[HN Gopher] New study shows plants and animals emit a visible li...
___________________________________________________________________
New study shows plants and animals emit a visible light that
expires at death
Author : ivewonyoung
Score : 190 points
Date : 2025-09-24 03:27 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pubs.acs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pubs.acs.org)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Title: _Imaging Ultraweak Photon Emission from Living and Dead
| Mice and from Plants under Stress_
|
| Previously (19 points, April)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617867
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Light is just a form of electromagnetic radiation. All processes
| produce electromagnetic radiation, only different in the amount.
| So as we improve our equipments, we naturally can see more things
| like that.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| "See" is a poor verb choice. "Detect".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Guessing these are surfacing due to the recent _Radiolab_ podcast
| "The Spark of Life": https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-spark-of-
| life
|
| > _in the spectral range of 200-1000 nm_
|
| That's UV, visible and near IR. We know that 100-600 nm (infrared
| EDIT: UV) light "can carry out photostimulation and
| photobiomodulation effects particularly benefiting neural
| stimulation, wound healing, and cancer treatment" [1]. I'm
| curious what could be producing UV and visible light.
|
| Does light production tend to hang out around any particular
| organs or organelles? If stress causes it, I'd hypothesise it's
| metabolic or signalling related.
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5505738/
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| The brain is electro-chemical, hold all sorts of minuscule
| charges... I guess once the process for keeping that all going
| comes to abrupt halt, electric potentials change which would
| take into account some electromagnetic field :shrugs:
| volemo wrote:
| > 100-600 nm (infrared) light
|
| Ultraviolet, you mean.
|
| > I'm curious what could be producing UV and visible light.
|
| There is tons of chemoluminescent stuff in a live being. As my
| spectroscopist friend says, everything luminesces at some
| point.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I would assume respiratory complexes I and III in mitochondria.
| Both used highly reduced states to create the gradient to pump
| protons, and electron leakage is inevitable.
|
| This likely then leads to redox transitions in quinones,
| flavins, metal centres, leaving them in unstable excited
| states. When they relax, the excess energy has to go somewhere
| - usually thermal energy, but just occasionally, a photon.
|
| This would also tally with anaesthetics and injury having an
| effect, as both effect mitochondrial function - and of course
| when you're dead, so are your mitochondria.
| DaveZale wrote:
| Thanks, that's the first thought I had, thanks for reporting
| mitochondria. Which are not localized stuctures as pictured
| in undergrad courses.
| teleforce wrote:
| Yes, I come here to mention that this phenomena has
| something to do with mitochondria.
|
| For the next decade it most probably will be one of the
| very important topics in science of life in general.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Finally a way we can do the Star Trek "scanning for life forms".
| nntwozz wrote:
| He's dead, Jim.
| simondotau wrote:
| I'm a doctor, not a spectrophotometer!
| tantalor wrote:
| I just love scanning for life forms.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWBmaKk32fE
| luxpsycho wrote:
| This is the technology Skynet will harvest to track down and
| eliminate all life. Finally an objective and measurable metric
| for this pesky concept!
| r0ze-at-hn wrote:
| Perhaps this is why creatures keep evolving eyes.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Frankly, IR signature + movement is more than enough to the
| ChatGPT+Claude+Deepseek axis to completely obliterate all those
| pesky electricity wasters that are not involved in useful
| industries like Energy and Chipmaking.
| moduspol wrote:
| How soon after death does it expire? Are we talking seconds?
| Hours?
| fmbb wrote:
| Exactly 21 moments.
| hhjinks wrote:
| Imperial or metric?
| ycuser2 wrote:
| Yes.
| layer8 wrote:
| When the soul leaves the body.
| stuaxo wrote:
| We use a lot of energy, its not surprising we emit it.
| cout wrote:
| It is surprising to me that it is in the visible range.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Every body does emit radiation. Most is in IR range, but
| since nature is very broad, a very small amount is in a wide
| band from the spectrum.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
|
| You can see it in the picture, the radiation is very wide.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You'll probably want to compare/contrast that with Fig 1 in
| the paper https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.0
| 8.622743v1....
