Why are there lefties and righties?

This week on Unexplainable or Not, we’ve got three scientific mysteries all about left and right. Jonquilyn Hill, host of Vox’s new podcast Explain It to Me, is going to guess which of them has been solved and which ones are still unexplainable. Guest: S. Furkan Ozturk, researcher at Harvard University 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 by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members 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.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. 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.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 1:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  This is Unexplainable or Not, the game show where we finally get some answers. This week, our guest is Jonklin Hill. She's the host of Explain It To Me, Vox's new podcast, all about answering listener questions. Welcome, JQ.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Hello. I'm so excited to try to answer whatever y'all give me.

• 2:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, you ready to explain science to us?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Um, no, but I will try my best.

• 2:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  OK, so Unexplainable or Not is a game show where you have to guess what we know and what we don't. You're going to hear three scientific mysteries, and you're going to hear them from me, from our supervising producer, Meredith Hodnap.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Hey there.

• 2:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  And from our senior reporter-producer, Byrd Pinkerton.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  It's me, I'm the best one.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  No contest.

• 2:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  So two of these mysteries are still unexplainable, but one of them has recently been solved. After you hear all the mysteries, you're going to get a chance to guess which one you think scientists have actually explained. And this week, in honor of your show, Explain It To Me, we're going to be telling you mysteries inspired by a listener question.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Oh, I love this.

• 2:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Actually, one of your listeners.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 2:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Your producer, Sophie, sent us this question. So here it is.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  Hi, my name is Piper. I consider myself to be a relatively intelligent person, at least of average intelligence, but I'm 24 and still get my left and right confused. I've met a couple of people like that in my life, and I'm wondering what's wrong with us? Relax, a better word. Why do some people have a harder time than others distinguishing their left and right?

• 3:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  So we love this question so much that we wanted to spin up a whole game show around it, three mysteries all about left and right.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Ooh, I love this.

• 3:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  What's your relationship to your left and your right?

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Okay, I, so now I'm a gym girly. Like, in a perfect world, I get up early and I go to the gym before work. The world is often not perfect. But I sometimes work with a personal trainer and he'll tell me, like, okay, your left hand, and I'll raise my right.

• 3:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, man.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I consider myself a very smart person, but when it comes to physical activity, I'm a clumsy little potato. I don't know why. So I understand where Piper is coming from on this.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Very relatable.

• 4:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so this is a perfect question for you.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  And actually, Bird is going to start with Piper's question.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, Junklin, like you, I also cannot tell my left from my right, which was great, because when we were first introducing these questions, no one was like, I just don't know about this, because like, I feel like everyone couldn't tell their left from their right, and I was like.

• 4:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  I feel terrible.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Drag me.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  What a fun assumption to make.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  So to research this, I called up Inika van der Haem. She's a professor at Leiden University who studies spatial functioning. So that's everything from like, how we remember where our car keys are to like, how do we try and get from point A to point B?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I feel like this woman could save my life in multiple ways.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  And so I read her this question, basically. I had like, read her Piper's thing in full. And the very first thing she said is that, quote, "There is nothing wrong with this person. This is a natural phenomenon."

• 5:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  You're really dragging me. This is terrible.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Noam's the weirdo. Shocking.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  So she said essentially, like, our front is not the same as our back. Our top, like, our head is not the same as our bottom, our feet. So it's not hard to sort of tell those apart. But left, right, like, we're kind of symmetrical, right? So it's understandable that it's harder. But it is super weird here, right? Because there are some people, Noam, who just can do this automatically. Like, they just know, I'm never going to stop. And then there are some people, like me, like J Q, the normies of the world, who, you know, they have to like, make a little L with their fingers.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  And be like, okay, is this L normal? Or is it backwards? Like, oh, the normal L is left side.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  For me, as like, a little dyslexic child, I was like, but they're both Ls. I don't understand.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Okay, and then there's a third category, which is Meredith, who's just lost.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  But Inika wound up doing a large study where they basically showed people like, a stick figure with little ball hands. So one hand was white and one hand is red. And the figure could be like, facing you or facing away. And they would basically ask people to say like, is the red hand on this stick figure on the left side or the right side? For example. And it turns out that like, when the stick figure was turned away from people, so the stick figure's right was their right and left was their left, it was way easier for them to tell left and right apart. Which suggests, potentially, that we're all kind of consulting our own bodies in some way to figure out left and right in the world.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Like, whether or not we can do that more automatically, we're referring to ourselves in doing this. But that still doesn't really answer the question of like, why do some people do this automatically? And others like myself, like you, why do we have a harder time? That is still something that she needs to figure out. Or is it? And did she already solve it? Oh.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 7:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  So what's your initial reaction? What do you think? You think we know the answer to left, right confusion?

