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People Emit Visible Light
An Anonymous Reader writes "The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. Japanese researchers have shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals."
This isn't any kind of new or unpredicted phenomenon. Everything that emits heat emits some light. The chances that the wavelength of a photon emitted by a human being (while giving off normal heat) will fall within the visible spectrum is very low, but given that we emit billions and billions of photons on a regular basis, it's sure to happen every now and then. Get sensitive enough cameras, and you'll see that glow from everything that isn't at absolute zero.
I thought this was discovered and establish in 2005 by Mitsuo Hiramatsu, a scientist at the Central Research Laboratory at Hamamatsu Photonics. The only new information I recognize is that it varies by time of day, not that people emit visible light. Did this new study find anything else out additionally or just make pretty pictures that show it?
My work here is dung.
So, I guess we really are all "Shiny Happy People!" I suppose next we should begin holding hands.
Whod've thunk it...
May be I can use this definition to claim my code is fully documented when the sole documentation is a line of comment that says, "Someday I should document this insane hack."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Master Yoda called this back in The Empire Strikes Back: "Luminous beings are we...not this crude matter!"
People are visible, but they aren't all that bright.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Similar "biophoton" phenomena have been studied in the past at the International Institute of Biophysics. It is most interesting as conventional theories do not predict such emissions.
The important thing here is we just discovered the solution to the energy crisis, all we need are MORE people.
Think about it; if 1 person emits light 1000 times too faint to see, that means 1000 people emit exactly enough light to see. All I need are 1000+ Chinese people willing to stand around in my hallway for a couple pennies a month and I don't need a nightlight to find my way to the pisser at 4am anymore!!!
"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." - Yoda
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Visible in this context doesn't mean perceptible, it's describing the wavelength, not the intensity. The light is very low intensity that has a wavelength within the visible spectrum.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You plonks just sparkle. We shine.
Oh, and to E.T.: I've got your ouch right here.
So, since this light is directly related to biological processes, that means in theory it should be tied to mood. For instance, clinical depression is tied to a general depression of all physiological processes. So, it would stand to reason that if you're down, you would emit less light. Someone who is euphoric should look (relatively) like a lightbulb in comparison. I know in the article it says that the amount and color of light varies, I wonder if this would lead towards a mood-ring style ability to read emotions. For instance, someone who is emitting a "pensive" light spectrum, along with other biological cues like sweat, and fidgiting may be a good suspect for scrutiny.
And you're playing a semantic trick where you take a word with multiple definitions, and change the definition you're using from the one that was clearly implied by the original context.
In the headline "People Emit Visible Light", "Visible" means "in the visible portion of the spectrum". "Visible Light", especially in a scientific context, usually means "light which is in the visible portion of the spectrum".
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The summary, most commenters, and largely the article itself seem to be missing the big point here
So yes, people glow, and yes, this was known previously. The point of the research is that this can be used, for studying circadian rythms and maybe identifying problems with it and metabolism. The scientist quoted is billed as a "circadian rhythm biologist," you've got to think he's probably not studying this to find out if people glow or not.
The information in the summary is thirdhand at best: whoever makes the summary makes it from an article, which in this case wasn't primary literature from the actual scientists but was AOL news or whoever "imaginova corp" is interviewing several japanese scientists about their work. AOL news seems to have misunderstood the research that they were writing about.
I'm not sure halos are even part of Christian canon.
How humbling, though, to realize that a four-watt nightlight harbors something like a billion times more chi than you do.
I don't think that's obvious... well, other than the fact that they don't emit visible light by the definition I'd normally assume was meant. Since I can look around and see that they don't...
It's extremely obvious if you're aware of the meaning of "visible light" in a scientific context. Anytime you see the phrase "visible light" in the same sentence as "scientists say" or "researchers have shown", then it is nearly 100% certain that this is the intended meaning. The clincher would be if you consider the layman's definition of "visible", realize that this is clearly not true, then consider the scientific definition and realize it is the only one that makes sense. Of course this still depends on knowing the scientific definition.
And I'll admit I'm rather shocked that so many /.ers apparently don't know that meaning of the phrase "visible light". I know we have a more diverse background than we used to, but I still figured the average slashdotter was likely to have gotten a science degree where basic physics was a requirement, or at least have payed more attention than normal in high school physics or even just read the many science/astronomy related articles posted here, or read xkcd, or something.
It made more sense to me when I just assumed people were being pedantic dicks. :P
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Not really a halo...