| lovich wrote:
| If you can see something with your biological eyes, it is
| emitting energy in the electromagnetic spectrum
| codingdave wrote:
| More likely to be reflecting, not emitting.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Which is actually the same.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Simple experiment: Turn off the lightbulb, close the
| curtains and check again how many of your household items
| are still "emitting" light.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| When I provide the necessary energy with the necessary
| frequency they will.
| cout wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I have trouble seeing other
| life forms in a room that is pitch black.
| lovich wrote:
| I don't know what my comment had to do about being in a
| situation where you don't see it
| adrian_b wrote:
| The visible range corresponds to the typical energy
| differences between different states of an outer electron in
| a molecule, which also correspond to the typical energy
| differences between the input and output molecules of a
| chemical reaction.
|
| (The near infrared range corresponds to the typical energy
| differences between different vibrational states of the atoms
| in a molecule. Such energy differences are smaller than the
| energy differences encountered in most chemical reactions,
| which involve extracting or adding atoms from/to the
| molecule, which obviously needs more energy than the
| vibration of those atoms, when they remain bound in the
| molecule.)
|
| Thus it is normal and expected that the output molecules of
| an exothermic chemical reaction may be in an excited state
| from which they can decay to their ground state by emitting
| light exactly in the visible range.
|
| As long as it is living, in any organism a lot of exothermic
| chemical reactions happen. In many cases the energy produced
| by those reactions is used for something useful for the
| organism (i.e. the excited output molecules transfer their
| surplus energy to other molecules), but it also may escape as
| emitted light, reducing the efficiency in the use of the
| energy produced by an exothermic chemical reaction to less
| than 100% (the efficiency is also reduced when the energy of
| the excited molecule is transferred to other molecules than
| those intended, which eventually results in warming the
| environment instead of doing useful work).
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Hooold up.
|
| So you're saying that there is something special about the
| visible spectrum? I've always wondered why most eyes we
| know of work in that range (modulo some leftovers from our
| time as aquatic creatures)
| benterix wrote:
| Yeah, I always unconsciously assumed it's just a random
| slice, never thought deeper about this. Thanks, HN!
| Y_Y wrote:
| I invite you to consider that most of the light that
| earth species have had available during their evolution
| comes from a blackbody emitter at about 6000 kelvins
| (solar photosphere).
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/physics-and-
| astronomy/s...
| adrian_b wrote:
| The sensitivity of the eyes is indeed matched to the
| available light.
|
| However the causal dependencies are more complex than
| this. If the available light would have been from another
| range of the possible frequencies, the eyes could not
| have used the same kinds of photoreceptors that are used
| now in the eyes of all animals.
|
| For instance, if the available light would have been only
| infrared, then photo-chemical reactions could not have
| been used for detecting it, but such light could have
| been detected by its warming effect, like some snakes do
| for detecting infrared.
|
| If our star would have been much colder, with negligible
| visible light, then such light might have been not usable
| for splitting water and generating free oxygen in the
| atmosphere. In such a case, the planet would have
| remained populated only by anaerobic bacteria and
| viruses, like in the first few billion years of Earth's
| history.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| As other's commented it is "special" because a good
| portion of the radiation from the Sun is in the same
| range.
|
| It's also special for a few other reasons. The most
| obvious one being that UV light is destructive to many
| forms of animal life, there isn't much utility in being
| able to see for example something like X-Rays. They don't
| occur naturally in any quantity and the mechanisms that
| create them (lightning) also give off visible light.
|
| On the other end of things, lower energy photons are what
| we would call heat. Some animals can see it, but not
| humans. We can sense it just fine through other
| mechanisms however.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You're missing a big one: organic chemistry* changes
| often occur in the 4-7 eV range of energy, which is the
| visible spectrum.
|
| * Meaning "molecules containing carbon", not "hippy
| chemistry done without pesticides".
| cout wrote:
| This is a lot to chew on. Thank you.
