The Light in the Night

While reading my June 30th copy of New Scientist, I came across an interesting article (Better than Sunshine by Jeff Hecht) on the effects that artificial light has on us, as well as the effects it has on the animals around us. To sum it up very quickly, our current artificial light is not entirely beneficial to our lives. By using LEDs, in the future, light bulbs may be made that can change over time, providing different compositions of colors in our light at different times of day, helping to improve our energy levels and sleeping habits (by mimicking the behavior of the Sun). I'm not going to go into it, but a quick Google search brought up many research papers using these kinds of lights already.

While I was searching around though, I found a program called f.lux, which is a neat little app that changes your screen color throughout the day according to where the sun is. Obviously, such a program would be bad for someone who is a digital artist, but for someone like me, who spends a lot of time at the computer reading and working on things that don't depend on exact colors, its a nifty little app. During the evening, you really start to notice the screen's changes, although it does not affect the usability.

If you're the sort of person who uses their computer all day, it couldn't hurt to check it out. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

f.lux