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Mmm. This could be me being delusional because again, I think this woman could fix me. But maybe we found it out. I think maybe.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 7:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay. So next up, I've got a mystery for you, which is why are there lefties in the first place?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Ooh, I was almost left-handed, but I switched at the end.

• 7:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  What?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  At the end. The end of what? That's a direct quote from my mom. Like, okay, so apparently when I was a little kid, I would do everything with my left hand, like everything. And then all of a sudden, it was like, okay, write your name. And once that started, I was just like, all right, right hand. I was almost left-handed, but didn't quite make it.

• 8:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so that feels like some kind of social influence. And when I started thinking about this question, I kind of thought that was what was behind lefties and righties. Like, you'll often hear that the reason there are so few lefties is because all these countries and cultures have been really anti-lefty. You know, sinister, the word sinister is from Latin for left.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't realize that.

• 8:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  Gauche is French for left. Bird told me that.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Blame the French.

• 8:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  But it's not just a social thing. You can see this actually really early on. So when you take an ultrasound, by the 15th week in the womb, a fetus will already show a hand preference.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 8:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  So 85% of fetuses are just moving their right hand a lot more than their left.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, what are they doing with their right hand?

• 9:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  They're just kind of moving it around.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Okay, got things to do.

• 9:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it's not just humans, like chimps are mostly righties, gorillas are mostly righties, dogs, cats, even crabs have handedness or some kind of like clawedness where they have one preferred claw. So it's definitely not just a social thing. But. Then what is it? Like, where do lefties come from? So I talked to Veronica Odensova, who's a researcher at Frey University in Amsterdam. And she said, there are a couple of basic ideas of what might make someone a lefty. So the first one is genetics, right? Like, maybe there's a gene somewhere that makes you a lefty. So some studies have kind of compared identical twins with fraternal twins.

• 9:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  And they've basically come to the point where scientists say it's about 25% genetics. It plays a role, but it's not the main thing that makes someone a lefty. And when I asked Veronica what the main cause is, she basically said scientists just think it's random. So here's what that means. There's lots of just stuff happening in our bodies all the time. Like genes set out rules for stuff to happen. But then all the cells and everything inside the cells, they're all just bouncing around.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  So random.

• 10:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, this, this one scientist I read called it a jitter in the system.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 10:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  Which is just kind of this crazy way to think about what's going on in our bodies. Like, we think there's this order, and it just seems like we're walking agents of chaos all the time.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Mm, that actually, yeah.

• 10:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and there are apparently like 41 gene locations that influence left-handedness.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  What?

• 10:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and then we're trying to imagine how these 41 genes are coding for all these things that are bouncing around all the time. Like, we haven't figured out the math that could predict this. And we still can't explain what's going on, other than just saying it's random.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Do you ever stop and think, wow, being a person is so wild? Like, our hearts are beating and we're breathing and we're not even thinking about it. And we've been doing it this whole time.

• 11:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  But maybe we have figured this out, and we have gotten the math right. And we do know why lefties and righties are the way they are.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 11:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's also possible.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  I don't know. I just feel like if you're, I, I will be honest, I was not the best in math.

• 11:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  Me neither.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Like, when my friends were, you know, in AP Calculus, I was like, I will put all my brain power towards those English AP classes. Like, that was my vibe. So I am convinced that people who are good at math can, again, fix me. I'm convinced.

