Living things glow with visible light
Japanese scientist have shown how the human body glows with visible light. The quantity of light emitted is 1000 times too dim for our eyes to see, but the researchers imaged the glow with special cameras. The light is tied to metabolism, suggesting that measuring it could have medical applications, says Tohoku Institute of Technology scientist Masaki Kobayashi. Meanwhile, New Age aura-seers everywhere scream with "vindication." From LiveScience:
In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals."Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light" (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)
(This visible light differs from the infrared radiation -- an invisible form of light -- that comes from body heat.)
To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.
The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.
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now all those New Age morons will have to buy modern technology to stay in business.
Another interesting note is that DNA regularly emits photons
"...thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.
So would this mean that the anti-oxidant vitamins that I've been taking are actually depleting my aura? Those Bastards!
The article on PLoS ONE (to which you should all donate).
"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."
well thanks a lot, guess I'll have to develop new hunting methods.
e=mc^2 - enough said.
Can dogs and other animals see our glow at night?
Since we radiate in the infrared I just assumed we gave off a blackbody spectrum. Seems obvious there'd be a small amount of energy in the visible band.
Actually, I'm not convinced the human eye can't see this: The retina can see down to just a few photons in certain frequencies (green, I suppose). You can get much less than that.
"imaged the glow with special cameras"
Tricorder anyone?
Are we sure this is not a result of Chernobyl?
those of use who see auras have no need for vindication, any more than you need C. Everett Koop to verify the existence of your dog. Science is kept alive only by mystery.
The new agers got ahold of this one a few years ago - it has been shown that regular meditators emit fewer photons.
Differential effects of relaxation techniques on ultraweak photon emission. J Altern Complement Med. 2008; Apr;14(3):241-50. Van Wijk EP, Lüdtke R, Van Wijk R. International Institute of Biophysics, Neuss, Germany.
Did they test different weather conditions? And what about people locked in a dark room for extended time periods? I mean, perhaps we just glow. The light happens to peak shortly after the amount of sunlight would peak as well - so it could be claimed that perhaps the light emitted is simply a capture and release of sunlight. The brighter the sun, the stronger your glow.
Interesting. Of course it's also been known for a while (since 1942) that, when humans are in scotopic vision-mode (="night vision"), our eyes can respond to a single photon. Maybe this light isn't totally subliminal...
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html
For those of us who can see this without too much trouble, it's easier to see under fluorescent light. When someone gets nervous (usually if they're lying and really don't want to get caught), a pattern appears on the face that resembles a ladder or bug-legs.
I wonder how this changes for people with sleeping disorders or workers with wacky sleeping patterns whose circadian rhythms are out of sync
Ephcee - That's my thought. Potentially this could lead to earlier and more accurate diagnosis of that kind of disorder.
Wow: David Allan Coe was right...
I can't seem to find the original article, but I fail to see how this entirely surprising. Aren't they just detecting de Broglie waves?
Biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp has been working with biophotons for some years now. An Australian chap worked with them before Popp. Perhaps the Japanese work is an extension of these earlier researchers?
Carlos Castaneda was right.
Don't worry, Takuan. Just because we know it's there, doesn't mean we'll mask it. You'll still be free to cull the herd...
I'm with you #9, after all, doesn't just about anything held to a constant 98 degrees radiate SOME light in the visible spectrum?
I'm throwin' off sparks, babe!
@9, 22: "It's just lack body radiation in the visible spectrum" was my first reaction too, before I read the paper. Maybe not surprisingly, the authors also thought of this, and they do address it. While they don't do an explicit calculation of the expected black body intensity, we can: black body radiation falls off exponentially at higher frequencies (Planck's law), and the visible spectrum is >10x higher than the human black body peak of 9500nm, so the black body radiation is going to be pretty dim in the visible spectrum (take far red, say: exp(-9500./750) ~ 1e-6). A better test is to take data, which the authors actually did do. They compare the image of the visible photons with a thermal image (Fig 1I), and they are fairly convincingly different. Also, there's no correlation with body temperature variations, which you would expect for purely thermal emissions, and there is a correlation with metabolic cycle, which doesn't make sense for a purely thermal process. They cite references which include spectral data, which sounds pretty interesting. So no: I don't think it's thermal.
And with an oscilloscope, a wire, and some signal processing, we can detect changes in the electromagnetic environment as beings pass by, and what kind of mood they're in.
Interesting that the results showed the lowest point at 10 a.m. and the peak at 4 p.m.
gee thanks...next government will be able to detect our mood and thoughts. Now I have upgrade my tin foil hat to whole body wrap...
it's a wrap for me...
All objects, including human beans, emit EMR across the electromagnetic spectrum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
Radio emission at a wavelengths of a few centimeters is particularly easy to detect.
Terrific. We emit scant few photons peaking around time to -go home-; finally, something that not only isn't worth the trouble to measure more, but actually indicates "I'm outta here!" in itself.
But new agers ALREADY think the sun shines out of their assholes.
great work. one step closer to bio-energy-deriving robot apocalypse.
@16: 'The quantity of light emitted is 1000 times too dim for our eyes to see.' I imagine it's even more so when under bright, flickery flourescent light. I'm pretty unconvinced that this proves your, ahem, 'bug-legs'.
Were the test subjects residents of Nagasaki or Hiroshima?
ndollak - i mostly know what you mean