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Comment by griffzhowl | Hacker News Reader

A lot of comments are assuming this is just heat.

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, accessible on bioarxiv:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.08.622743v1

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The fact that they're seeing visible photon differences between live and dead tissue at the same temperature suggests it's tied to metabolic or biochemical activity, not just thermal noise

Yes, exactly.

I should have added that this result wasn't unexpected or mysterious as it might sound, because it's known from physics that different chemical processes have characteristic photon emissions. Since it's known that different chemical processes occur in living and dead organisms, it was expected that there would be differing emissions in the two cases. As far as I know this research is the first actual detection of these differences

I believe there's an example of something similar happening when fertilization of an egg occurs. There's a zinc reaction which creates "flash" of visible light.

Animals (and plants? Bio 101 was a long time ago) use ATP for a lot of their metabolism and phosphates are pretty well known for emitting light as they react.

That sounds cool. I was able to find this press release about a "zinc explosion" that's been documented in human fertilization

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2016/04/radiant-zinc-f...

I didn't yet have the patience to go through the original research papers to see what the manner of detection was (I've had a couple of drinks this evening), but the phrasing of zinc "sparks" suggests emitted photons. On the other hand, the fact they're talking about zinc rather than photons suggets they're talking about detecting ion transfer rather than photon emission

Sure but, in fairness, the HN title is a bit misleading. The paper says that the bodies are emitting light in the visible part of the EM spectrum not that the light is visible. And the intensity isn't really high enough to see the light without instruments.

True, there's an ambiguity in "visible light" between "EM radiation within the visible frequency range" and "EM radiation within the visible frequency range which is of sufficient intensity that we can detect it with our eyes"

But this is independent of the misconception that the radiation observed in this experiment is thermal. Thermal radiation in the visible range at this temperature is much lower in intensity than the biological radiation observed here, but both kinds of radiation are well below the intensity that we can see with our eyes.

Sure, what isn't fair about debating the headline in the comments without reading the article?

Specifically from paper: The live/dead mice (and container) were all held at 37C, which google tells me is a normal mouse body temp. And, the observed light does not match the spectrum of black body radiation expected for the temps at which images were taken or subjects were held.

Also strange: The effect changed w/ injury or anesthetic treatment according to the abstract.

If we had good enough sensors could we use this for screening or diagnostics?

“Aura scanners” has an appropriately cyberpunk feel.

From the abstract the answer basically seems to be yes, and that's how they're pitching it.

They note increased emissions due to injury, which would be consistent with repair activities increasing the general intensity of chemistry happening to facilitate repair at wound sites.

Research is finding MicroTubules in the brain likely are the LINK (quantum entanglement) to where Consciousness "lives" (is located). Note that the Microtubules link STOPs while under Anesthesia.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=microtubules+co...

Your idiosyncratic use of capital letters only adds to my skepticism.

First video when I hit that YouTube link was Joe Rogan.

Skeptic meter caught fire before I could get a reading.

This is such a weird way to navigate life.

Joe Rogan has interviewed plenty of people, different people that have very little in common, just because some of them have controversial views that make you nervous that doesn't mean all the information is useless.

We are constantly bombarded by links to information. It is reasonable to make snap judgments about the quality of the information based on who is providing it. If I’m looking for accurate, factual information on a topic that is clearly prone to magical thinking, a provider whose reputation is to listen to anyone, including people who very much engage in magical thinking, is actually a very bad source. Because they will not filter on anything beyond “is this neat to listen to.”

You are correct. However, Joe Rogan should not be the first stop for assessing the scientific plausibility of a new idea. If that is where someone is sending you, that can- and should- be a red flag.

I don't think it's the controversy of his guests so much as many of their unqualified ramblings that get treated as expertise. It's really obnoxious that it all gets put into political controversy when it's just often facially stupid BS.

And you're enough of an expert on all subjects to judge?

Or are you rather shielding from whatever makes you think?

The odd defensiveness of it wherever any criticism is labeled as some sort of philosophy against thinking.

>And you're enough of an expert on all subjects to judge?

Never claimed to be

This is like Gell-Man Amnesia, but for the YouTube age. If I can recognize a source is unreliable for my area of expertise, it's more strange to expect that I would trust it in other areas just because I don't have the expertise in that area to directly evaluate all of the claims

And to add to that he's interviewed just as many absolutely mainstream scientists whose ideas are not considered controversial

Nothing weird or new about it: Suppose the foremost source for Dr. Example's claims happens to be the one time they interviewed on Coast To Coast AM [0]. That tells you something about the media-landscape they seek—or have been stuck inside.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_to_Coast_AM

On the other hand, there's no shortage of information out there, so it's not particularly weird to filter out the sources you already have found to be unreliable rather than spend the time to try to listen to everything else they have to say

I havent even RTFA to be fair but I like how often Bayesian heuristics like this turn out to be... Useful... If even not provably "true".

Yeah he types weird and linked some generic YouTube search result that pops Joe Rogan up for some people, but there's some pretty interesting research along these lines that's becoming harder to dismiss as just Roger Penrose stepping way outta his field (I don't see people personally attacking Hameroff or Tuszynski for their roles in this research which always struck me as telling). I think it's more trying to zero in on how consciousness works from the perspective of trying to figure out how xenon administration in anesthesiology works to induce its effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXElfzVgg6M

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106452...

Why does consciousness have to live somewhere? I currently prefer to think of it as an emergent phenomenon that arises (somehow, we have no clue) from the complex and distributed computations in the brain. Many different systems contribute, and saying that a single level of abstraction is where it lives seems meaningless. Kind of like saying that your video game “lives” in a transistor. It’s not wrong, but it’s not useful.

We don't seem to be able to find it inside the physical brain, and not for a lack of trying. Just throwing emergent behaviour out there changes nothing, just like it doesn't for AI.

There are observed differences in brain function between conscious and unconscious patients. What's wrong with that as an initial characterization of "consciousness in the brain"? The investigation of these "neural correlates of consciousness" is quite a rich research field in its own right

Obviously, but that doesn't tell us shit where consciousness comes from.

why not?

What would "finding it" mean, whether inside the brain or out? It's quite easy to perturb consciousness by messing with the pieces of the brain, via pharmacology, injury, electrical stimulation, etc. I'm not sure why we need to assign responsibility to a single specific component like microtubules. That seems like saying the axle is responsible for a car moving. Sure, not wrong, but not right or explanatory either.

Yeah we don't even have a strict definition of consciousness.

It sounds like it's time for The Talk [0].

The whole thing is good, but the final punchline in the last three panels are particularly relevant.

[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

Specific electrochemical processes have their own characteristic photon emissions. Since there are some processes that occur distinctively in living organisms (e.g. to do with metabolism), it was previously thought that these would have characteristic photon emissions, but as far as I know these are the first observations of this kind of thing.

The effect changing with injury or anaesthetic I guess reflects the fact that there are different electrochemical processes occurring in these cases that have detectable differences in the photon emissions

I seem to recall the mechanism for anesthetics being something like temporarily depolarizing the mitochondrial walls to shut down ATP synthesis, so that might point towards where the effect is originating.

That would be lethal. Instead, they affect cell membranes of nerve cells.

Ah, thank you, I was misremembering. That sounds more feasible.

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