At least not to most people. Assuming that light sensitivity and light emission are independently normally distributed in the population, it's entirely possible that extremely sensitive individuals can see the light coming off the extremely bright individuals. Further, it is possible for genetically isolated populations to have gained extreme sensitivity or extreme brightness through the usual biological mechanisms, or if such traits were selected for through cultural or religious practices. Also, consider that relatively unstressed young Japanese men may not be fully activating whatever metabolism or physiology issues the light. There may be something to metabolism around "afterglow", women glowing when they're pregnant, unusual mental capacity, etc. which could easily generate 10 or 100 x the intensity observed in this study, and thus be observable by many people. (All sorts of biological processes span several orders of magnitude in concentration, intensity, energy, etc., and plenty of other bio-luminescent organisms show that the energy levels required to emit naked eye visible light are mostly not harmful to the organism.)
Whether we are consciously aware of the brightness of others, or if we do anything with that information are topics for future study.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Correct. Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation a human body will emit one photon with a wavelength of 600nm every 10 seconds. If we scale that up by a factor of 1,000 that would mean the human eye would need to be capable of seeing a flux of 100 photons/second per unit solid angle. This is well below the threshold of a human eye - you'd need a photomultiplier or low temp photon counter device to pick this up. So clearly this is not the source of light.
They aren't, as such. What we know as a "halo" is more of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon knock-off of something that appears in a lot of early Christian art as a nimbus - a sort of glowing aura around Jesus and sometimes an accompanying Lamb. According to this wikipedia page the concept was used earlier in a lot of other historical religious art too before becoming bastardized by pop culture's somewhat clumsy literal interpretation.
Anybody that's ever taken LSD could have told you that!
And you're assuming that Slashdot headlines are viewed as Scientific forum (capitalization used to emphasize your bias).
When the sentence containing the phrase in question also includes the phrase "scientists reveal" and the next sentence includes "researchers show", then it is probably safe to interpret it in a scientific context.
I will admit that I am biased towards thinking that most slashdotters would have attended and been interested enough to pay attention to high school or entry-level college physics. I realize that's not true. I guess I'm just really surprised that the term "visible light" is outside so many /.ers experience.
Slashdot is not a scientific forum, but a nerd-emphasised general forum.
Uh-huh. And one common attribute of nerds -- at least a virtue of anyone who I would call a nerd as a compliment -- is the desire to learn. When I read articles on /. about things not in my area of expertise, I often learn things from the article and from other readers who are familiar with the terms and phrases used in the article. It's one of the more enjoyable aspects of this forum.
And now you know what "visible light" means in a scientific context. That's the most common context for that phrase, by the way. When talking in layman's terms, using "visible" to describe "light" would generally be redundant. Nobody would say "Then I saw a visible light shining through the woods."
Slashdot may not be a scientific forum, but there are a lot of science articles on it. So you should be prepared to see scientific terms and to interpret them in a scientific context. You should probably not be upset when a scientific article uses scientific terms.
Thus the common or vernacular definition should always be used, and the editors should remember that headlines are summaries of the article and stand alone frequently without further explanation.
Okay, so next time an article mentions "infrared", it should instead specify "electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 750 nm and 100 m" so that readers don't say "What's infrared? I know from latin that 'infra' means 'below', but what's 'below' red? Maroon? Fuchsia?" Er, but wait, "electromagnetic" and "wavelength" don't aren't vernacular in any way... So no science terms? No technical terms? How do you even describe what this article is about using only vernacular definitions?
Look, I don't understand a lot of legal terms (for one example among many), but I'm not about to ask that every YRO article avoids using them, or kvetch about it when I fail to comprehend a term and am corrected.
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it's entirely possible that extremely sensitive individuals can see the light coming off the extremely bright individuals.
If there are people who have vision that is 1,000 times normal, then they must get blinded by the sun really easily...
There may be something to metabolism ... which could easily generate 10 or 100 x the intensity observed in this study, and thus be observable by many people.
Conversely, the 'brights' (don't tell Dawkins about this!) would be producing lots more free-radicals than normal. I sure hope they also have more efficient repair mechanisms in place to mop them up.
Close. A single photon is capable of making a single cell (rod) in your retina fire. To actually perceive light, you need around 9 or 10 rods to fire at around the same time. Problem here is that only around 10% of the photons entering your eye end up striking a receptor - the rest are reflected off of the cornea, get absorbed in the vitreous humor (fluid inside the eye), or pass through the retina without striking a spot where a receptor is located.
"1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive"
yeah apparently Japanese scientists have a different definition of visible than I do. I always had that stupid "if I can see it then it is visible, if I can't see it then it isn't visible".
I bet it is just like with cellular mitosis: audibly noisy when my cells divide, just so quiet that I can't personally hear it.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
Usually "visible light" means "electromagnetic radiation with wavelength lying in (approximately) 380-750nm range". At least that's what they taught us in the university. Somehow, I find this definition much more logical than yours, no offense meant.
