Stuff You Should Know - How Light Pollution Works

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Artificial light at night, aka light pollution, affects almost everyone on Earth. And not just people – trees, plants, animals, insects, and marine life are affected by our propensity to light up everything we can. Learn what you – YOU! – can do to help.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there. And I just want to say this is Stuff You Should Know, the Chuck's birthday edition.

Happy birthday, Chuck. Thank you, thank you. Okay, so back to it. Yeah, we got a, I got approval from Josh to do a special front-loaded listener mail. I'm a little tense about this. I'm not, I'm not gonna lie. Really? You were like, oh, it's his birthday. I gotta do it. Yeah, I had to give in. For those of you who don't know, at the end of the podcast, some people just switch it off when you start your little gobbledygook at the end. But we read mail from listeners, which can be informative and instructive and fun and heartwarming and sad. And they're really good. So you've been missing out if you don't listen through to those. But

I'm gonna do one here at the front because this just came in as sheer coincidence that it happened to dovetail with today's topic. Yeah. So while Alex Lash here of New Zealand did not suggest this topic such that we took the suggestion, you're already doing it. Nice legalese there, yeah. You sounded like a mobster trying to cite legal stuff. So here we go from Alex. Hey guys, following up on the National Park app, I'd like to suggest you complete the trifecta and do dark sky reserves and marine reserves. I'm from New Zealand. My dad played a part in the formation of our own dark sky reserve

in the McKinsey Basin. There's a joint effort between the local Maori Iwi, I'm probably just mispronouncing or anything, Tekapo Tourism, which is the town, and the University of Canterbury, who ran the Mount John Observatory in the area. My dad was head of physics and astronomy at the university at the time. It is a truly life-altering experience to look up and see a sky lit brilliant by the Milky Way with no light pollution. And then Tekapo, you can do a tour to look through some of the telescopes for a better view. And this is from Alex Lash, and he attached a picture of a photo that his friend took of the night sky with the observatory in the foreground. And he was like, there is no special

camera. It's just mounted on a tripod to leave that exposure open for a long time. And brother, it is, you should check out this email from Alex. It is unbelievably gorgeous. And we forget what is up there in the sky when you live in most places in the world. Yeah. I mean, they say that in the US and Europe, 99% of us live in light-polluted skies that are so light-polluted that we can't see the Milky Way. You just can't see it. It's there. We just can't see it because of all the light that we put out. And so, yeah, that is an amazing photo. So to see something like that in person, it really kind of, and to realize that it's out there, it makes you kind of sad. But at the same time, it makes me very determined to go

somewhere and see it. Unfortunately, I've been looking around. There's not a lot of places that I want to go anyway. So it's going to have to be a special trip. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And it is occasionally when I have gotten out to the desert or out in the middle of the ocean on the one cruise ship I went on. And you see those stars. It is a reminder. It's like those things are always up there. And so we get to see so little of that in the city. I mean, you're lucky if you get a smattering of stars if you live near a city on any given night. Yeah, no, it's definitely true. And like sky glow in and of itself, if you don't stop and think about what it is, it can be kind of beautiful in a weird way. It makes you feel like you're alive

and connected to everybody who's alive in that city right then weirdly, or it does for me, I should say. Yeah, I'm with you there. But when you do stop and think about what it is, it can make you pretty sad. And then when you do see something, you get like just a taste of what the night sky is supposed to look like. Like Chuck, in a truly like dark, like a night sky that isn't polluted with light, like Venus and Jupiter are so bright, they can make you cast a shadow. That's how bright they get. The Milky Way does too. Like you can cast a shadow from Venus and Jupiter. It's just mind-boggling to think of. You can't even see Jupiter. Maybe you see Venus, like if you're lucky around a city. But like you said, smattering of stars and some sky glow is

basically what you get. So I think the thing that really kind of makes me feel like, man, we were so close was up until even like 60, 70, 100 years ago. Like you didn't have to go very far from a place like Atlanta or New York or Boston or wherever, any city to go find something like this. Like maybe just drive out beyond the city limits here or there. But today, we've been increasing our artificial lighting even faster than our populations been growing. And so it's gotten to this point now where we've lost a lot. And there's some people saying, hey, not only are we losing stuff, we're actually gaining all sorts of negativity too that we need to start addressing. And that is the upshot of light pollution. It really does stand as a type of

