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New study shows plants and animals emit a visible light that expires at death
- gnabgib 1y agoTitle: 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617867
- sinuhe69 1y agoLight 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 1y ago"See" is a poor verb choice. "Detect".
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoGuessing these are surfacing due to the recent Radiolab podcast "The Spark of Life": https://radiolab.org/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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5505738/
- alfiedotwtf 1y agoThe 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 1y ago> 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- madaxe_again 1y agoI 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 1y agoThanks, that's the first thought I had, thanks for reporting mitochondria. Which are not localized stuctures as pictured in undergrad courses.
- teleforce 1y agoYes, 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 1y agoFinally a way we can do the Star Trek "scanning for life forms".
- nntwozz 1y agoHe's dead, Jim.
- simondotau 1y agoI'm a doctor, not a spectrophotometer!
- tantalor 1y agoI just love scanning for life forms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWBmaKk32fE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWBmaKk32fE
- luxpsycho 1y agoThis 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 1y agoPerhaps this is why creatures keep evolving eyes.
- elzbardico 1y agoFrankly, 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 1y agoHow soon after death does it expire? Are we talking seconds? Hours?
- stuaxo 1y agoWe use a lot of energy, its not surprising we emit it.
- cout 1y agoIt is surprising to me that it is in the visible range.
- _trampeltier 1y agoEvery 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation You can see it in the picture, the radiation is very wide.
- jvanderbot 1y agoYou'll probably want to compare/contrast that with Fig 1 in the paper https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.08.622743v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.08.622743v1....
- lovich 1y agoIf you can see something with your biological eyes, it is emitting energy in the electromagnetic spectrum
- codingdave 1y agoMore likely to be reflecting, not emitting.
- 1718627440 1y agoWhich is actually the same.
- 1y ago
- amelius 1y agoThis must be the light my supermarket uses to make meat look fresh.
- ochronus 1y agoOh no, this will feed the "aura" BSers
- aa-jv 1y agoCorollary: it'll give the materialism jerks something to think about.
- ochronus 1y agosuch as?
- aa-jv 1y agoSuch as, maybe there's more to life than just chemical reactions.
- ochronus 1y agoMore, how? Come on, be more exact.
- jodrellblank 1y agoYou 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 1y agono ;)
- Antibabelic 1y ago
- AngryData 1y agoPretty 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 1y agoNot "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 1y agoWoah that's wild, so this gives credence to some more spiritual stuff out there.
- amelius 1y agoCan we detect it on exoplanets?
- viraptor 1y agoNo. If it's barely detectable right next to the organism, it's extremely below the noise level on a planetary scale.
- ourmandave 1y agoWhat if we got 8 billion people to all jump, er, bio-luminate at once?
- viraptor 1y agoYou'd still get less than 1 cd of luminance in total, unless my napkin math is way off.
- drcongo 1y agoDoes this mean we can finally answer the question "at what point is a strawberry no longer alive"?
- Kenji 1y ago[dead]
- slightwinder 1y agoI prefer to call it heat. Just to clarify the picture.
- alterom 1y ago>visible light
- cenamus 1y ago> 10–10^3 photons cm^–2 s^–1 So probably invisible but under the very darkest of conditions?
- ricardobeat 1y agoVisible refers to being in the visible spectrum.
- SkiFire13 1y agoI thought black bodies emitted light the whole spectrum, albeit with differences in the distribution depending on their temperature?
- Sharlin 1y agoYep, 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 1y agoThis 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 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.08.622743v1
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- zx8080 1y agoIs that just heat?
- neuronic 1y agoThe source specifically tells you the answer.
- ginko 1y ago..so black-body radiation?
- estearum 1y agono
- neuronic 1y agoIs 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 1y agoYou can only access the abstract without logging in and I see no argument that this isn't black-body radiation in that.
- griffzhowl 1y agoA 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 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.08.622743v1
- jvanderbot 1y agoSpecifically 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 1y agoIf we had good enough sensors could we use this for screening or diagnostics? “Aura scanners” has an appropriately cyberpunk feel.
- XorNot 1y agoFrom 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 1y agoResearch 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+consciousness https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=microtubules+co...
- felineflock 1y agoI couldn't get to the PDF. Here are articles commenting some of the content: https://nrc.canada.ca/en/stories/worlds-first-ultraweak-photon-emission-technology-holds-promise-medical-forecasts https://nrc.canada.ca/en/stories/worlds-first-ultraweak-phot... https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-vanishes-when-we-die-says-surprising-new-study https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-va... https://phys.org/news/2025-05-emit-faint-extinguishes-death.html https://phys.org/news/2025-05-emit-faint-extinguishes-death....
- samirillian 1y agoYou’re all made of stars you gotta let that shit shine okay?
- nottorp 1y agoWas "AI" used in this study?
- Dove 1y agoLuminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
- Poomba 1y agoAs someone wise once said, “You just gotta ignite the light and let it shine”
- veunes 1y agoTurns out Katy Perry was low-key talking about ultraweak biophoton emission all along
- veunes 1y agoKind 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 1y ago“Pause CPR and turn off all the lights.”
- cardiffspaceman 1y agoWhen 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 1y agoI 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 1y agothats because they are npc's
- dgrin91 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoSome 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 1y agoI mean the definition of death is when the light fades right? Everything else is just an approximation. Would be wild if true.
- lupire 1y agoSleeping probably also fades light.
- Thiez 1y agoIt would be wild because it would be wrong. We acknowledge someone who has suffered brain death to be truly dead, even if their body can be kept alive (and presumably shining!) for weeks and weeks through modern medicine. If this light is a side effect of biochemical processes then presumably someone who is decapitated will also continue to shine for minutes. The fading of the light would be sufficient but not necessary for someone to be considered dead, so it would make a poor definition.
- tantalor 1y agoTIL local anesthetics works on plants https://medium.com/@lukehollomon/anesthesia-works-on-plants-too-and-we-dont-know-why-dc7ed8a89909 https://medium.com/@lukehollomon/anesthesia-works-on-plants-...
- stevenwoo 1y agoYou 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.
- 5350-uiop-1130 1y agowhy 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 1y agoIsn’t it well known you can tell plant health via there spectral return? NVDI cameras/filters? https://static.publiclab.org/#wiki/ndvi https://static.publiclab.org/#wiki/ndvi The difference here being absorption vs. emission I guess?
- butlike 1y ago"Luminous beings are we; not this crude matter" - Yoda
- throwawaylaptop 1y agoA lot of people into vegetable juicing talk about biophotons and I always figured it was a bit of quackery. Still makes you wonder if your carrot on the counter still has any? The juicers will say that it does but if you cook the carrot it won't.
- syed_qutub3 1y agoThinking out loud: The emissions are extremely weak. And so it COULD be epiphenomenal... but even as a side effect, the mechanism is still biochemically meaningful. I don't want to suggest consciousness or "life force" activity (Occam's razor suggests biochemical activity), but nonetheless, this opens up the need for deeper mechanistic understandings.
- hulitu 1y ago> this opens up the need for deeper mechanistic understandings. It is usually taught in school. /s
- orcasushi 1y agoHaha it foolded me: a bit ambigious to call it 'visible'. The light is in the 'visual wavelength spectrum'. Also by far not bright enough to be visible.
- bricss 1y agoMitochondria emits UV light