Wait. You're telling me that the majority of people will use definition 1a, and only 1a, without even considering 1b, even though 1b specifically and directly refers to the exact phrase being used -- "visible light"?
You're telling me that the majority of English speaking people do not ever consider the multiple definitions that nearly every word in our language has, and choose based on contextual clues what the most likely intended meaning is? I don't buy that for a second. You know why? Because just now, without even thinking about it, you automatically processed the word "buy" and based on the contextual clues chose meaning number 5.
This has nothing to do with people choosing the first definition from a dictionary as opposed to the second, because nobody was looking in a dictionary. This has to do with people not knowing a scientific term so common and non-obscure it's definition 1b in said dictionary.
Okay, once again I'm surprised, and again I admit it must just be the fault of my perception.
I would never have guessed that people who have no idea what "visible light" means would find the phrase "light in the visible spectrum", or even just "spectrum" meaningful. I wouldn't have thought those people even knew that the stuff outside the visible spectrum was light. So you're telling me that people know that the colors in a rainbow and X-rays and radio waves are all the same thing, they're all light, but at the same time have no idea what "visible light" could mean? I really never would have expected that.
I guess this illustrates one of the difficulties of writing about technical material for a layman audience -- remembering what it was like to be a layman, and thus what a layman would understand, when that could have been a long time ago. As far as I can remember, I learned about the EM radiation spectrum that includes X-rays, radio waves, infrared, and the light our eyes are sensitive to along with the phrase "visible light" to describe the latter section of the spectrum in a single class session in high school physics. So it would never have occurred to me that you could expect your audience to know one and not the other.
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What does color have to do with this?
Well if you're black, this means you're probably going to be more popular at raves.
Not that I really feel the ability to see auras would prove God or psychics or anything, but your conclusion is making an assumption that has no basis.
Just because we can see a dim light, does not mean that a bright one would blind us. It tends to be true due to the way our iris works, but even in bright indirect sunlight we can see dim directed lights, and there is no saying that the iris would filter out all of a dim directed light.
90% of our filtering goes on in our brains anyway. We filter away information we don't think we need--the way you may choose to lighten an image but lose some detail--the detail is still in the image, we've just chosen to view it in a way that doesn't allow us to see it.
So it's possible that your brain could see things that others don't in the same way that a blind man can hear sounds you can't (or more accurately "won't" hear because your brain considers them background and turns them off)
Also a lot of people don't know this but the Super Devil doesn't appear anywhere in the Bible.
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The only thing round my Lamb is Mint Sauce (open sauce of course)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
If there are people who have vision that is 1,000 times normal, then they must get blinded by the sun really easily...
Poor dogs! I hear that their sense of smell is something like 5000 times more sensitive than ours. They must not be able to smell anything when there is a strong aroma!
Or thing of the cats who can see "in the dark". Well it's not really the dark it's just thousands of time less bright than daylight. Which means that in the daytime they must get blinded!
Should I continue? :)
You don't even have to assume some people are more sensitive to light, and can "see" it.
There was a study a while ago about conscious and subconscious sight. Apparently certain kinds of blindness leave subconscious vision semi in-tact, so although the person couldn't see, he could snap his eyes shut if a bug was about to hit them.
"Halos" might not even be literal halos, so much as a feeling you get when looking at someone.
Your subconscious doesn't have a lot of ways to communicate. It's limited to feelings and reactions, mostly? I think this could all be processed subconsciously, so that our conscious mind would never know.
While most cows aren't spherical in real life, within a species the height of cows, their mass, horn length, volume of milk production, girth, colour, etc. all vary within known ranges, with most members of the population being distributed about the middle. It's also possible that the luminescence phenomena is mostly quantized--cows have a whole number of legs and not 3.6 +/- 0.4 legs, nor 1.1 +/- 0.1 brains--but the fact that luminescence appears to vary within each day (at least within their sample) in individuals of a species with a lifespan of 10e5 days suggests that it's not a binary or quantized trait.
So, this isn't assuming a spherical cow as much as assuming (until we have better evidence) for this discussion that this instance of a previously unobserved kind of animal (new physiological trait or process) fits into the same pattern in which the vast majority of all other known traits also fit. Scientists have been wrong in the past on this kind of confirmation bias assumption (see ring species, for example) but we always have to start with what we know and can show from available evidence.
If you have evidence that we need a new sub-field of biochemistry or physiology or genetics to deal with dimly glowing human faces which offers a more robust model of the intensity of glowing faces and/or ocular light sensitivity than we have in this discussion (for which we have really big piles of circumstantial evidence from many different circumstances and models which seem to have worked for the last few decades at least) please present it so that we may discuss your new model instead. Otherwise, your attempted counterpoint amounts to a claim without evidence that much of what we know about evolutionary biology is wrong (possible, but you didn't specify why you think that).
