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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 19 2019, @08:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-blues-may-be-good-for-you dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Not such a bright idea: why your phone's 'night mode' may be keeping you awake

"Night mode" is one of those features you may be aware of only because your phone keeps telling you about it. At some point while you are lying in bed at night sending texts, your screen may politely suggest you activate a function that shifts the colours of your screen from the colder to the warmer end of the spectrum. It is supposed to help you sleep better.

Findings in a study led by Dr Tim Brown and published in Current Biology suggest this is the very opposite of correct. The research, carried out on mice, appears to rubbish the notion that blue light disrupts sleep. All things being equal, warm yellow light is worse.

[...] According to the study, brightness levels are more important than colour when it comes to stimulating the body clock. However, when the light is equally dim, blue is more relaxing than yellow.

This makes basic sense: daylight is yellow, twilight is blue, and sunrise and sunset are pretty reliable ways to tell your body clock what time it is. Of course, at this point, we only know it works on mice – and mice don't have phones. "We think there is good reason to believe it's also true in humans," says Dr Brown.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:25PM (#934172)

    It looks blue to some people because blue sensitive cones are more sensitive than red sensitive cones. I personally don't experience this and wondered why TV shows always shot night scenes in a blue filter, until the stupid dress came along and people said that white actually does look blue to some people in the dark.

    Similarly, daylight isn't yellow. It's white. The peak of the Sun's emissions is actually in the green part of the spectrum. But everyone is calibrated so daylight looks white.

    Sunrise and sunset are somewhere between pink and orange, depending on the exact atmospheric conditions. They are definitely not blue, the sky is only blue during the day. (And night, but it's too dark to see the blue color). All this should be obvious to everyone.

    I think the story author must be an alien or something.

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