put this out. But he does think that eventually this type of thing could potentially be useful for a couple of things. So like

• 12:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  organ transportation, if you're transporting organs for transplants, it could potentially be a way of a sort of early diagnostic if one of the organs is not living or having trouble. There's other potentially cool idea where it could be useful for monitoring crop health and forest health. Like, like, maybe there's a way to monitor the health of a plant population just by looking at the glow coming off of it. It's all just like a huge, maybe possible down the line because this is so, so, so early. But I don't know, just for me, even though we're so early, the idea that light, like just regular visible light can tell the difference between something that is alive and dead. Like, to me, it feels

• 13:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  like we're scratching the surface of something really big here.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  And there's so many places for this to go that gets me just really, really excited.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  It's just sort of.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Beautiful to think about.

• 13:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, like whether it's the soul or just kind of it's nice that we all glow.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  I don't think it's the soul.

• 13:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  No, it's not the soul.

• 13:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, that's my half of the double feature. I think I'm Barbie because it's like Barbie's a doll, you know, she has a life force, if you believe. But I don't think she's emitting bio photons. So, so I think I'm Barbie. I don't know if you're Oppenheimer.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  I kind of want to also be Barbie. Like it's just like being Barbie is so much more fun. If I'm Oppenheimer, I'm like the end of the world.

• 14:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  We're doing Barbenheimers. I don't think we can both be Barbie.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Go to the movies. We watch Barbie again.

• 14:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's true.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Great. After the break, we maybe watch Barbie again. We'll find out.

• 14:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Let's do it.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a business requires you to be resourceful. And the more you flex that muscle, the more you start to see opportunities for growth. For example, launching your business with Black Friday approaching means you can take advantage of the extra online traffic. And Shopify is there to help you make it all happen. Shopify says they are the platform for a record breaking, reliable holiday selling season for businesses at every stage. They have pre-built website themes and an AI site builder, which should make it easy to launch a beautiful, professional looking store. And you don't ever need to touch a line of code to do it. They also have a mobile app that lets you run your store from anywhere.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  And they say their AI e-commerce expert sidekick can help you manage almost any business task with a single prompt, including holiday discounts. With Shopify, you can easily sell everywhere people shop, online, in person, across social media, even in AI chats. If you are ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/unexplainable to start your free trial. That is Shopify.com/unexplainable. Go to Shopify.com/unexplainable today to hear your first.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Quince. Fall is my absolute favorite season. I love fall colors, I love fall leather, I love the specific light you sometimes get on a fall afternoon, and I really love fall clothes, which Quince has. This fall, Quince is offering pieces with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and merino wool. The styles are timeless, versatile, and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for day after day. Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $60, giving you the softness and quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  I think my favorite thing about Quince clothes is that they're just good wardrobe staples. I got three black shirts from them, each in a slightly different style, and they are just correct. They fit the way they are supposed to, they look nice, they feel nice, and they go well with the rest of my closet. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, please let them know it was unexplainable. It's a great way to support the show.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  So last year, I was kind of poking around on questions of human health and space. And just because we care about human health, we care about space here on the show. I was looking for papers-

• 18:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, you don't care about space.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  On this, it's true. I care more about the ocean. But nevertheless, I was looking for human health and space papers. And I saw this paper in the journal Cell that I actually, sorry, I just want to say, I do care about space. I've been following the Artemis 2 stuff closely. I care.

• 18:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  You just, you just really care about the ocean.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  I just also really care about the ocean.

• 18:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Someday, we're gonna have a space versus ocean-

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Someday, we're gonna have a space versus ocean's battle. But today is not that day, because I saw a paper in Cell that was basically like, we studied the microbes on the space station, the International Space Station. And as you know, I'm obsessed with microbes, obviously. Reached out to the lead author on this paper, very fun individual.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  My name is Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benitez, if you want to go the full name, because we like to make it sound like we're in a telenovela.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  And so I asked Rodolfo, basically, why they wanted to study microbes on the International Space Station. And he told me, like, this study was not new, right? There have been several studies of ISS microbes. And there are kind of a few reasons to do this. So, one, they just sort of want to know what the astronauts up there are being exposed to, like, what's up there around them, how it might be affecting them. And then, two, which I just hadn't thought as much about, was spacecraft health.

• 19:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  What?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  So he was saying that, like, microbes can form biofilms that could mess up your hardware potentially.

• 19:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, like the health of the spacecraft itself?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I had read previously, this isn't a microbe, but Mir, M-I-R, the sort of like Russian space station, had issues with fungus at one point. So it is actually important to, like, monitor this stuff. And so Rodolfo himself does not go up in space, unfortunately. But this astronaut microbiologist named Kate Rubens, she went up to the International Space Station, and she basically swabbed everything.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  So like food storage areas, exercise areas, personal hygiene areas where they brush their teeth.

• 20:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  That is incredible.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  I hadn't realized this, but they have to wipe bays. Like, they don't, they can't take a shower because the water would

• 20:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, that would be crazy.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Go everywhere. But I wasn't, I was

• 20:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  No, I don't really spend time like imagining astronauts showering. I haven't really thought about that, honestly.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  So they're swabbing all of this, all these areas. And then they bring all this back to analyze and they sort of confirmed what other studies had found on the ISS, which is they have really careful sterilization procedures up there, right? They have air filters. Astronauts are not just wiping down themselves, they're also wiping down everything with these like antimicrobial wipes. They have vacuums, quarantines before they go up. But that does not mean that the ISS is like germ free, right? Instead, the ISS is essentially colonized by a lot of human-related microbes. So microbes from human bodies.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  So from skin, from mouths, from urine and feces, like everywhere. Which, to be clear, is also true of like urine in my house, right? There would also be microbes from our mouths.

