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Sunlight allows us to make vitamin D, credited with healthier living, but a surprise research finding could reveal another powerful benefit of getting some sun.
Georgetown University Medical Center researchers have found that sunlight, through a mechanism separate than vitamin D production, energizes T cells that play a central role in human immunity.
Their findings, published today in Scientific Reports, suggest how the skin, the body's largest organ, stays alert to the many microbes that can nest there.
"We all know sunlight provides vitamin D, which is suggested to have an impact on immunity, among other things. But what we found is a completely separate role of sunlight on immunity," says the study's senior investigator, Gerard Ahern, PhD, associate professor in the Georgetown's Department of Pharmacology and Physiology. "Some of the roles attributed to vitamin D on immunity may be due to this new mechanism."
They specifically found that low levels of blue light, found in sun rays, makes T cells move faster -- marking the first reported human cell responding to sunlight by speeding its pace.
Bad news for our basement-dwelling brethren.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 27 2016, @04:40PM
the TSA is groping you for a good reason. bleeding heart liberals always want to blame the authority system instead of themselves for not knowing why. there's probably something wrong with what it is groping. groping crotches (och?) probably something in the crotch coating that isn't supposed to be there, etc. schedule 1 residue from poison "drugs" that crossed the border, for example. just b/c lawyers don't know how to check for it doesn't mean it's not there. i'm not saying that all legal recreational drug use is not real, only that i doubt it's always the airport security screeners at fault. the legal industry always wants to say you were just born defective when they can't/won't dig any deeper to find the real cause of the "misbehaving" crime system.
There are plenty of examples of reactive systems that overreact. You just need to look a little for them.