Luminous Beings Are We, Not This Crude Matter

So, you may have seen the Yahoo! News article (or the LiveScience.com article) titled "Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light". If you haven't, well, go check one of them out. Or the original PLoS ONE article "Imaging of Ultraweak Spontaneous Photon Emission from Human Body Displaying Diurnal Rhythm", if you feel like getting your hardcore science nerd on. Go ahead. I'll wait.

"Youuuu...
"light up myyyy....
"liiffe."

Back yet? Good. Here's the abstract from the original paper, if you didn't read that part:

The human body literally glimmers. The intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes. Ultraweak photon emission is known as the energy released as light through the changes in energy metabolism. We successfully imaged the diurnal change of this ultraweak photon emission with an improved highly sensitive imaging system using cryogenic charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. We found that the human body directly and rhythmically emits light. The diurnal changes in photon emission might be linked to changes in energy metabolism.

So, we glow in the dark. And, if our eyes were a whole lot more sensitive, we'd be able to see it. I'm not going to go all pseudoscientistic on this and claim that this explains the aura - I don't even vaguely believe that - but I'm tickled nigh unto death to learn that I glow in the dark.

Even if I can't see it.