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

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griffzhowl 3 days ago | parent [-]

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

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cogman10 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	griffzhowl 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		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