| create-username wrote:
| transforming food into energy and poop seems to be the meaning
| of life from an individual point of view
| Aerroon wrote:
| The second law of thermodynamics! Life is the ultimate
| expression of that. We create order, but to do that we always
| create more chaos than order.
| amelius wrote:
| This must be the light my supermarket uses to make meat look
| fresh.
| ochronus wrote:
| Oh no, this will feed the "aura" BSers
| aa-jv wrote:
| Corollary: it'll give the materialism jerks something to think
| about.
| ochronus wrote:
| such as?
| aa-jv wrote:
| Such as, maybe there's more to life than just chemical
| reactions.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| Are you implying the light discussed in the paper is
| supernatural?
| maleldil wrote:
| Where is the indication that this light (which is barely
| visible to instruments, let alone humans) does not come
| from "just chemical reactions"?
|
| This finding is certainly interesting, but it does not at
| all contribute to "spiritual thinking".
| ochronus wrote:
| More, how? Come on, be more exact.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You be more exact; I've spent plenty of time in internet
| woo-woo ideas and I don't think I've heard of auras since
| the nineties, reading about Kirlian photographs from a
| hundred years before that.
|
| Here you are saying that some unspecified group is
| deriving some unspecified ideas which are, you claim,
| life riskingly serious.
|
| Just for the sake of making HN interesting to read, can
| you stop with the one sentence comments that vaguely
| imply you know something we don't, and be more exact,
| explanatory and specific?
| ochronus wrote:
| no ;)
| I_Lorem wrote:
| Bioluminescence IS a natural chemical reaction, though.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| That perhaps the people who claim to see auras were in fact
| telling the truth due to having the right genetics to be
| able to observe this light.
| viraptor wrote:
| They don't. It's normal visible light spectrum, just
| extremely weak. Nobody can see it with their eyes.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Supposedly the human eye can detect a single photon under
| the right conditions though.
| viraptor wrote:
| Not really...
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/08/08/105518/the-
| thorn...
|
| Or, yes, under ideal conditions, maybe sometimes. 51.6%
| chance of being right in a yes/no question will not help
| in this case.
| codr7 wrote:
| Nobody is a pretty strong claim.
|
| Human bodies are different in many ways.
| viraptor wrote:
| This is like saying: "Nobody can jump over this 200m
| wall. - Nobody is a pretty strong claim." It's really
| beyond the scope of human vision overall, rather than
| "really hard".
| moralestapia wrote:
| Those are ... two different things?
|
| People can pick up single photons, this is definitely
| within the realm of possibility.
|
| Btw, your level zero snark can be defeated by the "on
| which planet?" argument.
| markovs_gun wrote:
| Or perhaps there just happened to be an overlap between
| the nonsense they believe in and some shred of truth that
| you have to squint really hard to make work.
| ochronus wrote:
| That's not even the "BS" part (for me), but what they
| "derive" from all of that.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| God forbid we take something "magical" and extract the real
| Truth from it? Like, if this is a piece of evidence, aren't you
| happy to update your assumptions?
| slightwinder wrote:
| Sadly, that's not how it works. Those nutheads are twisting
| everything to their convenience, and sell it to idiots, even
| at the cost of someone's live. And any "proof" of their BS is
| just solidifying all the other BS.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| You have a one-dimensional view of your "opponents". Not
| everybody who is into spiritual BS is preying on suckers,
| or a sucker being preyed upon.
|
| The thinking that preceded our current understanding of
| physical elements was very loose and woo-woo(Water, Earth,
| Wind, Fire), but we refined.
| slightwinder wrote:
| I never claimed that everyone is doing this. Are you
| reflecting?
