In short
The episode explores “biophotons” (faint visible light emitted by living cells) as a potential way to distinguish living vs dead tissue, and then contrasts that with how the International Space Station’s low-diversity microbiome affects astronauts’ health.
Guests/backgrounds
No traditional guests. The hosts discuss two researchers: Daniel Oblock (University of Calgary; quantum physics/biology) and Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benitez (lead author of a Cell paper; ISS microbiome research). Astronaut microbiologist Kate Rubins is cited for swabbing ISS surfaces.
Key claims
Metabolic reactions emit tiny visible light; in experiments, live vs euthanized mice show stark biophoton differences, and scraped leaves show healing-related light patterns. ISS is colonized mainly by human microbes but has reduced diversity; over-clean indoor environments may be unhealthy.
Notable examples
Live vs dead mouse biophoton images; scraped leaf “healing” streaks; ISS swabs from food storage, hygiene areas, and wipe bays; links to astronaut rashes/allergies and immune issues.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Glow of Life
1:02 to 1:34
Discussion about biophotons and their relationship to life and death.
“so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?”
The Glow of Life
2:29 to 6:40
Discussion about biophotons and their relationship to life and death.
“What would you say is the difference between something dead or alive?”
Experiments with Mice and Leaves
6:41 to 12:31
Exploring experiments that visualize the difference between living and dead organisms.
“Quintillions of photons and you got one photon off.”
Implications of Biophoton Research
12:32 to 13:40
Discussion of potential applications for biophoton research in health and agriculture.
“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.”
Barbenheimer Discussion
14:03 to 14:41
Hosts discuss their thoughts on the Barbenheimer phenomenon.
“I think I'm Barbie because it's like Barbie's a doll.”
Barbenheimer Discussion
14:48 to 15:51
Hosts discuss their thoughts on the Barbenheimer phenomenon.
“I'm often on quests for weirdly specific basic clothing staples.”
Microbes in Space
18:07 to 26:39
Exploration of microbes on the ISS and their impact on human health.
“So last year, I was kind of poking around on questions of human health and space.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Daniel Oblak:Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has your back. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95 % more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.
0:34Daniel Oblak:And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.
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1:44Daniel Oblak:Hello, Bird. Hello, Noam. How's it going?
1:48Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:It's going great. I'm happy to see you.
1:50Daniel Oblak:Me too. Um, so a while back I came to you with this idea, uh, or more like a question, right? What's better than one unexplainable? Nine unexplainables. I was thinking more like two. I don't know. I was thinking we do a little two in one. Maybe I tell you a little thing. You tell me a little thing. Okay. And we do a little double feature. I like double features. Maybe we do like a Barbenheimer. One of us can be Barbie. One of us can be Oppenheimer. Okay. I don't know which of us will be which. I'd like to be Barbie, I think. Maybe we'll do the stories. We'll see who's who at the end. We'll check in.
2:27Daniel Oblak:Okay. That sounds good. Do you have yours? Do you have your unexplainable nugget?
2:31Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:I have my unexplainable. I am ready. And we'll see who gets to be Barbie. Great.
2:37Daniel Oblak:So I want to start with a question.
2:39Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Okay.
2:39Daniel Oblak:What would you say is the difference between something dead or alive?
2:44Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:One's dead and the other's alive.
2:47Daniel Oblak:Good. Good analysis, Bert.
2:50Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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.
3:10Daniel Oblak:Okay, 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.
3:25Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Is this like vampires don't show up on cameras so you can like identify the undead? Oh, okay.
3:33Daniel Oblak:That actually might be a better way of doing this than my idea. Okay. But no, this comes from this guy, Daniel Oblock. 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. And he got really interested in looking into ways quantum physics might interact with biology. 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. Uh-huh. 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.
4:23Sure.
4:24Daniel Oblak:So Daniel was looking into questions of quantum physics and biology, and a colleague told him about something called a biophoton.
4:33Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Sorry, photons are like the sort of particle form of light. Yeah. But then we're saying bio-photon, like, a live part of life? Like a living? No, no, no.