• 11:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so our third and final mystery comes from our supervising producer, Meredith Hadnot.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  All right. So we've been talking a lot about handedness this whole time. So let's take a look at them. You got fingers, you got thumbs, you got palms, you know, hopefully all in the right number and in the right order. And they're mirror images of each other. You see this when you like, put on a left glove on your right hand, the thumbs on the wrong side, it's all backwards. Well, this handedness shows up all the time in chemistry.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  It's called chirality, from the Greek word for hand. And I talked to researcher Furkan Ozterk about this. He said that two molecules can have all the same parts and be connected in all the same ways, and yet be mirror images of each other. Basically, a left and right-handed version of the exact same molecule.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  So in a lot of chemical reactions, like man-made chemical reactions in the lab, the left and right-handed versions are all mixed up together in like a 50/50 ratio. But sometimes, a molecule's chirality matters a lot. Like, I was a organic chemist before I got into audio.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh. Why are you up?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  But were you good at math, Mara?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Hmm. I honestly wasn't that great at chemistry. I treated it a lot like cooking. I was just like, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And unfortunately, that doesn't work out the best.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  And then you were like, I know what to do, podcasting.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  That's the, that's the way to go. So sometimes, when I was at the bench and like, working on a reaction, it'd be like, off by half. And I just like, couldn't figure out why. And it'd be like, making a cake and like, only having half of the flour mix in, and just the other half, just like, refusing to participate. And it'd be because I was using a mixture of both the left and right-handed molecules, and only one was working.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  That, oh, what? Oh, my gosh.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  I mean, there's like, a pretty classic tragic example. The medicine- And thalidomide was prescribed to pregnant people in the 1950s as a mixture of both the left and right handed versions. And one version of the molecule was like a really effective treatment for morning sickness. And the other one caused severe birth defects.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Even though they were the exact same molecule, just different mirror images of each other. So this is something that, you know, scientists have known about for a while. But the crazy thing is that there's one place where we don't see a mixture of left and right handed molecules together. And this is in all the molecules that have to do with life.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Again, people, wow.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  So this is like, DNA, RNA, proteins, sugars, like throughout the natural world. So like, not manmade chemicals in a lab. These life molecules only exist in one mirror form or the other. It's never a mixture. DNA is always right handed and proteins are always left handed. And this is a mystery that has stumped biologists and chemists for over 150 years because this homo chirality or same handedness is basically a signature of life as we know it.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  And not just humans, right? Like plants, everything?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  From like, the tiniest microbe to the most complex organism, like, life is this big weird bucket. It's really hard to define. There aren't a lot of things that are connecting all living things on earth. But on a molecular level, whatever life uses a chiral molecule, it only uses one handedness. So to have something like this be such like a bedrock, fundamental truth of life, the reason why must go all the way back to like, the very origins of life itself.

• 15:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so JK, what do you think? Do you think we've figured out why life only has one kind of molecule? Either left or right, but not both?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Ooh, I don't know. That's a huge ass mystery, y'all. That's a big ol' mystery.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 16:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, so we got three mysteries. There's the mystery of left-right confusion. There's the mystery of why are there lefties in the first place? And then we've got this mystery of why molecules of life are either lefty or righty, but never both. They're all unexplainable, or at least they all were unexplainable at one point. One of these mysteries has recently been figured out. And you'll have a chance to guess after the break.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Ah!

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. Being curious is endlessly rewarding. There are few better feelings, in my opinion, than asking a question and then having that question lead you down a rabbit hole. Might even be the beginning of a new set of interests that was not on your radar beforehand. Maybe you're looking up at the night sky one night and you start to wonder what the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye is. One place to start searching for answers to a question like that is TikTok. First, you might discover a video about the Andromeda Galaxy. And then, next thing you know, you're learning how to find different stars, or how to identify

• 17:25Speaker 00

  constellations, or how different astronomical discoveries got made, or how constellations got their names. You don't need serious equipment to make serious discoveries. Start with a simple question, and suddenly, you're somewhere you never expected to be. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. At tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. Being curious is endlessly rewarding. There are few better feelings, in my opinion, than asking a question and then having that question lead you down a rabbit hole. Might even be the beginning of a new set of interests that was not on your radar beforehand. Maybe you're looking up at the night sky one night and you start to wonder what the most distant thing you can see with a naked eye is. One place to start searching for answers to a question like that is TikTok. First, you might discover a video about the Andromeda Galaxy. And then, next thing you know, you're learning how to find different stars, or how to identify

