Secretly Incredibly Fascinating: Glow-In-The-Dark Stuff

Episode notes

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why glow-in-the-dark stuff is secretly incredibly fascinating.

Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week’s bonus episode.

LINKS FOR KATIE GOLDIN:

• Katie Goldin on Bluesky
• @ProBirdRights on Bluesky
• ‘Creature Feature’ podcast (iHeartRadio)
• When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide (Audubon)

RESOURCES USED TO INFORM THE EPISODE’S LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

• native-land.ca
• U.S. Department Of Arts And Culture
• The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland (Smithsonian)
• “Finding Lenapehoking” (YouTube / Hudson River Maritime Museum)
• Why Do They Call It Beacon? (The Highlands Current)
• Dutch & Native American Heritage In The Hudson River Valley (National Park Service)

RESEARCH SOURCES:

• How minerals and rocks reflect rainbows, glow in the dark, and otherwise blow your mind (Popular Science)
• Molecule of the week: Zinc sulfide (American Chemical Society)
• Diphenyl oxalate (Chemistry World Magazine / Royal Society Of Chemistry)
• Strontium aluminate (Chemistry World Magazine / Royal Society Of Chemistry)
• Making Glow-in-the-dark Powder (University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
• The Radium Girls: The Dark Story Of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore
• Do black lights increase your risk of skin cancer? (Cancer Council Australia)
• SciShow: “Why Things Look That Way Under a Blacklight” (YouTube)
• Every Human Body Gives Off an Invisible Glow. Here’s What It Means. (Popular Mechanics)
• How does glow-in-the-dark stuff work? (HowStuffWorks.com)
• Why Are Most Glow-In-the Dark Toys Green? (LiveScience.com)
• Why the share of $100 bills in circulation has been going up for over 40 years (Quartz)
• Inventing Daylight: On the evolution and growth of fluorescent colors in modern culture—especially in bright, neon, DayGlo form. (Tedium.co)
• Periodic Table: Europium (Royal Society Of Chemistry)
• Herbal Safety: Kidneywood (The University Of Texas at El Paso)
• Kidneywood — Eysenhardtia texana (Garden Style San Antonio)
• The Bologna Stone Was a Glowing Mystery for 400 Years (io9)
• Will glow-in-the-dark materials someday light our cities? (Ars Technica)
• Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Sir George Gabriel Stokes, British mathematician and physicist
• Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Henri Becquerel, French physicist
• “Get Me A Radium Highball!”: New York and the Radium Craze (The New York Historical Society)
• Katie mentioned that some studies suggest a possible positive effect of low-dose radiation. Here’s a link to an example (a 2015 study published in ‘Scientific Reports’). As we say, none of this is definitive yet.
• In the episode we joke about Thomas Edison and his notoriety for the electrocution of an elephant. This is one good source (Smithsonian Magazine) about the nuances there.
• Secretly Incredibly Fascinating: Cathode Ray Tubes
• Secretly Incredibly Fascinating: Sunscreen