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| You did though. You said "those nutheads". Not "some of
| those nutheads"
| slightwinder wrote:
| Yes, those nutheads who are twisting it, not all nutheads
| who are in spiritual stuff. There are many old and
| ancient creeds which are barely changing for decades and
| centuries. Those can be also problematic, but usually
| their believers are more pragmatic and won't tell you how
| you can cure cancer by just praying hard enough while
| sipping the 200 dollar tea they sell you.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Sorry, I muddled together your reply and the one I
| originally replied to in my head and seem to have arrived
| at the strawman "Auras are bs and people who take this
| article as a hint to them are grifters/victims".
|
| I guess it's a charged topic for me ( _badumm-tss_ ).
| Aerroon wrote:
| Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma fit the woo-woo
| explanation of earth, water, air, and fire quite well
| though. It's actually eerie how well it fits.
| binary132 wrote:
| Hey, never thought of it like that!
| samus wrote:
| We have discovered way more exotic states of matter
| though. And for a preindustrial society there are only
| three phenomena that involve plasma: the sun, the aurora
| borealis, and lightning.
| I_Lorem wrote:
| Fire is not a state of matter, it's a process. Sadly, my
| prog rock band "Solid Gas and a Process that Creates Heat
| and Light" never really took off.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Liquid is not literally only water either, so I don't
| think it contradicts the comparison.
| throwaway4302 wrote:
| I don't believe in auras, but perhaps some of these photons are
| picked up by human brains unconsciously, even though it can not
| be seen "directly". Those that sense it feel special because it
| is not common, and may use supernatural explanations, when it
| is really just a natural phenomenon.
| ochronus wrote:
| Yup, could be! My problem is not with that, but rather the
| things they seem to "derive" from this.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| That one has to use a throwaway to avoid losing HN good boy
| points from the bitter fedora-posters is a shame.
| codr7 wrote:
| No one ever claimed that auras weren't natural, just
| frequencies that most people can't see. Everything vibrates,
| even physical matter, we've just agreed to experience some
| frequencies differently.
| Thiez wrote:
| If humans could detect this light then we could see living
| things in otherwise complete darkness. But we cannot. So it
| stands to reason that these photons do not explain "auras",
| and "It's just your imagination" remains the best explanation
| for auras. Perhaps they are based on simple after-images: if
| you stare at something long enough the color detecting cells
| in your eyes get tired and you start seeing weird visual
| effects that seem to match how people describe "auras".
| AngryData wrote:
| Pretty much everything that is either capturing or releasing
| energy is giving off a spectrum of EM radiation. Usually it is
| mostly in the IR range, but you really just need sensitive enough
| equipment to get all sorts of EM noise.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Not "pretty much everything" but actually everything. The only
| way an object wouldn't emit radiation is if it was at absolute
| zero, which is something that exists literally no where in the
| universe.
|
| That said, this light is not the result of just radiating heat
| and must have a different source.
| dayvster wrote:
| Woah that's wild, so this gives credence to some more spiritual
| stuff out there.
| amelius wrote:
| Can we detect it on exoplanets?
| viraptor wrote:
| No. If it's barely detectable right next to the organism, it's
| extremely below the noise level on a planetary scale.
| ourmandave wrote:
| What if we got 8 billion people to all jump, er, bio-luminate
| at once?
| viraptor wrote:
| You'd still get less than 1 cd of luminance in total,
| unless my napkin math is way off.
| drcongo wrote:
| Does this mean we can finally answer the question "at what point
| is a strawberry no longer alive"?
| slightwinder wrote:
| I prefer to call it heat. Just to clarify the picture.
| alterom wrote:
| > _visible_ light
| cenamus wrote:
| > 10-10^3 photons cm^-2 s^-1
|
| So probably invisible but under the very darkest of
| conditions?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Visible refers to being _in the visible spectrum_.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| I thought black bodies emitted light the whole spectrum,
| albeit with differences in the distribution depending on
| their temperature?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yep, but the exponential decay at the short-wavelength end
| means you're going to hit a single-digit number of
| photons/m^2/s fairly quickly.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| This is specifically not thermal (blackbody) radiation, which
| is negligible at the visible frequency range for mice at these
| temperatures. The researchers find a difference in visible
| wavelength emission between living and dead mice _at the same
| temperature_
|
| This point is addressed on page 2 of the paper.