• 18:40Speaker 00

  constellations, or how different astronomical discoveries got made, or how constellations got their names. You don't need serious equipment to make serious discoveries. Start with a simple question, and suddenly, you're somewhere you never expected to be. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. At tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 19:12Speaker 05

  Support for the show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. If you have a dog or cat, here's something you need to know. According to Forbes, one in three pets will need emergency treatment this year. And every six seconds, a pet parent gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Vet bills don't have to hit that hard. Fetch is pet insurance that covers accidents, illnesses, and emergency visits, and pays back up to 90% of eligible vet bills. No wonder pet parents give Fetch an excellent rating on TrustPilot. Get a free quote in minutes at fetchpet.com/save. That's fetchpet.com/save.

• 20:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's unexplainable or not, JQ, welcome back.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 20:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  So we got three mysteries, but one of them has had a recent breakthrough.

• 20:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Mystery one, why do some people struggle to tell their left from their right? Mystery two, what makes someone a lefty? And mystery three, why does life have this weird rule about only having either left or right-handed molecules? So, without making your final guess, tell me what you're thinking after you've heard all three mysteries.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Okay, first of all, I want to know the answer to all of these, and the fact that there is no answer to two of them has me shaking my fist at the sky. I'm leaning towards left-right blindness, just because I feel like knowing why we're right and left-handed, and knowing why molecules are also right and left-handed. I realize it's not the same problem, but it feels like the same problem to me.

• 21:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  So you think left-right confusion is the thing?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yes, but that could also be because I want to get an answer for Piper and for me also.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  That makes sense.

• 21:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  So is that your final answer, left-right confusion?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Left-right confusion.

• 21:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Locking it in.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Boop-boop.

• 21:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Meredith, sound effects?

• 21:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, JQ, here's your answer.

• 21:23Speaker 07

  Turns out that a lot of molecules exist as metrical pairs.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 21:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Turns out, we had a breakthrough on why molecules of life only exist as either left or right-handed.

• 21:38Speaker 06

  Wait, how's, explain?

• 21:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Meredith cared to explain.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we just heard from Furkan Oz Turk, and he's a post-doc at Harvard and Cambridge University.

• 21:49Speaker 07

  I'm a physicist by training, and I'm working on origins of life.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  And Furkan and his collaborators might have found a clue to why the chemistry of life never uses a mixture of right and left molecules. So because this is such a fundamental thing across all of life on Earth, he started thinking about the origins of life.

• 22:11Speaker 07

  Without figuring out why homochromality happens, we cannot really understand how life emerged on Earth.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  To be clear, we have not solved the origins of life.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, girl, you about to bring some news to me? I was locked in.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  That would be a much bigger deal and you would not be hearing about it on a game show.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  But scientists do have a whole bunch of different theories of how life could have started. And one of those theories is that life could have started with a molecule involved with the genetic blueprints for life, a building block for a molecule called RNA. So not something from life itself, but a potential precursor. And this building block molecule just happens to be chiral. So it's one of those kinds of molecules that have mirror images. So both a left and a right-handed version. And with all this in mind, Ferkon focused on magnets.

• 23:09Speaker 07

  Most magnetic minerals and electrons through their spin can strongly couple to molecules' chiral structure.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  It turns out that chiral molecules, they can either be attracted to or repelled by a magnetic field, depending on whether they're left or right-handed. And minerals, rocks with lots of iron in them, can be magnetized by the Earth's magnetic field.

• 23:36Speaker 07

  They're very abundant on early Earth. They have been detected in minerals that date back to like four billion years old. And it was everywhere.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  So Ferkon thought that these magnets might have been like a physical way of organizing, like a primordial soup of left and right-handed molecules. And it could have had like a knock-on effect and ended up making like a bunch of other life molecules, single-handed as well. So Ferkon decided to put this to the test.

