Researchers at the University of Basel and University College London have created a scale that can measure life. The scale, which can measure the mass of single cells lets and them “monitor how their weight changes over time … with a resolution of milliseconds and trillionths of a gram.”
This means they can weigh a cell the instant it dies, finding definitely the mass of life.
This system let the researchers Christoph Gerber, Jason Mercer, and Sascha Martin see that cells exhibit second-to-second weight fluctuations while alive but these fluctuations stop when they die. In short, they can measure the weight of life pulsing through a cell.
“We established that the weight of living cells fluctuates continuously by about one to four percent as they regulate their total weight,” said Martínez-Martín. “We’re seeing things that nobody else has yet observed.”
To be clear this can’t weigh a human before or after death. To do that you need Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.