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Chemists Discover How Blue Light Speeds Blindness
Isao writes: It (apparently) has been known that blue light damages eyes and accelerates macular degeneration. A new article on Phys.org may have identified how this happens. It seems that unlike other light colors, blue causes a necessary molecule (retinal) to permanently kill photoreceptor cells. "The researcher found that a molecule called alpha Tocopherol, a Vitamin E derivative and a natural antioxidant in the eye and body, stops the cells from dying," reports Phys.org. "However, as a person ages or the immune system is suppressed, people lose the ability to fight against the attack by retinal and blue light." The authors will continue their research and recommend filtering and blue-light reduction in the meantime. The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Ok, from now on I'm looking at the world through rose colored glasses. That should stop all that blue light business.
Light activatable G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), also known as opsins, harvest light through their covalently bound chromophore 11-cis retinal (11CR), an aldehyde derivative of vitamin A1,2.
Thanks again, /. Covalently... a new word to insert in otherwise innocuous conversation to thwart my intelligent friends' belief that they might be my mental equal.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Back to the old amber CRT, then
Topic says it all. LED ones are especially blue-heavy (up to 80% of the overall output in saltwater reef tanks) and that's gotta cause some issues.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Light text on black (not 'dark' -- BLACK!). Black text on white is CRAZY, EDDIE!
Or my palms are, perhaps, busy remedying the azure state of another bodily part.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The blurb (and even the article) is jaded and implies that blue light causes blindness to ride the anti-screen wave.
If you read it, you find that the issue is actually that the body makes alpha Tocopherol, a Vitamin E derivative, which keeps the photoreceptor cells from dying. Some people lose the ability to make that alpha Tocopherol as they age, leading to blindness.
So the issue isn't to avoid blue light and buy crazy glasses... (how are you really going to avoid blue light if you ever want to see white again anyway? Are you going to stop looking at white paper?) Rather it's to find a way to keep supplying alpha Tocopherol to the eye as people age.
We're in an old villa and use "Warm white" bulbs as it looks odd not to architecturally. They are on the redder (actually cooler 3000K) end of the spectrum to emulate your classic tungsten filament lighting. Not the best for reading resistor bands but at least I'll have my eyesight a bit longer... And hey, maybe my wake/sleep cycles will be better than the "Daylight" (6500K, bluer) colour balanced bulbs that everyone is using now.
So as soon as I figure out how to stop aging I won't have this issue?
No, as at the time of the introduction of the blue LED, efficiency and output was horrible, and even an incandescent light of equal power consumption output more light below the 470nm range than the LED did.
Around the early 2000s is when blue LEDs began to gain in efficiency to the point where they were commercially viable for use in just about any consumer product.
I'd suggest starting to look around 1997-2004 for the beginning of an increasing trend.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Time to throw away all this 4K HDR LCD garbage and go back to good old monochrome.
P.S. - Does anyone know how I can hook up a Hercules ISA card to PCIe?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Nice to see that someone is still messing with resistors that have bands. You must like the old cruft like I do. My issue is the focus now. Many many years ago I was able to solder a 40 pin flat pack without glasses. Now I'm lucky to find the damn iron without technological assistance.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
The blurb (and even the article) is jaded and implies that blue light causes blindness to ride the anti-screen wave.
You can say whatever you want, but the truth is BLUE LIGHT HURTS THE RETINA
I did not know that before my retina was damaged (caused by an abrupt change of pressure due to deep sea diving)
The retina of both my eyes were damaged - left eye gone completely dark - and after the many operations I regained only partial sight on my left eye
Now, every time I go into a room with blue light shining both my eyes hurt
It has nothing to do with alpha Tocopherol --- as I am still in my 20's and my body can still produce enough alpha Tocopherol
It is that POWER came with blue light that hurts the eye
>"We're in an old villa and use "Warm white" bulbs as it looks odd not to architecturally. They are on the redder (actually cooler 3000K) end of the spectrum to emulate your classic tungsten filament lighting. "
Warm/soft white is more like 2700K, which is traditional tungsten lighting. Bright white is around 3000K, cool white around 4100K, day light is around 5000K. I will admit to still buying and using mostly warm white and a bit of bright white in my house, with nothing colder. I can't seem to get used to the colder temperatures, residentially, no matter how popular it seems to be. It is just too harsh at night/evening and not pleasing.
It's not about light output, it's about cost. When blue LEDs became cheap, everyone and their mom started using them for power indicators. They didn't have to produce otherwise useful amounts of light for that. They just had to be affordable in quantity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I feel you brother.
Used to be able solder 0603 resistors with my 5cm super eyes. Now my arms are getting to short!
46137
I love my tuneable white bulbs. have set up a script to match daylight during day and the old fashioned tungsten in the evenings.
bickerdyke
The amber glasses used by shooters work by blocking blue light. The lens in your eye is a simple lens, so suffers from chromatic aberration. It does not focus the different colors of light onto the exact same spot. So what you see can be sharpened by blocking one end of the visible spectrum - red or blue. Your eyes are most sensitive to detail in green, less so in red, and suck at resolving blue. So blue light can be filtered out with very little effect on visual acuity (other than color accuracy). With less chromatic aberration, what you see appears slightly sharper.
