Mwako ambao ngozi yako haiachi kutoa

Kaa katika chumba chenye giza na, hata hivyo, utaendelea kutoa mwanga. Ngozi yako inang'aa kwa udhaifu na bila kukoma, na jambo hilo halina uhusiano wowote na joto la mwili.

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.

Timu ya Kijapani ilithibitisha hili mwaka wa elfu mbili na tisa. Waliwaweka watu wa kujitolea, wakiwa wamevua nguo za juu, ndani ya chumba kisichopitisha mwanga na kuelekeza kamera nyeti kupita kiasi kwao kwa vipindi vya dakika ishirini kwa wakati mmoja. Kamera hiyo ilirekodi mwako thabiti, usio sawasawa, ukipanda kutoka ngozini, ukiwa dhahiri zaidi kuzunguka uso. Mwako huo ni matokeo ya bahati mbaya ya kemia ya kawaida ya seli: miitikio inayohusisha utoaji wa oksijeni, inapoendelea, hutoa chembe moja moja za mwanga.

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.

Kuna kikwazo, na ndicho kinachoeleza kwa nini hakuna aliyewahi kutambua hapo awali. Mwanga huo ni hafifu takriban mara elfu moja kuliko kitu hafifu zaidi ambacho jicho la binadamu linaweza kukitambua. Hutawahi kuuona, wala hakuna mtu mwingine atakayeuona. Uchunguzi ule ule uligundua kwamba mwako huo hupanda na kushuka kadiri siku inavyoendelea, ukiwa hafifu zaidi asubuhi na wenye nguvu zaidi jioni, jambo linaloashiria kwamba uso wako unafuata ratiba yake ya pekee.

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.