Comment by userbinator
15 hours ago
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.
> Isn't this just...black-body radiation?
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.
Did they kill those mice just so they could see whether they stopped glowing when they died? :/
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.
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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
... assuming you live in a western society, how do you feel about the hundreds of thousands of middle eastern people we kill (with the U.S. doing most of the dirty work) so you can have cheap oil? Do you think about it?
I'm not trying to be confrontational (though obviously this is a loaded and maybe unfair question). To me, that knowledge leads me to the conclusion that enjoying the fruits of civilization requires killing. That is, the line is between purposeful versus gratuitous killings. So I'm untroubled by killing mice for medical experiments. I'm curious what thought process allows people to register the killing of mice. Do you live in a state of distress about your own existence?
> invisible to the human eye
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.