|
| Paper is accessible on bioarxiv:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.08.622743v1
| somenameforme wrote:
| You should post this as a top-level comment because it's
| extremely informative and most of everybody is just assuming
| this is just talking about thermal radiation.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Done ^^
| zx8080 wrote:
| Is that just heat?
| neuronic wrote:
| The source specifically tells you the answer.
| ginko wrote:
| ..so black-body radiation?
| estearum wrote:
| no
| neuronic wrote:
| Is there a reason why you feel compelled to compose a comment
| before reading or even just skimming the source? Why ask
| questions that are specifically answered by the provided link?
| ginko wrote:
| You can only access the abstract without logging in and I see
| no argument that this isn't black-body radiation in that.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| A lot of comments are assuming this is just heat.
|
| This is specifically not thermal (blackbody) radiation, which is
| negligible at the visible frequency range for mice at these
| temperatures. The researchers find a difference in visible
| wavelength emission between living and dead mice _at the same
| temperature_
|
| This point is addressed on page 2 of the paper, accessible on
| bioarxiv:
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.08.622743v1
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Specifically from paper: The live/dead mice (and container)
| were all held at 37C, which google tells me is a normal mouse
| body temp. And, the observed light does not match the spectrum
| of black body radiation expected for the temps at which images
| were taken or subjects were held.
|
| Also strange: The effect changed w/ injury or anesthetic
| treatment according to the abstract.
| api wrote:
| If we had good enough sensors could we use this for screening
| or diagnostics?
|
| "Aura scanners" has an appropriately cyberpunk feel.
| XorNot wrote:
| From the abstract the answer basically seems to be yes, and
| that's how they're pitching it.
|
| They note increased emissions due to injury, which would be
| consistent with repair activities increasing the general
| intensity of chemistry happening to facilitate repair at
| wound sites.
| Fanofilm wrote:
| Research is finding MicroTubules in the brain likely are the
| LINK (quantum entanglement) to where Consciousness "lives"
| (is located). Note that the Microtubules link STOPs while
| under Anesthesia.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=microtubules+co.
| ..
| Y_Y wrote:
| Your idiosyncratic use of capital letters only adds to my
| skepticism.
| noir_lord wrote:
| First video when I hit that YouTube link was Joe Rogan.
|
| Skeptic meter caught fire before I could get a reading.
| codr7 wrote:
| This is such a weird way to navigate life.
|
| Joe Rogan has interviewed plenty of people, different
| people that have very little in common, just because some
| of them have controversial views that make you nervous
| that doesn't mean all the information is useless.
| afthonos wrote:
| We are constantly bombarded by links to information. It
| is reasonable to make snap judgments about the quality of
| the information based on who is providing it. If I'm
| looking for accurate, factual information on a topic that
| is clearly prone to magical thinking, a provider whose
| reputation is to listen to anyone, including people who
| very much engage in magical thinking, is actually a very
| bad source. Because they will not filter on anything
| beyond "is this neat to listen to."
| Starman_Jones wrote:
| You are correct. However, Joe Rogan should not be the
| first stop for assessing the scientific plausibility of a
| new idea. If that is where someone is sending you, that
| can- and should- be a red flag.
| freejazz wrote:
| I don't think it's the controversy of his guests so much
| as many of their unqualified ramblings that get treated
| as expertise. It's really obnoxious that it all gets put
| into political controversy when it's just often facially
| stupid BS.
| codr7 wrote:
| And you're enough of an expert on all subjects to judge?
|
| Or are you rather shielding from whatever makes you
| think?
| freejazz wrote:
| The odd defensiveness of it wherever any criticism is
| labeled as some sort of philosophy _against_ thinking.
|
| >And you're enough of an expert on all subjects to judge?
|
| Never claimed to be
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| And to add to that he's interviewed just as many
| absolutely mainstream scientists whose ideas are not
| considered controversial
| Terr_ wrote:
| Nothing weird or new about it: Suppose the foremost
| source for Dr. Example's claims happens to be the one
| time they interviewed on Coast To Coast AM [0]. That
| tells you something about the media-landscape they seek--
| or have been stuck inside.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_to_Coast_AM
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I havent even RTFA to be fair but I like how often
| Bayesian heuristics like this turn out to be... Useful...
| If even not provably "true".
