Humans Glow

http://news.aol.com/article/humans-glow/584160

by nreece • 17 years ago

38 15 17 years ago

news.aol.com

ars• 17 years ago

I doubt it. The eye is able to see a single photon. So if humans glowed at all, people should be able to see it.

jpeterson• 17 years ago

[citation needed]

tel2• 17 years ago

Your eyes have cells which contain pigments which react upon exposure to single photons. Single photon signal is really, really noisy though and so your eye requires thousands of such signals to combine in spatially and temporally relevant patterns before it sends a signal to your brain.

davi• 17 years ago

9 photons for 60% success rate of conscious perception http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...

jsonscripter• 17 years ago

Back in high school we calculated the energy in a single photon by turning down the power on an LED until it almost went out. We recorded the amount of power, and figured out the energy in a photon within 15% accuracy.

I had a crazy Physics teacher :)

eznet• 17 years ago

AOL load this page slowly for anyone else?

Direct: http://www.livescience.com/health/090722-body-glow.html

rue• 17 years ago

AOL!

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

I posted this yesterday with the title 'it turns out people glow in the dark'. Then, as now, I objected to the headline, which should have said that humans glow in the visible light spectrum. One could hardly tell this in a lit environment, could one?

[/pedant]

rajat• 17 years ago

So all the aura readers were right after all?

pygy• 17 years ago

The perception of auras is a kind of synesthesia (emotions => vision). It can also be related to optical illusions (like contrast amplification).

Spontaneous synesthetic aura perception is very rare, and I don't know if you can develop it later on, or if secondary "aura readers" percieve the second kind, or if a strong emotion can trigger the phenomenon is someone who usually doesn't percieve it.

There's nothing magical related to that.

pmichaud• 17 years ago

Oh, I don't know... magic isn't about the supernatural, magic is about finding wonder in the mundane. This might qualify as magical.

onreact-com• 17 years ago

I bet the military loves that.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

Infrared is a bigger problem.

Mz• 17 years ago

I've always kind of figured that the halos around holy figures had to be rooted in something real. Older cultures weren't so big on fictionalizing things. They generally drew or wrote about something real. Maybe they didn't understand it well and made up some myth to explain what it seemed like to them, the way Native Americans (of the northwest) had the idea that the world was a piece of land floating in a bowl of water and an earthquake was when one of the gods pushing down on one end of the land, causing it to dip under the water. This is a fairly accurate representation of the tsunamis that occur after coastal earthquakes. It makes sense from that perspective as an attempt to make a logical model of observed events in the face of incomplete information.

We talk about a bride "glowing" on her wedding day. Perhaps that is not merely hyperbole. Perhaps it is something subtly perceived. And perhaps halos are also something subtly perceived. Saying that makes me think of expressions like "bringer of light" or "a light upon the world".

Humans Glow

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