Biophotons (or ultra weak photon emission) has been known about for decades. Various reactive oxidative molecules release light when coming down from an excited state. Some enzymatic activity is also known to produce light.
The big question has been just how much useful information can be derived from that light? It is difficult to tease out signal from noise and the human body is far from transparent at those frequencies so it's not like you could use it for imaging.
Since breathing stops and various oxidation reactions thus also slow or stop it makes sense the emitted light would decrease.
Waterluvian · 8h ago
> UPE varied depending on exposure to stress factors like temperature changes, injury and chemical treatments
I haven’t read the study but I studied remote sensing in undergrad and one thing we worked on was how to detect the stress of an agricultural crop from multispectral satellite data. You can quite clearly detect how plants are handling temperature, pest damage, drought conditions, largely based on their near- and middle-infrared responses. On the surface this sounds a lot like that, which I think is neat.
junon · 2h ago
I could read a whole article on this if you wrote one. It sounds sci-fi.
userbinator · 8h ago
UPE, also known as biophoton emission, is a spontaneous release of extremely low-intensity light that is invisible to the human eye and falls within the spectral range of 200–1,000 nm
Part of that is in the infrared spectrum, and the other end in UV (including A, B, and C). Isn't this just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation that everything with a non-zero absolute temperature emits? Dead beings would obviously cool down and reduce the amount of radiation they emit.
throw10920 · 8h ago
> Isn't this just...black-body radiation?
I think that they explicitly controlled for that. From the article:
> The results revealed that despite both groups having the same body temperature of 37°C, the live mice showed robust emissions, whereas the UPE from the euthanized mice was nearly extinguished.
It's possible that they controlled improperly, but that's another question - from my reading of the above, they artificially heated the corpses (or measured immediately after death) to control for blackbody radiation.
mock-possum · 4h ago
Did they kill those mice just so they could see whether they stopped glowing when they died? :/
whimsicalism · 28m ago
humans kill animals by hundreds of millions every single day, i have trouble understanding the furor caused specifically by lab experiments which are likely significantly more beneficial than the median slaughter
junon · 2h ago
Could be, yes. Mice have it real bad in labs. Many people have commented over the years about not being able to pursue their careers doing lab work because of all the abuse on mice. One of those uncomfortable realities we live in; the mice have allowed us to make so many discoveries but it's a bit macabre how it all works.
A microbiologist friend once mentioned a stint in a neurobiology lab where they spent a considerable amount of time serially chopping off heads of live mice so as to be able to quickly probe the brain. It was emotionally taxing, they said, which for someone who had killed more than their fair share of lab animals at that point....
Another friend had his first software programming job at a pharmaceutical lab that used dogs for some studies. Once a week or so he'd catch someone pushing a cart through the hallway to dispose of the carcasses, with legs and tails hanging over the side of the bin. Macabre, indeed.
addaon · 8h ago
> invisible to the human eye
Also unclear how the light would be invisible to the human eye, given that the human eye has single-photon sensitivity smack in the middle of that range.
throw10920 · 8h ago
I noticed that too and I agree that sounds wrong - I suspect the authors of the popsci phys article were being hasty and wrote poorly, using "invisible" to refer to the intensity, separate from the frequency (even though it's misleadingly mentioned immediately after).
Or maybe they're just wrong and didn't realize that 500 nm is visible light - that's possible too.
No comments yet
taejavu · 6h ago
Forgive my ignorance - at what point does electromagnetic radiation not count as light? Because it seems obvious to me that since our bodies are warm, and heat is a form of EMR, then of course we radiate "light". But also, things that wouldn't be described as warm still do this - all matter in the universe emits EMR, does it not?
Would someone be so kind as to clear up my long-held misconceptions?
volemo · 5h ago
> at what point does electromagnetic radiation not count as light?
At the point when its wavelength is outside of visible range, roughly 380 to 750 nm. (Some experts will call (parts of) IR and UV radiation “light”, but that’s neither here nor there.)
> Because it seems obvious to me that since our bodies are warm, and heat is a form of EMR, then of course we radiate "light".
Of course, everything radiates, and everything radiates light if you heat it up enough (> 500°C, > 1000°F).
> But also, things that wouldn't be described as warm still do this - all matter in the universe emits EMR, does it not?
Yep, only things at absolute zero temperature truly do not radiate, and it’s impossible to get there.
However, afaiu, the study describes chemiluminescence, i.e. specifically radiation above thermal.
ccgreg · 5h ago
In my most recent trip through academic astronomy, not only do they say "visible light" early and often, radio astronomers refer to "optics" and "photons" and VLBI images are called "images" and not "maps".