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Yeah he types weird and linked some generic YouTube
| search result that pops Joe Rogan up for some people, but
| there's some pretty interesting research along these
| lines that's becoming harder to dismiss as just Roger
| Penrose stepping way outta his field (I don't see people
| personally attacking Hameroff or Tuszynski for their
| roles in this research which always struck me as
| telling). I think it's more trying to zero in on how
| consciousness works from the perspective of trying to
| figure out how xenon administration in anesthesiology
| works to induce its effects.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXElfzVgg6M
|
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106
| 452...
| etrautmann wrote:
| Why does consciousness have to live somewhere? I currently
| prefer to think of it as an emergent phenomenon that arises
| (somehow, we have no clue) from the complex and distributed
| computations in the brain. Many different systems
| contribute, and saying that a single level of abstraction
| is where it lives seems meaningless. Kind of like saying
| that your video game "lives" in a transistor. It's not
| wrong, but it's not useful.
| codr7 wrote:
| We don't seem to be able to find it inside the physical
| brain, and not for a lack of trying. Just throwing
| emergent behaviour out there changes nothing, just like
| it doesn't for AI.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| There are observed differences in brain function between
| conscious and unconscious patients. What's wrong with
| that as an initial characterization of "consciousness in
| the brain"? The investigation of these "neural correlates
| of consciousness" is quite a rich research field in its
| own right
| codr7 wrote:
| Obviously, but that doesn't tell us shit where
| consciousness comes from.
| etrautmann wrote:
| What would "finding it" mean, whether inside the brain or
| out? It's quite easy to perturb consciousness by messing
| with the pieces of the brain, via pharmacology, injury,
| electrical stimulation, etc. I'm not sure why we need to
| assign responsibility to a single specific component like
| microtubules. That seems like saying the axle is
| responsible for a car moving. Sure, not wrong, but not
| right or explanatory either.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It sounds like it's time for The Talk [0].
|
| The whole thing is good, but the final punchline in the
| last three panels are particularly relevant.
|
| [0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Specific electrochemical processes have their own
| characteristic photon emissions. Since there are some
| processes that occur distinctively in living organisms (e.g.
| to do with metabolism), it was previously thought that these
| would have characteristic photon emissions, but as far as I
| know these are the first observations of this kind of thing.
|
| The effect changing with injury or anaesthetic I guess
| reflects the fact that there are different electrochemical
| processes occurring in these cases that have detectable
| differences in the photon emissions
| roughly wrote:
| I seem to recall the mechanism for anesthetics being
| something like temporarily depolarizing the mitochondrial
| walls to shut down ATP synthesis, so that might point
| towards where the effect is originating.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That would be lethal. Instead, they affect cell membranes
| of nerve cells.
| roughly wrote:
| Ah, thank you, I was misremembering. That sounds more
| feasible.
| lucozade wrote:
| Sure but, in fairness, the HN title is a bit misleading. The
| paper says that the bodies are emitting light in the visible
| part of the EM spectrum not that the light is visible. And the
| intensity isn't really high enough to see the light without
| instruments.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| True, there's an ambiguity in "visible light" between "EM
| radiation within the visible frequency range" and "EM
| radiation within the visible frequency range which is of
| sufficient intensity that we can detect it with our eyes"
|
| But this is independent of the misconception that the
| radiation observed in this experiment is thermal. Thermal
| radiation in the visible range at this temperature is much
| lower in intensity than the biological radiation observed
| here, but both kinds of radiation are well below the
| intensity that we can see with our eyes.
| freejazz wrote:
| Sure, what isn't fair about debating the headline in the
| comments without reading the article?
| veunes wrote:
| The fact that they're seeing visible photon differences between
| live and dead tissue at the same temperature suggests it's tied
| to metabolic or biochemical activity, not just thermal noise
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Yes, exactly.