• 24:08Speaker 07

  What we did is, in the lab, we made these magnetic minerals. We magnetized them with magnetic fields.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  And he put a 50/50 mixture of left and right-handed molecules, this RNA building block, on top of a magnet.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Just a regular magnet? I imagine it's very strong.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, just a regular magnet, like in a way, like recreating that primordial soup on top of a magnetized lake bed in early Earth.

• 24:34Speaker 07

  And then that's where the magic happens.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  The soup began to form crystals.

• 24:39Speaker 07

  And the crystals that formed on the magnetic mineral was only one-handed.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  The magnet was separating these left and right-handed molecules from each other, locking all the right-handed ones into a solid crystal and leaving all the left-handed ones just floating around in the soup. So while we still don't know the origins of life, this might be a clue to some pretty fundamental early Earth chemistry that made life possible.

• 25:07Speaker 07

  I was like, very, very excited and right away emailed like our collaborators. And he got back to us like immediately and he said, like, you bloody well done, cracked it.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Furcon still has a lot of questions, like he used a really strong magnet in his experiments. So he wants to try it again on like naturally formed magnetized rocks from across the world to see if it could happen under even more naturalistic conditions. Other sorting forces might have played a role like polarized light or radiation from cosmic rays, but solving this mystery won't just give us insight on our own history, you know? It'll help us look out into the universe and, and decide, you know, where life could have developed somewhere else in this big old universe of ours.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Wow. I feel like I'm going to be thinking of it a lot more. And the next time I work with my personal trainer and he's like, you don't know your right from your left. And I'll be like, no, and no one knows why.

• 26:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, um, one last thing before you go, even though you didn't win, we do have a consolation prize for you.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Ooh, is it your friendship?

• 26:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  I think we have two consolation prizes for you.

• 26:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  We've got a tradition on our show where at the end of the game show, I write a song about the revealed mystery.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Ah, I love music.

• 26:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I sampled one of my favorite left, right songs and I wrote something for you.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 27:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Anything to do with life. Crisscross. Magnets. In the ancient verse. Made stuff. In the ancient verse. And the molecules alive picked a side and they didn't. Crisscross. How do scientists know? If things can make life?

• 27:24Speaker 02

  I don't know. You tell me.

• 27:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  The key just might be if they're only left or right.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Take them to the bridge. Everybody clap your hands.

• 27:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Proteins slide to the left. DNA slide to the right. And if you don't have anything to do with life. Crisscross.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  I'm out of here, y'all. Peace, peace. Wow. I love my job.

• 27:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Me too.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  We need to create a line dance for this song specifically. I'm gonna-

• 27:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  We need like slide to the left and then everyone's like, which left?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you was, oh, and then you actually slide to the right? That's amazing. Wow.

• 28:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's it for Unexplainable or Not. Thank you to JQ for coming on the show. Thank you to our presenters, Byrd Pinkerton.

• 28:17Speaker 06

  You're welcome.

• 28:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  And Meredith Hadnot.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Anytime.

• 28:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  And thanks to our audience for joining us. If you have a mystery or a solved mystery you want us to tell on an upcoming game show, let us know. You can write us at [email protected]. We read all the emails. And that's it for Unexplainable or Not. Goodbye.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  We're gonna get funky, funky.

• 28:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  This episode was reported by Byrd Pinkerton, Meredith Hadnot, and me, Noam Hassenfeld. Production and music from me, editing from Meredith, who also runs our team. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, fact checking from Anouk Doussou, and tons of great vibes from Mandy Nguyen. Thanks so much to Jonklin Hill for playing our game this week. You can find her show, Explain It To Me, wherever you listen. They cover questions like, is my dentist scamming me? Or why do people say like so much? It's a great listen. Don't miss it. Special thanks this week to Noemi Globus, and thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating our show. If you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. At unexplainable at vox.com. And you can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen.

• 29:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  It really helps us find new listeners. You can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you signed up because of us, send us a note. We'd love to hear from you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

• 30:11Speaker 06

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• 30:32Speaker 06

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.