你的皮肤从未停止发出的光

坐在一个漆黑的房间里,你依然会不断地发出光。你的皮肤在持续不断地微微发光,而这与体温毫无关系。

Sit in a dark room and you will, nonetheless, continue to emit light. Your skin glows faintly and without pause, and the phenomenon has nothing to do with body heat.

一个日本研究团队在二零零九年证实了这一点。他们让志愿者赤裸上身,坐进一个不透光的密闭舱室,用一台极其灵敏的相机对准他们,连续拍摄二十分钟。相机记录到皮肤表面持续而斑驳地发着光,面部尤其明显。这种光是普通细胞化学反应的一种副产品:涉及氧气释放的反应,在进行的过程中,会释放出单个的光粒子。

A Japanese team established this in two thousand and nine. They placed volunteers, stripped to the waist, inside a light-tight chamber and trained an extraordinarily sensitive camera on them for stretches of twenty minutes at a time. The camera registered a steady, patchy luminescence rising off the skin, most pronounced around the face. The glow is an incidental product of ordinary cellular chemistry: reactions involving oxygen release, as they proceed, single particles of light.

其中有一个关键之处,正好解释了为什么此前一直没有人注意到它。这种光大约比人眼能察觉到的最暗的光还要暗一千倍。你永远不可能看见它,别人也一样。同一项研究还发现,这种光的强弱会随一天的时间起伏变化,清晨最弱,傍晚最强,这似乎说明你的脸也在按照自己的日程行事。

There is a catch, and it accounts for why nobody had noticed before. The light is roughly a thousand times fainter than the dimmest thing a human eye can register. You are never going to see it, nor is anyone else. The same study found that the glow rises and falls across the day, weakest in the morning and strongest in the late afternoon, which suggests that your face is keeping to a schedule of its own.