pollution when you dig into it. Yeah. And this is one where we're going to arm you with some information, maybe gently remind you about some best practices without trying to be too preachy about what you do at your own home. But it's not just skyscrapers and big city stuff. It's the individual human's home that has far too much light pointing up at the sky these days. And it all adds up. It does. And a significant portion of it is wasted. If you start looking at light pollution, I guess, warning people. Right. Yeah. You know, if you start hanging out with that crowd, you'll find that they also very frequently say, hey, you can save a lot of fossil fuel emissions and a lot of money on electricity if you just use sensible lighting

that doesn't pollute. Yeah. So let's talk about the history of it a little bit. Because like I was saying, it's not a very old problem that we face, but it's really kind of grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. Yeah. And big thanks to Olivia for her help with this one. I think this is kind of right up her alley. She points out that, you know, astronomers, obviously, were some of the very first people to say, hey, we've got a problem going on. And this was in the late 19th century. There was an astronomer named Giovanni Sciaparelli, who talked about coal smoke, a problem in and of itself, and quote, the abuse of electric lights in quote, that were basically wrecking Giovanni's view from the observatory in Italy there at Brera, I guess in Brera,

but the Brera Astronomical Observatory. It's in Milan, actually. So part of the problem was that Sciaparelli was too cool to take his sunglasses off. So he was not exactly like a reporter you could rely on. Right. Unreliable narrator in Gucci sunglasses. Yeah. I've noticed like I've gotten to this weird point in my life, Chuck, where rather than use the word I'm looking for, I use five different words that are clumsily strung together that kind of get across what I'm trying to say. You've gotten to this point. Okay. I feel like it's stepped up recently. Okay. All right. I need a little more perspective on myself to be thinking about how I be. No, you don't need to think about that anymore than you already do. Okay. So astronomers were among the first. There

were also authors, Olivia points out there was a naturalist and author named Henry Beston, who has a great quote. It's kind of sad. This was in 1928, mind you, with lights and evermore lights, we drive the holiness of night back to the forest in the sea. Today's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night who have never even seen night. Yeah. 1928. Yeah. And we take those people out into the night. They go, what was that? Who's that? Who's there? Where's my flashlight? So things really kind of got going. People were aware. There's all sorts of light pollution going on. All you have to do is try to get some sleep in a city where there's tons of lights on to understand light pollution and have

it affect you. So it's not like people didn't realize there were issues with overuse of artificial lights along the way. But it wasn't until the 50s that anybody actually started to do something about it, which if you stop and think about it, if really we started to run into this problem around the beginning of the 20th century, less than half a century later, people were already moving to address it. And the whole thing started in Arizona, thanks to a rich, rich astronomer, Percival Lowell, who had built an observatory, a great Lowell Observatory out there near, was it Flagstaff, I believe? Yeah, near the Grand Canyon. Yeah. And it was a great space at the time when he built it in 1894. But by the time, I think the 1950s rolled around, when they were

looking to expand, they're like, already Flagstaff is just too bright for our telescope. What are we going to do? Well, and they said, and this is what all observatories basically had to do, was move out even further. So they moved out about 12 miles southeast of the city. But then even then, they were like, you know, at some point, this is going to be a problem as well, because of the way that humans just expand their footprint with suburbs and excerpts. And so let's actually do something about it. And so the Flagstaff City Council is a sort of one of the first measures in the United States on light pollution, banned the searchlights. When you grew up in the 70s and 80s, you remember this. You don't see

them anymore, which I guess this is why. I've seen it as recently in the last like 10 or 15 years. Oh, really? I haven't seen one in a, and I didn't even remember them until this article. But when a big business would open up, or just any business that could afford to hire spotlights, they would have these searchlight spotlights, like these bat signals just kind of flowing back and forth in the night sky. And I guess, you know, the idea was you would just say, what's that light? I need to drive toward it. I got nothing else to do. I need to find out if there's a new air and rent. Exactly. Exactly. And people would do that, I guess, because they used them. I mean, those searchlights weren't cheap to rent, I would imagine. So they must have been

effective if people use them for that long. I remember those all the time when I was a kid. And Flagstaff City Council said, at the very least, no more of those dumb things. They're like, yeah, it's exciting, true, but it's wrecking Percival Lowell's telescope. So they actually, yeah, they were the first city in the country, and maybe even in the world, the past, something that protected dark skies. And that kind of set like the tone for the Flagstaff and Tucson area, which I can't remember if they're even remotely close to one another. Not super close now. Our good friend Blair Bunting actually, I think they live in Flagstaff now, so he's probably going to send us an email disabusing me of any notion that Flagstaff and

