Life
All living things emit an eerie glow that is snuffed out upon death
Our bodies emit a stream of low-energy photons, and now experiments in mice have revealed that this ghostly glow is cut off when we die
By Alex Wilkins
9 May 2025
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Living things produce “biophotons”Tim Robberts/Getty Images
All living things, including humans, constantly emit a ghostly glow – and it appears to vanish almost as soon as we die. Monitoring this signal could one day help track forest health or even detect diseases in people.
The existence of this barely perceptible glow has been controversial, but it is thought to be the result of a process called ultraweak photon emission. Mitochondria and other energy-producing machinery in our cells involve molecules gaining and losing energy, in turn emitting the equivalent of a few photons a second per square centimetre of skin tissue.…
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