4:48Daniel Oblak:The photon is not alive, but the photon is related to life.
4:51Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Okay.
4:52Daniel Oblak: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.
5:20Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:What? Wait. So, okay, to clarify, what you are supposedly telling me is that each of us is shining with like a mild aura of life?
5:35Daniel Oblak:that is not even metaphorical. That is literally true.
5:40Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Is it like a visible aura of life?
5:43Daniel Oblak: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. 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. Want to guess how much we're talking here? How many photons metabolic reactions give off?
6:29Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Nine.
6:31Daniel Oblak:Oh, my God.
6:32Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:That is such a good guess.
6:35Daniel Oblak:Here we're talking about a few photons, like 10 photons. You have one photon off. Never been wrong in my life. Quintillions of photons and you got one photon off. Okay, great. But you'd never be able to see my bio photons with the naked eye. So you need a really, really, really dark room and a really, really sensitive camera. And there have been examples of people that have looked for biophotons in living tissue before. But Daniel doesn't think anyone's ever looked at a full living organism until his team.
7:12Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Okay.
7:12Daniel Oblak:Now, this is not the funnest part, but you know how lots of scientific experiments use mice that end up having to be euthanized? Hmm. 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.
7:32Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:So a mouse died.
7:34Daniel Oblak: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. Here is a picture and I just want you to tell me what you see. Okay.
8:10Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:There's a picture of a live 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. 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. Yeah. But other than that, it's like it's disintegrating.
8:46Daniel Oblak: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. 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. It's like a window into whether the being is alive or not. 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?
9:43Daniel Oblak: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. 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.
10:11I don't know.
10:12Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Just looking at this, I think I'm still fundamentally hung up on the idea that we're all very, very faintly glowing.
Read the full transcript
10:25Daniel Oblak: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. Okay. And I just want to show you what this looks like.
10:46Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Okay, so I'm looking at some leaves, and then there are these white streaks, like gashes across them.
10:57Daniel Oblak:Yeah, and that's where the leaves were scraped.
11:00Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Is it like the cells are trying to heal so they have more intense metabolic practices so they're glowing more? Yes.
11:08Daniel Oblak:What Daniel says is he thinks this is showing the leaf trying to heal itself. They're like firemen running to the fire and throwing buckets. Like, throw this out, right? Yeah, something like that. 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.
11:33Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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 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. 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.
12:02Daniel Oblak:Yeah, there's a lot of confounding factors. I think we're very far away from this research being particularly useful. He did this analysis recently showing that it would be pretty hard to get any useful biophoton information on a brain without going like inside the skull just because of all the other biophotons 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.
12:43Daniel Oblak: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, 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. So there's this other potentially cool idea where it could be useful for monitoring crop health and forest health. 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.
13:25Daniel Oblak: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 like we're scratching the surface of something really big here.
13:39Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Yeah.
13:40Daniel Oblak:And there's so many places for this to go that gets me just really, really excited. It's just sort of beautiful to think about.
13:50Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Yeah.
13:51Daniel Oblak:Like whether it's the soul or just kind of it's nice that we all glow. I don't think it's the soul. No, it's not the soul.
14:02Okay.
14:03Daniel Oblak: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 I think I'm Barbie. I don't know if you're Oppenheimer.
14:22Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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.
14:30Daniel Oblak:We're doing Barbenheimer, so I don't think we can both be Barbie.
14:33Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Go to the movies. We watch Barbie again. That's true, O 'Reilly. Great. After the break, we maybe watch Barbie again. We'll find out. Let's do it.
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15:29Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Now, you might not be looking for several different kinds of hyper-specific black shirts, but Quince also has lots of wardrobe staples for spring for you to choose from. Think 100 % European linen shorts and shirts from$34 that are lightweight, breathable and comfortable, but still look put together. You can refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash unexplainable for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That is q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash unexplainable to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash unexplainable.
