You Glow. Nobody Can See It.

Sit in a completely dark room and you are still giving off light. Your skin emits a faint glow, continuously, and it has nothing to do with body heat.

Sæt dig i et helt mørkt rum, og du udsender stadig lys. Din hud afgiver en svag glød, hele tiden, og det har intet med kropsvarme at gøre.

A Japanese team proved it in two thousand and nine. They put volunteers, stripped to the waist, into a light-tight room and pointed an extremely sensitive camera at them for twenty minutes at a time. The camera picked up a steady, patchy shine coming off the skin, brightest around the face. The glow is a by-product of ordinary chemistry inside your cells: reactions involving oxygen throw off single particles of light as they go.

Et japansk hold beviste det i to tusind og ni. De satte frivillige, afklædt til livet, ind i et lystæt rum og rettede et ekstremt følsomt kamera mod dem i tyve minutter ad gangen. Kameraet fangede en jævn, pletvis glød der kom fra huden, kraftigst omkring ansigtet. Gløden er et biprodukt af almindelig kemi inde i dine celler: reaktioner der involverer ilt, kaster enkelte lyspartikler fra sig undervejs.

There is a catch, and it explains why nobody ever noticed. The light is roughly a thousand times weaker than the faintest thing a human eye can detect. You are never going to see it, and neither is anybody else. The same study found the glow rises and falls across the day, weakest in the morning and strongest in the late afternoon, which means that somewhere in all of this your face is keeping a schedule.

Der er en hage, og den forklarer hvorfor ingen nogensinde har lagt mærke til det. Lyset er omtrent tusind gange svagere end det svageste et menneskeøje kan opfatte. Du kommer aldrig til at se det, og det vil ingen andre heller. Samme undersøgelse viste at gløden stiger og falder hen over dagen, svagest om morgenen og stærkest sidst på eftermiddagen, hvilket betyder at et sted i alt dette holder dit ansigt en tidsplan.