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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm personally comfortable accepting that people have experiences that aren't explained by mainstream science, and I know at least one person who says they can see auras, a person who is very dear to me. But I also know it's best not to sneer at people who aren't familiar with those experiences, as it serves only to anger and alienate people.
> Anyway cue the downvotes from the overly analytical people here
This breaks these guidelines:
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I know it can be upsetting to face hostility when sharing experiences and concepts that are deeply meaningful to you, but let's try and avoid taunting people like this. When it's predictable that a comment will attract downvotes, it's an indication that there might be a better way to express things.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't. If you computed the energy cost to produce this I'm pretty sure you should waste away from shining not to mention that this would be visible to all people not just "sensitive" folks.
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.
They actually are 380-750nm is the visible range. That said one lumen is approx 3.8×1015 photons and an LED bulb produces 75-110 lumens per watt. It seems like the original poster meant that we are not capable of detecting this with the naked eye even though it is theoretically in the right range.
I can turn out the light and not see my hand emitting light. Either a single photon isnt enough to be perceptible on average in real environments or something else is defective about the assumption for instance intervening tissue absorbing most or all photons involved.
HN has always had plenty of skepticism towards ideas that are incompatible with mainstream science, because it's just a microcosm of broader society, with a particular focus on tech.
I'd hope people here can be kind and tolerant enough to be accepting of other people's experiences and values, but it's important for all of us to avoid antagnoizing fellow community members with pre-emptive taunts about downvotes.
HN has always been hostile to completely unreasonable statements. You are probably acculturated to places like Facebook where one can post about how you saw the ghost of dead grandma or talk about how you squint and see people's aura and receive positive feedback.
I've replied to the comment that started this little flamewar to point out the way they antiagnozed fellow community members with the way they phrased their comment, but we can also make an effort not to be antagonized and be kind about someone else's own experiences. It takes at least two to make a flamewar.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Downvotes is the natural allergic reaction to alien ideas. Science to many isn't just a theory equal among others, but a religion, a part of their identity that they are very defensive about. The core postulate of this religion is that everything can be reduced to concepts understandable by their minds and replicated in a mechanical experiment, or it doesn't exist. If a few dozens of people could reliably demonstrate that they see the same aura, that would be a disaster for science as a religion, because a phenomenon apparently exists, yet you can't build an aura detector. On the other hand, this defensiveness is necessary to protect the science, for if you start admitting alien ideas without their assimilation, the science will fall apart.
> If a few dozens of people could reliably demonstrate that they see the same aura, that would be a disaster for science as a religion, because a phenomenon apparently exists, yet you can't build an aura detector.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that science is a religion to many people, but even if it was, I don't think what you said is a necessary conclusion.
If people objectively and reproducibly saw the same aura, it would allow scientists to actually study the phenomenon & try to build an aura detector. Since (AFAIK) this hasn't happened, science can't approach the topic due to the objective basis missing. But you're assuming that these auras would automatically be non-material, which doesn't seem like a fair assumption - given that we don't seem to have encountered any such thing so far.
The God of science is the Theory of Everything that unifies all forces under one set of closed-form equations, that this theory can be understood by our minds, and can be used to predict observations. When these assumptions are declared the final truths, the science morphs into a religion, and when the science is hollowed out with the 'Occam razor', the religion morphs into a very rigid materialistic doctrine.
I believe that aura has some basis in reality, maybe not what we think it is. It's much harder to believe that all the folklore around aura is made up in a consistent way. Auras must be material, if they are real, but it's not necessarily in the thin slice of matter our science is familiar with. It may be something in the realm of neutrinos or that famous dark matter: something very elusive that can be detected only in huge amounts.
Your first paragraph is what I frequently hear when people purport science to be a religion, but you're making two fundamentally wrong assumptions - first most scientists no longer believe a "Theory of Everything" to be able to fully predict observations, and second "Occam's razor" is merely a useful tool, but not a guiding principle of modern science. Sure, there are some people who might follow the ideas you talk about, but there are people who believe anything.
I don't fundamentally deny that something like an aura could exist, but believing it on the basis of common folklore should mean you also believe in many other things - like ghosts, fae and so many other "consistent" ideas. Yet I see no reason to believe it unless there is reliable evidence of it. You said that such evidence cropping up would be a disaster for science - I disagree, it would be wonderful! It would finally be a way for these things to be studied objectively. Does it not give you pause that, after so many decades, no group of people has been able to bring up such evidence?
But your eyeball, retina, all of it, would be producing the same light.
Maybe if you had a special eye scrotum of low light producing tissue that hung away from the body.
If we all work on this, I think we can seed the chemtrails-verse with the belief that ancient hunter gatherer men saw nocturnal prey with their testicles, and that you can learn to do it now with a combo of ice baths and bow hunting naked
Please don't comment like this on Hacker News. It's fine to disagree with someone else's comment and offer an alternative point of view, but please don't be mocking and mean like this.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
I apologise if my comment comes across as mean and snarky, and I can see how it does so I'm sorry. I wasn't my inention to mock the poster.
I have always been interested that we cannot see infrared, but some reptiles can, we cannot because our eyeballs are flooded with warm blood, there is no way for our bodies to distinguish signal from noise.
This made me think of the scrotums purpose to maintain the testes slightly below body temperature, which then amused me with the idea that it might therefore be able to function as a kind of infra red, body light retina.
so I was mocking some primal hunter ideas, but certainly no one posting on this page
@mentions don't work on Hacker News and I only saw them because someone else flagged them. Please email hn@ycombinator.com to draw the moderators' attention to things.
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...
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.