Sunday, October 23, 2016

Unexpected

Researchers have discovered that the best color for a night-light is, of all things, red. Blue light, thought to be calming and relaxing, actually provoked more depressive and unpleasant moods, while red reduced those moods in the experiment, which studied hamsters.

And no, it did not study male hamsters exposed to the red light while also meeting loose-moraled lady hamsters, so that particular aspect of a "red light district" and its effect on relaxation remain unproven.

On the other hand, maybe Roxanne was just trying to get some sleep and Sting could have been more helpful if he had just shut up for awhile.

1 comment:

CGHill said...

Rewritten (or at least retyped) press release:

Amazon is going to be pushing out a new firmware update for all modern Fire Tablets within the next few weeks. This is a feature that will limit the amount of blue light that emits from the screen, making reading on a tablet a little bit easier on the eyes.

Amazon explained the essence behind Blue Shade, stating that it "uses specialized filters to limit exposure to blue light. It also offers warm color filters and the ability to lower the display brightness to an ultra-low level for comfortable nighttime reading—even in a dark room," Amazon said in an emailed statement. "Customers can also fine-tune the color settings to their personal preference, with the device intelligently adjusting the color filtering so that at any color or brightness, the blue wavelength light is always suppressed."

"Studies have shown that evening exposure to blue light from tablets may suppress our bodies' production of melatonin," Amazon said in its press release, "which can prolong the time it takes to fall asleep, delay REM sleep, and reduce the level of alertness the next morning." Blue Shade is supposed to fix that issue.

(I have one of these tablets. If Blue Shade is active, the screen defaults to a soft red-orange; it's possible to have it switch in and out automatically, depending on the time of day.)