Be glad you don't have astigmatism, or you'd find yourself in the position of being unable to see clearly without glasses (or eventually, without multifocal lenses) at ANY distance, near OR far.
Ever since roughly age 40, I've felt like I need a binocular microscope to solder anything smaller than 100-mil pitch... and depending on the part & lighting, even 100-mil has left me feeling like I'm "soldering blind" half the time. I've gotten to where I need a magnifying glass just to tell the difference between red and orange bands on a resistor, even WITH bright high-CRI lighting.
for all those bluelight specials...
Will this finally put an end to all-white web pages, hopefully? And give us a less eye-straining Internet.
Millions of old people will run around with orange tinted glasses in 5, 4, 3, ...
If blue light was really as bad as they make out then we'd all go blind from looking at a blue sky.
Interestingly however, the human retina can see UV light but it's blocked by the lens. However when people had replcement lenses put due to cataracts they could now see this UV (as the artificial lens didn't block it) and THIS caused some serious problems.
We also know (I've been fucking saying this for almost a decade, now, when I was doing global horticultural lighting design) that grow lighting is triggering macular degeneration in younger healthier population.
Are you seriously trying to claim that all the 20 somethings that want to get "medical" marijuana are not making shit up and are actually suffering from macular degeneration? (people growing pot are almost the only people who would give a shit about grow lights in their 20s) Either cite reputable medical studies (note the plural) or I'm calling bullshit.
New Yorkers must have known this for a very long time ... they never look UP towards the sky, thus avoiding all of that dangerous blue coming from the sky outside.
Street lamps raise an interesting dilemma. Like many things in life, it's not a simple problem. Turns out that while our eyes are less sensitive to blue, we actually see blue better in low light conditions. It takes several factors fewer lumens of white light to illuminate the road compared to sulphur lighting. While day light lighting increases road safety at night, it comes at the cost of messing with sleep cycles.
And hey, maybe my wake/sleep cycles will be better than the "Daylight" (6500K, bluer) colour balanced bulbs that everyone is using now.
If you really want to help your wake sleep cycle- you would have the 6500k bulbs where you spend your mornings (if indoors) and the lower K, yellower bulbs in your bedroom, and where you spend your evenings. If you use the same bulbs 24/7 you're not really having much impact on your wake/sleep cycle.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
, which is a form of color blindness, and cannot see blue, and cannot be affected by that. Take that, normies :)
Actually, the blue light is still going to damage your eyes- you just don't see the danger.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Is this the Reese's Pieces of weasel words?
In addition to the grand (quibble) passive voice, the whole question of "since when has it (apparently) been known?" was stuffed into a long, cold drawer and is presently awaiting identification from dental records.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the sky blue?
We're not sure. I don't think anyone on Slashdot has ever seen the sky and reported back. We ought to mount an expedition out of our parents' basements. For research purposes.
Have gnu, will travel.
We're not evolutionarily engineered to survive long enough for this to matter.
Wait!? Someone replaced toobs? I never got the memo.
Have gnu, will travel.
>"I think you are presenting personal opinion as fact."
Nope
>"Fact is, 3000K is still very warm and for most people it looks yellowish."
That might be, but the industry typically calls that color "bright white" not "warm white", which is typically 2400K to 2700K. Although it does vary by manufacturer.
> "Cool White" is absolutely not 4000K, you can even see on the label it is above 6500K."
Again, I didn't make up these terms. The lighting industry typically calls "cool white" 4000 to 5000K. 6000 to 6500K is defined as "day light".
No, it was about light output, as anything that could put out decent blue light even for indicators at the time just simply didn't exist until the almost mid-90s. Read about Shuji Nakamura, Nichia, and the creation of the gallium-arsenide blue LED which drove the LED industry into its heights that it is seeing today.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
but the Blue Screen of Blindness?
Hey, maybe that starts in the mind, which explains the Zombie Apocalypse of Mobile Addiction....
Your mum told you long ago watching blue movies will make you blind. Well, now you know why.
Na. It was definitely about cost. I worked on 3 projects in the time period where that phenomenon took off.
We used blue lights because they looked cool, and had finally stopped costing $6 an LED.
I can say that in the projects I worked on, one of which was commercialized, it was solely about price, as you said.
We wanted them because they looked fucking cool, we didn't use them because they were insanely expensive. Once they were cheap- we used them everywhere we could... again, because they looked awesome. Blue LEDs had an otherworldly glow about them.
Nope, and nope.
Coral can, and do, thrive on blue light. When light hits the water's surface, and as you get deeper, certain wavelengths are absorbed by the water... the first (and at quite a low depth, comparatively) is red, second yellow, and finally blue at, roughly, 300' deep. After that, only non-photosynthetic corals can exist. Most coral growers/aquarium enthusiasts enjoy the most-actinic wavelength, blue. Most LED lights, specifically for growing coral, have arrays of pure white, red, green, and blue diodes.
I grew the hell out of many SPS, LPS, and softbodied corals with mostly the blue channel on..rarely turned on the white/red/green channel.
No sig for you! Come back one year!