Living beings produce “biophotons”
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This year, scientists observed a strange glow emanating from mice that disappears after death, reminiscent of paranormal ideas of a bodily aura. This discovery sparked renewed interest in the science behind biophotons.
Biophotons are ultra-weak particles of light produced by structures in living cells, including mitochondria, which generate energy. Researchers have long searched for these mercurial, faint signals, and the area has often been controversial, in part because of the extreme difficulty of separating biophotons from other sources of light, such as infrared radiation, and proving that they are real.
Experimental hurdles meant that previous biophoton studies tended to focus on smaller, specific body parts. But in May, Daniel Oblak of the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues detected biophotons emanating from the entire bodies of four hairless mice. After the mice died, these biophotons quickly disappeared.
They also detected biophotons emitted by the leaves of an umbrella tree (Heptapleurum arboricola). This more complete and careful study has made their existence more difficult to deny.
In the weeks that followed New scientist According to a report on the study, a number of other media outlets have contacted Oblak and his team for further interviews. The phenomenon’s resemblance to a psychic “aura,” the glow that psychics say can indicate a person’s physical and spiritual health, might partly explain people’s interest in this work, Oblak says. “There was an Argentinian person who insisted that we study how his hand seemed to glow when he touched or healed people.”
But the science behind biophotons is real, and many scientists have contacted his team to collaborate on further studies, Oblak says. One proposal is to look for possible mechanisms of biophoton production in plants – one expert in genetically modified seeds suggested they could explore this by turning off certain genes and observing how the amount of biophotons produced changes.
Determining the correlation between biophotons and the seed germination process could also find applications in agriculture, says Oblak. “You could look at a sample of seeds and just know if the germination process actually happened for each of the seeds without touching them.”
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