|
| I should have added that this result wasn't unexpected or
| mysterious as it might sound, because it's known from physics
| that different chemical processes have characteristic photon
| emissions. Since it's known that different chemical processes
| occur in living and dead organisms, it was expected that
| there would be differing emissions in the two cases. As far
| as I know this research is the first actual detection of
| these differences
| cogman10 wrote:
| I believe there's an example of something similar happening
| when fertilization of an egg occurs. There's a zinc
| reaction which creates "flash" of visible light.
|
| Animals (and plants? Bio 101 was a long time ago) use ATP
| for a lot of their metabolism and phosphates are pretty
| well known for emitting light as they react.
| felineflock wrote:
| I couldn't get to the PDF.
|
| Here are articles commenting some of the content:
|
| https://nrc.canada.ca/en/stories/worlds-first-ultraweak-phot...
|
| https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-va...
|
| https://phys.org/news/2025-05-emit-faint-extinguishes-death....
| samirillian wrote:
| You're all made of stars you gotta let that shit shine okay?
| Dove wrote:
| Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
| nottorp wrote:
| Was "AI" used in this study?
| Poomba wrote:
| As someone wise once said, "You just gotta ignite the light and
| let it shine"
| veunes wrote:
| Turns out Katy Perry was low-key talking about ultraweak
| biophoton emission all along
| veunes wrote:
| Kind of makes you wonder if this could eventually become a
| diagnostic tool, though I imagine the sensitivity requirements
| and ambient light issues are pretty brutal in real-world settings
| xattt wrote:
| "Pause CPR and turn off all the lights."
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| When you get dental X-rays, the technician aligns the
| instrument and leaves the room to push the button that triggers
| the image capture.
|
| Another problem to solve though, is ignoring the E-M radiation
| from small life forms that may be in the room.
| rixed wrote:
| I find it totally inline with expectations that, given
| sufficiently accurate measurement aparatus, one could detect a
| difference in light (and sound, and moves, and smell...) between
| living, stressed or dead things. After all, those are very
| distinguishable state of matter.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| thats because they are npc's
| dgrin91 wrote:
| I listened to the Radiolab podcast. I remained fairly unconvinced
| by the reporting on the show, but the part that really didn't
| make sense to me was, what is their definition of death? My
| (limited, non-medical) understand is that death has a bit of a
| spectrum associated with it. At what point does this light stop
| emitting? When you flatline exactly?
| PorterBHall wrote:
| I came here with a similar thought. Given that we don't have a
| really precise definition of that transition from living to
| dead, I wonder if this could be it.
| sieste wrote:
| Some parts of the dead mice still emit in that spectrum.
| There won't be a clear and distinct "the lights went out"
| moment but a gradual fading, so you'll have to define some
| threshold to translate from radiation distribution and
| intensity do dead/alive. I don't think an image of photon
| emission will help pronounce someone dead.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| I mean the definition of death is when the light fades right?
| Everything else is just an approximation. Would be wild if
| true.
| tantalor wrote:
| TIL local anesthetics works on plants
|
| https://medium.com/@lukehollomon/anesthesia-works-on-plants-...
| stevenwoo wrote:
| You might enjoy The Light Eaters, it covers latest studies on
| plants for consciousness. I'm still very skeptical after
| reading it, I.e. how to differentiate between automaton like
| behavior derived from genetic programming and consciousness
| (argued for in the book) is still not clear to me.
| tropicalfruit wrote:
| why does it feel like the world is full of "explainers" and
| "rationalisers"
|
| usually unintentionally pushing the accepted narrative
|
| anytime something interest comes up everyone seems to try to
| downplay or explain it
|
| the fact is even your explanation is wrong on some level
| buildbot wrote:
| Isn't it well known you can tell plant health via there spectral
| return? NVDI cameras/filters?
|
| https://static.publiclab.org/#wiki/ndvi
|
| The difference here being absorption vs. emission I guess?
| butlike wrote:
| "Luminous beings are we; not this crude matter"
|
| - Yoda
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