Svijetliš. Nitko to ne može vidjeti.

Sjedni u potpuno mračnu sobu, i dalje ćeš zračiti svjetlost. Tvoja koža ispušta slab sjaj, neprekidno, i to nema nikakve veze s tjelesnom toplinom.

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.

Japanski tim to je dokazao dvije tisuće i devete godine. Dobrovoljce, skinute do pojasa, stavili su u prostoriju nepropusnu za svjetlost i uperili iznimno osjetljivu kameru u njih po dvadeset minuta zaredom. Kamera je uhvatila stalan, mrljast sjaj koji je dolazio s kože, najsjajniji oko lica. Sjaj je nusprodukt obične kemije unutar tvojih stanica: reakcije koje uključuju kisik ispuštaju pojedinačne čestice svjetlosti dok se odvijaju.

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.

Postoji kvaka, i ona objašnjava zašto to nitko nikad nije primijetio. Svjetlost je otprilike tisuću puta slabija od najslabije stvari koju ljudsko oko može otkriti. Nikad je nećeš vidjeti, a ni itko drugi. Ista je studija otkrila da sjaj raste i pada tijekom dana, najslabiji ujutro, a najjači kasno popodne, što znači da negdje u svemu tome tvoje lice drži raspored.

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.