New study shows plants and animals emit a visible light that expires at death
10 comments
·September 24, 2025JumpCrisscross
alfiedotwtf
The 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:
luxpsycho
This 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
Perhaps this is why creators keep evolving eyes.
sinuhe69
Light 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.
moduspol
How soon after death does it expire? Are we talking seconds? Hours?
stuaxo
We use a lot of energy, its not surprising we emit it.
cout
It is surprising to me that it is in the visible range.
gnabgib
Title: 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
epicureanideal
Finally a way we can do the Star Trek "scanning for life forms".
Guessing these are surfacing due to the recent Radiolab 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) 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/