Lars Behrendt
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 6 Feb
Lars Behrendt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
in a New Mexico cave.
Microbes are doing photosynthesis in total darkness, which sounds impossible until it rewrites what we think life needs to survive.
And then a conversation starts about where in the universe life might be hiding.
We're here with someone who has researched this weird, wacky life.
His name is Lars Behrendt.
He's a microbial ecologist at Uppsala University and the Technical University of Denmark.
Lars, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, David.
You go to a cave, you shine a flashlight, and then you see it glowing green.
What do you think?
You think someone's down there playing around with glow-in-the-dark stuff, or you're on to something very strange in the world of biology?
Look, I took biology in high school.
I did badly in biology in university.
When I hear photosynthesis in total darkness, I think that's a contradiction.
Don't you need sunlight for photosynthesis?
So infrared light that this life is soaking up, turning into food for itself.
It sounds almost science fiction.
Tell me about how it works a little bit more technically.
Let's talk different environments, because if we zoom out and we think of what life needs to actually live, that sounds weird, but I guess it makes sense.
We start to think out in the cosmos.
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