Eat A Chiquita

We've all seen glow-in-the-dark stickers, Halloween skulls, and light up glow sticks that ravers carried around in the 90's, but few of us have seen a glowing banana. It's hard to believe, but glowing bananas actually exist! When the chlorophyll in banana peels ages, it doesn't visibly change color to the naked eye - but if it's looked at under ultraviolet light, it glows blue. Now not everyone has an ultraviolet light lying around the house to observe banana peels under, but this research* was just too cool not to share.

That Crazy Chlorophyll

You may remember learning about chlorophyll in biology class. In case you don't, chlorophyll is a molecule that is essential to the life of many plants and animals on our planet. Chlorophyll enables plants to take in sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water; also, it allows them to output the oxygen we breathe and, if they’re the edible kind, some of the nutrients we enjoy in our fruits and vegetables. Chlorophyll doesn’t last forever, though. In fact, it’s the breakdown of chlorophyll into byproducts that causes bananas to glow:

Image by Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation. Zina is also the author of Bananas Gone Bad Glow Blue in UV-Light.

*Research conducted by Nicholas Turro of Columbia University, Bernhard Krautler of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and colleagues, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science