16:38Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:row. Futurology isn't sci-fi. Each week, they have thoughtful conversations with scientists, artists, technologists, philosophers, people who illuminate the forces shaping our lives and try to imagine both where they'll take us and also how we can respond. They discuss whether the future is something we have to endure or something we can design. And if we can design it, what will we built. Subscribe to Futurology wherever you get your podcasts or watch full episodes on YouTube.
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18:07Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Destroy it. Barbie! 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.
18:20Daniel Oblak:I mean, you don't care about space.
18:21Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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 II stuff closely. I care.
18:40Daniel Oblak:You just really care about the ocean.
18:42Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:I just also really care about the oceans.
18:43Daniel Oblak:Someday we're going to have a space versus ocean battle.
18:46Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Someday we're going to have a space versus oceans battle. But today is not that day because I saw a paper and 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.
19:08Daniel Oblak: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.
19:17Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:And so I asked Rodolfo basically why they wanted to study microbes on the International Space Station. And he told me, like, the 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. What? So, he was saying that, like, microbes can form biofilms that could mess up your hardware, potentially.
19:54Daniel Oblak:Oh, like the health of the spacecraft itself.
19:57Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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 Rubins, she went up to the International Space Station and she basically swabbed everything. So, like, food storage areas, exercise areas, personal hygiene areas where they brush their teeth. And then, I hadn't realized this, but they have to wipe bays. Like, they can't take a shower because the water would go everywhere.
20:41Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:But I wasn't, I was just like...
20:43Daniel Oblak:No, I don't really spend time, like, imagining astronauts showering. I haven't really thought about that, honestly.
20:49Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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.
21:30So from skin, from mouths, from urine and feces, like everywhere.
21:37Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Which, to be clear, is also true of like you're in my house, right? There would also be microbes from our mouths. Yeah, don't hate on the space station. 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 microbial environment is more diverse because we're bringing in more stuff.
22:03Daniel Oblak: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. Is there a way that having more microbes is better or worse for us or the house?
22:42Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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.
23:23Daniel Oblak: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.
23:32Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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, I don't think that it's totally clear.
23:46Daniel Oblak:There's also like a lot of other stuff going on in the space station. Right, exactly.
23:50Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Like they're being exposed to all sorts of things and they're in this -
23:53Daniel Oblak:Like the radiation is like pummeling them in the face.
23:55Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:And also just like being trapped in a room with only a few people for a long time.
24:01Daniel Oblak:Yeah, not great.
24:02Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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. Do we need to figuratively track in dirt in some way?
24:25Daniel Oblak: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?
24:34Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:So there's a scientist that I spoke to years ago, this guy named Rob Dunn. And when we were speaking, we were talking about the fight less with microbes in our homes and more with like bugs, like insects.
24:48Daniel Oblak:Like things you can see.
24:49Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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 human bacteria. But I think sort of the most interesting thing to me is that Rodolfo was essentially saying to me that But 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.
25:37Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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.
25:46Daniel Oblak: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.
26:04Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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. But I am going to, I guess, like throw open the windows a bit and just sort of celebrate my outdoor germs to a certain extent.
26:53Daniel Oblak: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.
27:04Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:A little bit of chaos goes a long way.
27:09Daniel Oblak:I gotta say, Bird, based on how Rodolfo is talking about this, like a nuclear bomb, I feel like you are Oppenheimer.
27:21Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:I just, I wanted to be Ken.
27:23Daniel Oblak:There's no Ken. I'm Barbie. You are Oppenheimer. You have to invent the nuclear bomb. Well, thank you. Thanks for double featuring with me.
27:35Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Yeah, let's double feature again, I guess.
27:39Daniel Oblak:Sorry, you can be part of me next time.
27:48Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez: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 over-clean 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 Solitaroff and produced by the wonderful Amy Badula. 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.
28:30Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Melissa Hirsch checked our facts and Sally Helm and Meredith Hodnot for 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 unexplainable at Vox.com. If you'd like to support the show, the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member.
29:09Rodolfo Antonio Salido Benítez:It's very easy to do. Just go to Vox.com slash members. You will get access to all of Vox's 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, 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.
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From the publisher
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
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