It's not that wildly different from the 1980s -- even then I never heard anyone say something like:
> Of course, everything radiates, and everything radiates light if you heat it up enough (> 500°C, > 1000°F).
Like, literally, in an undergraduate class that I taught, one of the short-answer questions on the midterm was to ask what kind of light the teacher's hair emitted. The answer is, of course, infra-red light.
nine_k · 6h ago
Emitting heat is obvious, well-known, and thus uninteresting. Humans do not see in the IR range, so the interesting thing is emitting light in the visible spectrum range. It also has various mystical / magical / religious connotations in the traditional culture for millennia.
efnx · 8h ago
Anyone who has seen the movie Predator already knows this ;)
franky47 · 6h ago
Isn’t that a thermal image showing body warmth on infrared?
The OP title made me think of the aura seen by Xenomorphs in the original Alien vs Predator video games.
3oil3 · 8h ago
So we do have an "aura"?? Magical!
amarant · 7h ago
Well, mice do, if this study is to be believed anyway.
lostmsu · 7h ago
In mice.
markhahn · 6h ago
Woo-oriented people find this fascinating.
But talk to an electrical/computer engineer about it though. To be a signal, such light needs to be both received and aimed...
ggm · 5h ago
Oh. so thats why none of them can get jobs at Radio-Astronomy sites worldwide, because when the interviewer says "do you have any questions for us" the engineers all ask "so, is this RF you're detecting from space sources directed or radiative" and when they say its just physics, the engineers walk off disgusted...
Do they just mean as a part of our messy blackbody radiation?
bobmcnamara · 7h ago
no, nonthermal biophotons
moralestapia · 7h ago
What a beautiful finding.
Of note, 200-1,000 nm overlaps with the wavelengths we perceive.
Could it be that under some particularly dark environments, some particularly sensitive humans (or animals) can get a glimpse of it? I believe it's quite plausible.
michaelmrose · 5h ago
No because the amount of illumination is dwarfed by the amount that must bounce on off from more normal sources for us to be aware of things.
moralestapia · 5h ago
I don't believe that, our senses are extremely (extreeeemeeeelyyy to the absolute extreme) sensitive. Our nose can detect single molecules and their chirality, our eyes can detect single photons under some conditions. We might be able to detect quantum phenomena as well ...
Are you suggesting this light is of lower intensity than what a single photon puts out? Explain your reasoning.
nprateem · 6h ago
There's s knack to seeing auras. You need to soften your focus and kind of look more with peripheral vision than in the centre.
It's pretty easy to see the layer closest to the body. It's kind of like a bright outline about 1cm thick.
The layer with colours is further out and I've only ever seen it once. It was rad though, 10cm apple green flames appearing to shoot off my body as I moved my eyes around.
Certain lighting conditions make it easier, eg slightly dark environment with a backlit subject.
Anyway cue the downvotes from the overly analytical people here. As with all things meditation, the more you try the less you'll experience.
jwrallie · 6h ago
I can see colors on the periphery of my vision when black contrast with white too, and it is just... chromatic aberration from my glasses. Does not happen in a detectable level with my contacts.
cess11 · 3h ago
What you experience as perception happens inside the brain, it's inherently deceptive. With suggestive practice you can teach your brain to 'perceive' all sorts of things that to you appear as real as any other perception.
One way to study this is to shut off the neural channels for external stimuli with NMDA-antagonists or isolating the entire body, you'll experience immersive perceptions, including visions. Falling for various degrees of decoration your brain provides spontaneously or has been trained to provide is foundational to many religious and mystical currents throughout history. Some of them consider not falling for at least some of these things to be the basic exercise of their regimes, e.g. non-reaction to mental phenomena in Goenka's vipassana or time-locked prayer as in canonical hours and islamic prayer.
michaelmrose · 5h ago
The downvotes are because this is unreal. You are describing hallucinations. Lots of people have them.
nprateem · 4h ago
Err no I'm not.
This article is literally about living bodies emitting light in our visible spectrum but it's a hallucination to claim to see it. Yeah right...
Downvotes are no surprise here though.
roydivision · 3h ago
The article specifically states that this light is NOT visible to humans:
> UPE, also known as biophoton emission, is a spontaneous release of extremely low-intensity light that is invisible to the human eye and falls within the spectral range of 200–1,000 nm.
Timon3 · 3h ago
The article talks about tissue itself emitting light. By what mechanism would this light produce a "bright outline about 1cm thick"? Lamps etc. don't produce such an outline.
DiabloD3 · 9h ago
Yes, we know.
It is also brighter the further you die from home.