Tucson are anywhere near each other. But I guess Tucson copied Flagstaff maybe and started to say, hey, we should protect our dark skies too. Yeah, I think it was just sort of in the air in Arizona and in the early 1970s, Tucson passed some laws that said, hey, all these lights that are pointing upward, let's just point those down at least. And then over the next few decades, they moved like to different kinds of lights that were a little softer on the visual spectrum, not as bright. One of the big problems we'll talk about later is all the blue light these days from LEDs and electronics and things like that. But do you have the blue light? Are you trying to get better sleep and like not looking at your phone before bed? I've got that night shift thing

on from sunrise to sunset or sunset to sunrise. It's like a yellow, it's like yellow white stuff. Automatically it does that. Yeah, and I try to read books more at night too. I think it's, but it's more just like the light bulbs, those light fixtures. I don't care what time of day it is. They just look like you've made the decision to do everything you can to drive yourself insane. So you're going with the blue light LEDs. Well, you should avoid those, right? I think so. Yeah. I don't have them in my house. Good for you, Chuck. I mean, it's one of those things. Like LEDs are great because they last a long, long time, but they make different kinds of LEDs now. So you don't have to have those blue light ones. So there's this group called the

International Dark Sky Association. They were founded in 1988 by somebody who was part of that push in I think Tucson to start protecting the dark skies. They are big time into saying like, hey guys, we need to figure out something else. But aside from these blue wavelength LEDs that are really not good. And we'll really just snop all over blue light LEDs whenever we get a chance later in the episode. The point is, is the International Dark Sky Association has been introduced now and they are responsible for Alex Lash's favorite thing, certifying dark sky places around the world actually. I think there's 170 of them. Yeah. Like dark sky sanctuaries basically if you do the right thing, if this is your goal and you do the right thing, some people might say

it's the wrong thing. You can get certified places in, I believe, Minnesota. I think there's a park in Maine, the Cotted Inn Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine, Cosmic Campground in New Mexico. One that is, I don't think on the list, but I had a dark sky experience at Sappalo Island, Georgia, a few years ago. This is when I was, had the very misguided notion that I was going to try and direct a little independent movie. And we, a couple of friends of mine and I went down there to scout Sappalo Island, just one of the barrier islands of Georgia that is virtually uninhabited. There's still some of the original Gichi people that live there, but it's like, there's no electricity. So the guy that showed us to our place was like, take your flashlights at night because there are

no street lights. There are very few people and it is dark. And we got this little golf cart to ride out to the lighthouse. Was it an original golf cart? It was pretty original. But we got out on the little road, the dirt road, and turned the lights off. And man, it was unsettlingly dark. Oh yeah. Like you could, you literally could not see your hand in front of your face. Oh really? I was going to ask you if your eyes acclimated to the dark so that you could see better than you thought you could. Eventually, but this is like when we first switched them off. And you just forget about just street lights and just people and all the light that comes in. So it was, saw the best guy there I'd seen in a long time. And it's just weird when you're in a place

that's super dark. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine because you're not used to it. You're a city slicker. I'm a city slicker. So that's pretty much brings us up to where we are now in history as far as light pollution goes. It's a big old problem. There's some people at the fringes of this starting to try to get everybody else on board. And we're going to kind of dive into what actually makes light pollution after a break. Let's do it. A birthday break. Ooh. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance

Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to

podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, and we're back and it's still Chuck's birthday. Happy birthday again, Chuck. 51. It's a weird number. Yeah, but if you add them together, it equals six and six is perfectly fine. Right. It's my daughter's age. Right. We're about the same. All comes full circle. By the way, I took her to her first pro sporting event last night. Went to a Hawks game. Oh, wow. What'd she think? It was interesting. I mean, I knew we would have to leave at like

halftime just because of bedtime. But she made it through the half, got a little squirmy, but you know, NBA games, there's a lot of extra fun stuff going on. Oh, yeah. Fire cannons. They had dogs catching frisbees and t-shirt cannons and all that good stuff helps. Wow. On the court. It was great. So anyway, light pollution, I guess we should talk about the four main kinds, right? And I have bigger problems with some of these than others. Yeah. So the, the IDA, the International Dark Skies Association has basically identified four types. The first one's glare. And that is basically like if you look up at a street light, that light is going to basically hurt your eyes. You're looking, you're being hit with

glare from the street light. That's right. That's a kind of light pollution. It makes sense. The, the, the reason that that's light pollution is ideally you should have to be standing directly under the light fixture, the street light and look up for that glare to happen. That's just not the case. You can be half a mile away and look at a street light from the side and you're still going to get hit with that same glare. That's why it's a problem. That's what makes it light pollution. Right. The second one is one I have a big problem with is light trespass. And this is when you have a neighbor or somebody that has a floodlight like pointed in your bedroom window. And sometimes they just keep it on. And that's not the case with my current neighbor. Just to

be clear, I don't think he listens, but he's, he's pretty good. He like, I do have the motion sensor floodlights that only pop on when something is moving. Right. But be aware of the light that you cast from your home is, is all I'm, this is pre-cheese I'm going to get. I just realized two days ago that the old front security light replaced all the rest of them with those motion detector ones, but the one I've left so far, the, it's very old, like the on-off switch is actually like rusted in place. It's been on all day and all night. Like, and it has been shining at my neighbor's house. Luckily, no, luckily, I think their bedroom is on the other side. And they're also, they're very friendly. They would say something if there was an issue.

In a very friendly manner, very friendly people, but I just realized it. So now I ordered like a replacement light and I had to turn all my lights off because that one is just sitting there, sitting on and it's crazy. And also, when I think about all the electricity it's wasting during the day, it's like, come on. Yeah. Don't be so stupid, you stupid light. There's called clutter, which is, I mean, it's described by Livia as bright, confusing or excessive groups of lights. Yeah, I looked into that. What does confusing mean? Confusing is that we have something called contrast illumination that we use for night vision. So a light that looks less bright than another light is going to be further away. Well, with artificial light,

that's not necessarily the case. You could have like a porch light that's even brighter than a streetlight that's further away and it's going to confuse our eyes and mess up our night vision. Okay, that makes sense. And then also I have the impression that just having a big smattering of individual lights across the landscape at night is clutter as well, but I think the problem is it really messes with your night vision. Yeah, we do have a porch light to be clear. I'm not advocating for like total darkness of your home, but we leave the porch light on at night like Tom Baudette says to do and that's it. You got a Motel 6 now at your house? I live in the management office. It's quite nice and comfortable and affordable.

Yeah, it's your side hustle. Then you got Sky Glow, which is I think everyone kind of knows what this is. These are just the culmination of city lights and if you've ever driven into Las Vegas from the desert, you see that Sky Glow from a long ways away is just sort of a big glowing dome in the distance. And that one seems to be a problem that's not just from light pollution, but also air pollution too because you can see Sky Glow just fine on a cloudless night and it's reflecting actually off of all the particles in the atmosphere. And then if there are clouds, you can see the clouds usually quite clearly. You're not supposed to be able to see clouds, but that's part of Sky Glow as well. And as we'll see, the villain of

this episode, blue wavelength LED lights are particularly problematic with Sky Glow because those blue wavelength light actually travels very far and can create Sky Glow hundreds of miles away from the city. When you're way far away from the city, you'll still be able to see it just fine. Yeah. And Livia included this fun. You know, we're kind of talking about he kind of just forget in the city and you get used to stuff. She included a fun little story from 1994 when Los Angeles had a big power outage across the city and people were calling in very concerned and reporting what ended up being the Milky Way galaxy in the sky. Right. Like if they thought it was a gas cloud or something, I'm not sure. Just something concerning, I think, like, hey, there's this

