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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.
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.
Hell, I didn't know the word Khyber before Slashdot.
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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?
Blue light in this context is just that - regular blue pixels on a computer screen. There are night-safe modes which tone down these pixels.
Your retinas has around seven layers of rods, cones and processing neurons. Light is refracted through the lens so that infra-red light hits blood vessels, red light which has a longer wavelength and travels less deeper into the retina hits the upper layers. Blue light in this context is goes into the deepest layer of the retina because the wavelength is shorter and has more energy. UV light gets filtered out by the lens (but causes cataracts in the long term).
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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 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...
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.
, 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
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.