Comment by AshamedCaptain
1 day ago
Why is it that right now there is still on the frontpage of an "article being found flawed after 6k citations " ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/aking/ ) but this random article coming out of nowhere makes the front page on the same day?
People really should get it and stop sharing newly published papers to the general public. The value of one single academic paper is exactly 0. Even a handful of such articles still has 0 value to the general public. This is only of interest to other academics (or labs, countries, etc.) who may have the power to reproduce it in a controlled environment.
Be very skeptical of correlations like this that have dubious or poorly understood causation. Be even more skeptical if they are about day-to-day stuff that would likely have large swaths of people able to reproduce something like it on huge scales yet they haven't. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You can also look at all the papers it's citing too...
This article is not making an extraordinary claim, and your offence is hyperbolic. Analysis of research should not be restricted to the academe, but careful not to cherry puck research.
It seems like a pretty extraordinary claim to me.
Considering the percentage of live mitochondria that are exposed to external light in a human this seems like an enormous effect. The effect we'd expect from publication bias though is already pretty big. I'm going to go with the latter until we've got some replication, and a plausible mechanism (like.. why wouldn't whales be badly sick if this was a thing?).
I don't know about the mitochondria bit, but it is plausible that work performance is affected by light spectrum. The n=22 is too small, but replication or larger studies is an obvious next step. Let's hope the researchers in this field use pre registration.
The article mentions that unlike visible light, which is mostly absorbed by the skin, near infrared light penetrates deep into the body and the lowest frequencies of the Solar spectrum pass through the entire body.
This explains why most mitochondria are exposed to infrared light, even those deep in the body.
The article also mentions an inhibiting effect of blue and violet light upon mitochondria. For that it should be valid what you say, that this effect can happen only in the superficial layer of the body, because both skin and blood strongly absorb such light.
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