The big question has been just how much useful information can be derived from that light? It is difficult to tease out signal from noise and the human body is far from transparent at those frequencies so it's not like you could use it for imaging.
Since breathing stops and various oxidation reactions thus also slow or stop it makes sense the emitted light would decrease.
I haven’t read the study but I studied remote sensing in undergrad and one thing we worked on was how to detect the stress of an agricultural crop from multispectral satellite data. You can quite clearly detect how plants are handling temperature, pest damage, drought conditions, largely based on their near- and middle-infrared responses. On the surface this sounds a lot like that, which I think is neat.
Part of that is in the infrared spectrum, and the other end in UV (including A, B, and C). Isn't this just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation that everything with a non-zero absolute temperature emits? Dead beings would obviously cool down and reduce the amount of radiation they emit.
I think that they explicitly controlled for that. From the article:
> The results revealed that despite both groups having the same body temperature of 37°C, the live mice showed robust emissions, whereas the UPE from the euthanized mice was nearly extinguished.
It's possible that they controlled improperly, but that's another question - from my reading of the above, they artificially heated the corpses (or measured immediately after death) to control for blackbody radiation.
A microbiologist friend once mentioned a stint in a neurobiology lab where they spent a considerable amount of time serially chopping off heads of live mice so as to be able to quickly probe the brain. It was emotionally taxing, they said, which for someone who had killed more than their fair share of lab animals at that point....
Another friend had his first software programming job at a pharmaceutical lab that used dogs for some studies. Once a week or so he'd catch someone pushing a cart through the hallway to dispose of the carcasses, with legs and tails hanging over the side of the bin. Macabre, indeed.
Also unclear how the light would be invisible to the human eye, given that the human eye has single-photon sensitivity smack in the middle of that range.
Or maybe they're just wrong and didn't realize that 500 nm is visible light - that's possible too.
No comments yet
Would someone be so kind as to clear up my long-held misconceptions?
At the point when its wavelength is outside of visible range, roughly 380 to 750 nm. (Some experts will call (parts of) IR and UV radiation “light”, but that’s neither here nor there.)
> Because it seems obvious to me that since our bodies are warm, and heat is a form of EMR, then of course we radiate "light".
Of course, everything radiates, and everything radiates light if you heat it up enough (> 500°C, > 1000°F).
> But also, things that wouldn't be described as warm still do this - all matter in the universe emits EMR, does it not?
Yep, only things at absolute zero temperature truly do not radiate, and it’s impossible to get there.
However, afaiu, the study describes chemiluminescence, i.e. specifically radiation above thermal.
It's not that wildly different from the 1980s -- even then I never heard anyone say something like:
> Of course, everything radiates, and everything radiates light if you heat it up enough (> 500°C, > 1000°F).
Like, literally, in an undergraduate class that I taught, one of the short-answer questions on the midterm was to ask what kind of light the teacher's hair emitted. The answer is, of course, infra-red light.
The OP title made me think of the aura seen by Xenomorphs in the original Alien vs Predator video games.
But talk to an electrical/computer engineer about it though. To be a signal, such light needs to be both received and aimed...
Of note, 200-1,000 nm overlaps with the wavelengths we perceive.
Could it be that under some particularly dark environments, some particularly sensitive humans (or animals) can get a glimpse of it? I believe it's quite plausible.
Are you suggesting this light is of lower intensity than what a single photon puts out? Explain your reasoning.
It's pretty easy to see the layer closest to the body. It's kind of like a bright outline about 1cm thick.
The layer with colours is further out and I've only ever seen it once. It was rad though, 10cm apple green flames appearing to shoot off my body as I moved my eyes around.
Certain lighting conditions make it easier, eg slightly dark environment with a backlit subject.
Anyway cue the downvotes from the overly analytical people here. As with all things meditation, the more you try the less you'll experience.
One way to study this is to shut off the neural channels for external stimuli with NMDA-antagonists or isolating the entire body, you'll experience immersive perceptions, including visions. Falling for various degrees of decoration your brain provides spontaneously or has been trained to provide is foundational to many religious and mystical currents throughout history. Some of them consider not falling for at least some of these things to be the basic exercise of their regimes, e.g. non-reaction to mental phenomena in Goenka's vipassana or time-locked prayer as in canonical hours and islamic prayer.
This article is literally about living bodies emitting light in our visible spectrum but it's a hallucination to claim to see it. Yeah right...
Downvotes are no surprise here though.
> UPE, also known as biophoton emission, is a spontaneous release of extremely low-intensity light that is invisible to the human eye and falls within the spectral range of 200–1,000 nm.
It is also brighter the further you die from home.