Hacker News Reader

I prefer to call it heat. Just to clarify the picture.

This is specifically not thermal (blackbody) radiation, which is negligible at the visible frequency range for mice at these temperatures. The researchers find a difference in visible wavelength emission between living and dead mice at the same temperature

This point is addressed on page 2 of the paper.

Paper is accessible on bioarxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.08.622743v1

You should post this as a top-level comment because it's extremely informative and most of everybody is just assuming this is just talking about thermal radiation.

Done ^^

>visible light

> 10–10^3 photons cm^–2 s^–1

So probably invisible but under the very darkest of conditions?

Visible refers to being in the visible spectrum.

I thought black bodies emitted light the whole spectrum, albeit with differences in the distribution depending on their temperature?

Yep, but the exponential decay at the short-wavelength end means you're going to hit a single-digit number of photons/m^2/s fairly quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com