• 21:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, don't hate on the space station.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  There's, there are microbes from our mouths in the room right now. But comparatively, Rodolfo said, our homes are just a lot more sort of diverse. Our like microbial environment is more diverse because we're bringing in more stuff.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  In indoor homes, you might introduce new bacteria simply by opening the window or by tracking bacteria in your shoes or in your backpack as you lay it out in the outside environment and then bring it in. Given the difficulty of bringing things into the ISS, its microbiome is very diminished. It's very reduced in diversity compared to what we would see on the surface of the earth.

• 22:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Is there a way that having more microbes is better or worse for us or the house?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  So that's literally the question that Rodolfo is trying to answer. They want to know, sort of, are humans actually better off with a richer, more varied landscape of microbes around us? And we don't have all the answers to this. In the paper in the journal Cell, they say, sort of, figuring this out is an important long-term goal. Basically, they link to a bunch of studies that, sort of, connect being less exposed to microbes to chronic inflammatory diseases. They say astronauts on the ISS often have, like, rashes, allergies, immune function issues.

• 23:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  I imagine it's not the same thing, but it sort of feels reminiscent of this idea that if you're in, sort of, a hermetically sealed place and you're not getting exposed to stuff and developing immune reactions and all that, it could be bad for you.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's also, they talk about, like, there's evidence from mouse models that maybe being exposed to a diversity of microbes doesn't always help. So, like, it's...

• 23:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right, okay.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  I don't think that it's totally clear.

• 23:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's also, like, a lot of other stuff going on in the space station.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. Like, they're being exposed to all sorts of things and they're in this...

• 23:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  The radiation is, like, tumbling them in the face.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  And also, just, like, being trapped in a room with only a few people for a long time, like...

• 23:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, not great.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  So researchers just want to know more about how this, sort of, impoverished microbial community affects astronauts, and also if there's a way to make life in space on a place like the ISS or any future, sort of, home for humans, more like Earth. Like, do we need to figuratively track in dirt in some way?

• 24:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  What does this all do for the actual space station? Like, I don't know, is it different? Does it smell different in any way?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  So, there's a scientist that I spoke to years ago, this guy named Rob Dunn.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  When we were speaking, we were talking about the fight less with microbes in our homes and more with bugs, like insects.

• 24:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  Like, things you can see.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Right, things you can see, or sometimes not, but like the insects and spiders and whatever in our home, mites, et cetera. But he wrote this book called Never Home Alone, where he actually does mention microbes and the ISS as well. And in that book, he suggested that the ISS smells of body odor, which I guess would make sense to me because it's full of

• 25:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Small enclosed space.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Bacteria. But I think sort of the most interesting thing to me is that Rodolfo was essentially saying to me that, to him, the ISS is kind of like an extreme version of what we almost strive for when we live indoors. Like, yes, our homes are definitely, they're more microbially diverse than the space station. But he actually got into all this because he was part of another study looking into people's homes and their cleaning habits in their homes.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  Part of this interrogation also involved swabbing surfaces to try to see how our nuclear warfare with the dirty and grime in our houses could also be having impact on our microbial landscape and the types of microbes that we interact with.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  And to me, like, the ISS feels like the most intense, like, the ideal version of what we're striving for, right? Like, literally, nothing can get in unless we add it in. And the idea that that sort of perfect version of, like, a cleaner's paradise of nothing is going to get in, we can eliminate everything, could actually be, in some ways, not great for us. Like, the opposite of what we need. I don't know, I'm certainly not going to stop, like, disinfecting stuff.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  But I am gonna, I guess, like, throw open the windows a bit and just sort of celebrate my outdoor germs to a certain extent.

• 26:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's a nice metaphor for how maybe we should live our lives, you know? Don't clean everything out. Some mess is good. Keep some microbes.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  A little bit of chaos goes a long way.

• 26:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  I gotta say, Bird, based on how Rodolfo is talking about this like a nuclear bomb, I feel like you are Oppenheimer.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  I just, I wanted to be Ken.

• 27:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's no Ken. I'm Barbie. You are Oppenheimer.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  I had to invent the nuclear bomb.

• 27:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Well, thank you. Thanks for double featuring with me.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's double feature again, I guess.

• 27:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sorry, you can be Barbie next time.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  If you would like to see the bio photon images, we will link to Daniel's paper in the show description. We will also link to Rodolfo's paper about the ISS. And if you want to read more about microbial environments and what it means to overclean our homes of bugs, both big and small, I really recommend Rob Dunn's book. It's called Never Home Alone. This episode was edited by Joanna Solotaroff and produced by the wonderful Amy Bedula. Amy, we are so grateful to you for everything you've done for the show, and we couldn't have asked for a better fill-in host. So thank you. Noam helped with the production of this episode and also did the music. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the

• 28:21Speaker 00

  sound design. Melissa Hirsch checked our facts. And Sally Helm and Meredith Hadnot are the fact that Mara is back from leave. And we are so happy to have her. Thanks always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Noam. And a big thanks to Rob Knight for walking me through some facts about the ISS paper as well. If you have thoughts about the soul, or about cleaning your house, or about pretty much anything, please email us. We're at [email protected]. If you'd like to support the show, and the journalism the Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It's very easy to do. Just go to vox.com/members. You will get access to all of Vox's

• 29:03Speaker 00

  journalism, but you'll also know that you are supporting Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable,

• 29:13Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you also to those of you who left us a nice review on your podcast platform, or just told someone in your life about the show. You are all the best. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we don't yet know.