your brain is literally producing light right now and i need everyone to stop scrolling and absorb that for a second

a 2025 study put 20 people in a completely dark room with devices sensitive enough to detect a single photon, aimed them at their skulls, and confirmed that the human brain emits real measurable light that passes right through bone. they're calling the technique photoencephalography which is basically an EEG but for light instead of electricity, and honestly the name alone sounds like it belongs in a sci-fi novel.

but here's where it gets actually wild. the light patterns changed depending on what the person was thinking about. eyes open produced a different glow than eyes closed, listening to sounds lit up the temporal lobe differently than silence did, and the relationship between electrical brain activity and the light wasn't even a simple one-to-one thing. your brain apparently has this whole secondary communication layer happening in photons that we've just been completely blind to until now.

the light comes from your mitochondria, those little cellular power plants that use 20% of your entire body's energy just to keep your brain running. the chemical reactions that produce all that energy throw off tiny bursts of light as a byproduct, and some researchers think it might not even be waste, it might actually be how neurons talk to each other through something like biological fiber optics.

A group of fae that are queer affirming (some are actually queer too) and the imitation fae (name stealing) of the group can take your dead name from you.

Taking your dead name makes them stronger without causing any harm to you, so it’s a win-win.

One of the younger fae isn’t an imitation fae, but rather a guardian fae who has an online shop with a bunch of pride jewelry (that can also be enchanted if the customer wishes). They’re Non binary and gave their dead name to their friends.

THIS IDEA GIVES ME SO MUCH DOPAMINE

I’m already fleshing out the character ideas >:}

Work Flow

There are around 400 miles of blood vessels in the human brain, serving our most energy-hungry organ with oxygen and nutrients. Analysing these pulsing networks, though, is a real headache. Here, researchers test a combination of techniques, known as CUBIC, on a mouse brain. First, they ‘clear’ the tissues, using a chemical cocktail to wash away opaque molecules like fats so a microscope can zoom in on the details. But flying through this series of consecutive images – we might spot something missing. Machine learning helps to ’classify’ the vessel structures, separating their faint lines from the original images, leaving us flying through a ghostly mesh of blood vessels pulled from the brain. Further computer analysis extracts features from the vessel networks that may be tell-tale indicators of changes brought by ageing or vascular disease. In the future, CUBIC may help to extract maximum information from other valuable tissue samples.

Written by John Ankers

Video from work by Kei Takahashi and colleagues

Department of Molecular Pathology, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, September 2022

The gyri of the thinker's brain as a maze of choices in biomedical ethics