I can’t read the article through the paywall but the teaser is light on technical data. I feel like this should be huge news, everywhere, as a huge success for the climate
Ideally our LEDs should emit a safe dose of UV-B and infrared too, because they are vital for vit D and melatonin production, both of which are extremely important for general health. As more and more of us become basement dwellers and winter depression enjoyers, this would help out a lot with public health.
That’s not true. We’ve evolved while being irradiated by the sun for literally billions of years. Your body has mechanisms to repair damaged DNA and kill+replace cells that are too damaged. Issues arise when the damage grows fast enough for your body to keep up repairs. E.g. you get a sun burn because you don’t have an adequate tan or you hug a reactor meltdown.
Supplements are an inadequate solution for many reasons.
Vit D supplements barely get absorbed by the stommach. The only way to get adequate vitamin D levels with supplements is to take huge doses for like a month while testing your blood to see if levels are adequate.
Most available Vit D supplements take a week to be metabolized into the active form.
Vit D supplements can give you an overdose of Vitamin D and have severe negative health consequences.
Meanwhile half an hour of sunlight gives you healthy levels of Vit D without risk of overdose.
I’m not advocating for 1000W/m^2 UVB radiation blasting you 24/7, I’m talking about levels that are low enough that you can constantly be exposed to without a increase in risk.
And btw a lack of vitamin D causes severely bad health outcomes, even if it would cause a minor increase in skin cancer (which it doesn’t), the benefits of adequate vitamin D levels would vastly outweigh that risk.
Same with melatonin, supplements can’t replace the effect of exposure to infrared light. But at least with infrared people won’t spread misinformation about how there’s no safe levels.
We’ve evolved while being irradiated by the sun for literally billions of years. Your body has mechanisms to repair damaged DNA and kill+replace cells that are too damaged
We evolved for lots of things that are harmful overall. Unless there is evidence that sun exposure gives some non vitamin d advantage the fact it literally causes cancer means you should avoid it in general.
I like how your rebuttals both say that supplements are both not able to give you vitamin D but also simultaneously a risk of overdose.
Avoid the cancer causing radiation. Just take a pill every day and get your blood work done to see how much you should take.
But at least with infrared people won’t spread misinformation about how there’s no safe levels.
That's because infrared light doesn't cause cancer. Although your support for infrared light exposure does identify you as a bit of a quack.
Yeah, if you take like 15 pills on one day or something stupid like that.
But unlike the risk of taking 15 vitamin d pills, literally all the potential of giving you skin cancer.
This doesn't mean you have to be stupid and never go outside at all because "oh my goodness it's going to give me cancer". It just means that installing UVB emitters in our fucking light bulbs is a bad idea, and if you have vitamin d deficiency you can take a pill every day.
that’s why you’d make the level of UVB radiation low enough that people could safely spend 24/7 under it, but high enough that it provides a health benefit
You might not get 100% of your vit D levels this way, but perhaps just a fraction of it. Depends on how the risk benefit calculation works out.
and of course infrared is generally harmless as long as it’s not strong enough to cook you.
Given that the great big energy efficiency gains from LED lights comes from using just two emission bandgaps, one in the red part of the spectrum and another (the most efficient) in the blue - then surrounded by a phosporous layer to smooth the emission to cover more wavelengths than just those 2 - I doubt your suggestion would be possible without pretty much throwing away most of the energy efficiency of LEDs.
It makes more sense to, for those who need such things, have separate lamps with different technologies more suitable to emit in those wavelengths (incandescent is great for IR because it’s quite literally heating a piece of wire until it is so hot it emits light so you can tune it to be mostly IR, whilst various gases used in fluorescent lamps actually emit in the UV range, hence why the “colder” color fluorescent lamps have this white powdery layer inside the glass, as that’s a substance that absorbs the UV light and re-emits it mainly in the upper part of the visible apectrum, hence why it bluer white).
In fact I think you can do so already (get both IR and UV lamps) but their form factors might not be very practical as those are specialist devices for things like heating terrariums or illuminating signs which have elementes painted with fluorescent paint.
It’s not a question of impossible (as there are emission bandgaps in the UV and in IR, used in regular LEDs), it’s a question of it being a complete total waste of efficiency to deploy that as standard to satisfy the perceived need of a small number of people.
I suppose that there being for sale LED lamps clearly marked as, say, “UV and Infrared Enhanced” or something like that would make sense, but adding it to LED lamps in general would be quite the step back when it comes to the gains we’ve had from the higher efficiency of the LEDs (mainly because, as far as I know, those two emission bandgaps in the red and blue part of the spectrum are the most efficient we’ve discovered so far for illumination).
Thinking about it, it’s quite a cool idea to, say, replace one of the LED “filaments” in the more modern LED lamps with one emitting in the UV or IR spectrum (you can actually get lose LED “filaments” with various colors from a place like Aliexpress, though a quick search hasn’t revealed any with colors outside the visible spectrum) and unlike in incandescent and fluorescent lamps the glass bulb itself doesn’t really serve to keep gas inside or outside - it’s mainly decorative and possibly to keep people from damaging the light structure holding the filaments - so can be removed, though, at least in cheap led light bulbs, one should match the voltage characteristics of the filaments already inside because the designs often take shortcuts to save on the cost of the mains adaptor module that sits inside the bottom of the light bulb.
I feel that light pollution has dramatically increased. Where I live, it has been linked to navigational issues with the Bogong moth, which drastically reduced the primary food source of the critically endangered Pygmy possum.
I just built a new house, and I followed recommendations from architects and now my living room has 100w of lights and looks like a 7-Eleven from outside. It’s the equivalent of 1000w of incandescent globes, which was unheard of.
Pessimists know the “rebound effect”: improvement in efficiency leads us to do more of the thing. More illumination for example. This (partially) counteracts the good effects.
The lower operating costs of LEDs allows people/organizations/govt to leave the lights on longer or all night at a reduce costs compared to filament bulbs.
This is often to the detriment of migratory birds.
bloomberg.com
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