Living things produce “biophotons”
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This year, scientists observed an eerie glow emanating from mice that disappears after death, reminiscent of paranormal ideas of a bodily aura. The discovery led to a flurry of interest in the underlying science of biophotons.
Biophotons are ultraweak particles of light that are produced by structures in living cells including mitochondria, which generate energy. Researchers have long sought out these mercurial, faint signals, and the field has often been controversial, in part due to the extreme difficulty of separating out biophotons from other sources of light, like infrared radiation, and proving that they are real.
The experimental hurdles have meant that previous biophoton studies tended to focus on smaller, specific body parts. But in May, Daniel Oblak at the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues detected biophotons emanating from the entire body in four hairless mice. After the mice died, these biophotons rapidly faded away.
They also detected biophotons being emitted from the leaves of an umbrella tree (Heptapleurum arboricola). This more comprehensive, and careful, study made their existence more difficult to deny.
In the weeks after New Scientist reported on the study, a number of other media outlets contacted Oblak and his team for more interviews. The phenomenon’s resemblance to a psychic “aura”, the glow that psychics claim can indicate a person’s physical and spiritual health, may have partly explained people’s interest in the work, says Oblak. “There was a person from Argentina who insisted that we study how his hand seemed to radiate when he was touching or healing people.”
But the underlying science of biophotons is real, and many scientists have approached his team about collaborating on further studies, says Oblak. One proposal involves searching for possible biophoton production mechanisms in plants – an expert in genetically modifying seeds suggested that they could explore this by disabling certain genes and observing how the amount of biophotons produced changes.
Working out how biophotons correlate to the process of seed germination could also find uses in agriculture, says Oblak. “You could look at a sample of seeds, and just know whether the germination process actually occurred for each of the seeds without actually touching them.”
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