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
That's great. If you're right and halos are completely explained by historical pragmatic industrial design, glowing faces doesn't tell us much that's new. However, if there could be a physiological basis for some of the spiritual things for which we don't yet have a fully satisfying explanation--potentially individuals like shamans, diviners, etc.--we'll have gained some important insights into the human religions which have shaped so much of our world. We might also learn more about how we sense and perceive other people, which would be useful for such things as clinical and behavioral psychology, the treatment of mental illness, and the performance arts industries.
While your old tech explanation is cool, I'd get more new tech toys out of understanding if and why human faces glow (and also, what else glows?).
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Which, interestingly, is the oldest book in the Bible - not Genesis.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
1. The rods of the human retina can react to a single photon. However, to be consciously perceived between 5 and 10 photons must be detected within 100 milliseconds. To pick up light that's 'visible', but "1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive" ('Which is, of course, impossible. -- Hitchhiker's Guide) the researchers in TFA are claiming to detect small fractions of a photon (repeat HHG assertion here).
As stated, the above applies to conscious perception. A normally non-conscious perception via an alternate visual channel has been proven to exist. This 'blindsight' has been discussed here previously http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/24/2330245 . It has been shown to not only exist in the sighted, but can be trained in them so to become functional. There was a school for this in New Mexico that was written up in Co-Evolution Quarterly almost 20 years ago. In the discussion thread here, more than one person admitted to having developed or noticed having this ability.
2. The spirit of we two legged can become attuned to the spirit of the four legged, and so the hunter can find prey in darkness, and one can also avoid becoming hunted. Likewise, we can feel the spirit of the standing people (trees) and so find our way between them with surprising speed. Although it works as though it were sight, because it is a working of the spirit, the impressions received are not detected as visual images to the mind, but only to the spirit.
I've got a lot of academic training in #1. I've got some training, and have ancestors with a lot more in #2. They may be incompatible, but since no viewpoint perfectly and completely describes reality, none can be said to be the only truth. In any case, learning to use dark sight doesn't require believing either.
Still, there ain't no such as pieces of photons.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
No, what I'm saying is that the proposition, "People Emit Visible Light", is a crock. I take words seriously. When they say "visible", I take it to mean "VISIBLE". If they meant to say, "people emit light in the visible part of the spectrum", then they should have said exactly that. Words have meanings.
Actually it means he leaves it up to his guests to stick the mint and stuff in the blender, and if they complain about it he'll say "you want coriander? add the damn feature yourself, slacker!"
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
especially when referring to a qualitative attribute such as visibility; what's visible to one person may not be visible to another
Right. That's why the definition of "visible light" should rely more on some species-wide feature than on some feature that varies wildly from one person to another.
It would be accurate to say people emit some light within the wavelength range that is normally visible. It would be inaccurate to say people emit visible light.
This statement is exactly what I wanted to hear when I posted my first reply. :-)
Visible light, just means light within the visible spectrum. Even if everyone closes their eyes, and nobody actually sees it, visible light is still visible light (as distinct form Infra-red, Xrays, radio, etc.)
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
Given that antioxidants neutralize free radicals, here's a test one could do to see if free radicals really are involved.
Take two groups of people. Group #1 are people who's on the paleolithic diet (stone age diet), with very high intakes of antioxidants and thus a low level of free radicals. And group #2 are on the fast food diet or something that's really low in antioxidants and thus have a high consentration of free radicals in their bodies.
I would expect to see more light from group #2.
The retina of the eye contains two types of light sensitive cells: cones and rods. The cones are responsible for the eye's ability to distinguish colour and function well in good lighting conditions. The cones are further broken down into three types of cones, each sensitive to one of the three primary colours. The rods are responsible for providing vision when the ambient lighting is low. There is only one type of rod. As a result, when observing in very low light conditions, the eye can only see in black and white.
The rods are located near the outer edges of the retina. This is why very distant stars that are barely visible appear brighter if you use your peripheral vision to view them by looking off to the side.
If light in the visible part of the spectrum is emitted by a falling tree in the forest undergoing biochemical free radical reactions, but no one is around to see it, does it emit visible light?
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Well-spoken. The word Satan is a title or description, not a name originally given to the angel now known as Satan. We may never know his original name. Perhaps it is because biblical names have special meaning and the angel now known as Satan does not live up to his former name. Reminds me though of people who use the word "God" as if it is a name. Most people either don't know or don't care what God's real name is.
Sorry, Job is actually the 4th, 5th, or 6th oldest book. Genesis, Exodus, & Leviticus were all written prior but Numbers, Deuteronomy, & Job were all completed in the same year - circa 1473 BCE.