weird looking glow in the sky and they went, it's fine. It's the Milky Way. So I was saying earlier that our light emissions have been increasing faster than the human population. I think it's increased about 6% a year between 1947 and 2000. That's a lot. That is a lot. And so it's tough to keep up with and it's also tough to get people to kind of give those up as we'll see. But one of the things that has kind of become a newer problem, like artificial lights, like porch lights that get left on all night, that kind of thing, those have been a problem for a real long time. But one of the newer problems shook is satellites. Yeah. We've talked about how many satellites are up there flying around and that's a problem. I

think we talked a lot about that in the Space Junk episode. It's a problem for that reason, but it's a problem because they're interfering with astronomy and our night sky, aren't they? Yeah, in particular, so there's satellite streaks. They used to show up in about 0.5% of satellite images or of astronomy images that were taken at twilight, which is when you can see satellites most clearly. That's also the time you can see things like comets and meteors most clearly. So in addition to being an annoyance, it also potentially poses a hazard because it makes it more difficult to track near-Earth objects that we want to keep an eye on that may be coming toward us. Although if you

seem don't look up, it wouldn't matter anyway if we identified something like that in time. Did you see that? Yeah. Was it good? Oh yeah, you haven't seen it yet. No, the reviews were so bad that I avoided it. What? Really? You like abysmally bad. I don't get that at all. That I was just like, I'm not going to waste my time. And then I got nominated for Best Picture and I was like, well, how if it's so bad? Like, I genuinely don't understand what the bad reviews were. Not only was it like, you know, engrossing and like well done. And I thought Vice was terrible. I thought it was a

terrible movie. So I'm not like some just Adam McKay fan. I also thought the other guys was one of the worst movies ever made. I think you and me and I walked out of the theater on that one. Okay. So I've established my bone of feet days. I'm not some lackey for Adam McKay, but it was a really well done movie and it was really entertaining too. Just looked up real quick. He's got a fit for what it's worth, a 55% on rotten tomatoes and a 49% on Metacritic. I don't get it. It is definitely nowhere near that bad. All right. I'll check it out. No, it's actually pretty good. I think you'd like it. Always go to the RogerEber.com because I still trust the reviews there and they give it 1.5 stars.

Man. So seriously, Chuck, I would like you to watch this pretty soon and come back on another episode and tell everybody, don't tell me first. I really want it to be raw and I want it to hurt if it's going to hurt, you know what I mean? And just tell me what you think. I'm watching his Lakers show, which is fun. Oh, is it good? Yeah, it's fun. I would recommend it. Okay. Well, I'll take your recommendation. You take mine. Yeah. I definitely want to see what all the stink is about. But you got to finish your stat though because you only gave us the front half. So yeah. So I think they showed up in half of a percent of images before. Now they're up to

something like 19 percent of images taken at Twilight. Yeah, from two years. Yeah. And it's just going to keep getting worse and worse because we're adding more and more satellites. And by we, I mean Elon Musk with Starlink. Apparently, I think he's got or applied for permission for 42,000 satellites for Starlink Internet service. 42,000 satellites. That guy's gotten weird. He challenged Putin to a fight. I know. I know. Yes, that is demonstrably weird. Not just to a fight, a fight for like all the marbles over Ukraine. Like if he beat up Vladimir Putin. So weird. Putin was going to have to leave Ukraine, I guess was the thing. It is very weird. I agree. Maybe he thinks we're living in a cartoon simulation of real world.

I'm pretty sure he does. So there's going to be something like 100,000 satellites in the next few years, they think, because people like Elon Musk and others are just launching, launching, launching, and it's going to be more and more problematic. Yeah, which is a problem, like you said, for tracking the Earth objects. So it's the kind of thing that people should pay attention to. Well, plus also they pose a problem for astronomy in that they use radio signals to transmit. And we use radio telescopes to pick up radio transmissions. And apparently the satellite people and the telescope people are not necessarily coordinating. So they're not making the satellites invisible to the radio telescopes by using specific wavelengths that the radio telescopes

could then tune out. So I think that's a problem in that sense as well. Yeah, here's one stat. Without telescopes, just with your regular vision looking up in the sky, satellites will very soon make up one in 10 visible lights in the sky. That's a lot. So those aren't stars you're seeing up there? No. So about 10% of those will be satellites. Which that's also a problem in that sense too. We might as well talk about it now. One of the things that I find very satisfying because it keeps coming up whenever you look into light pollution and people advocating about doing something about it is that there are a lot of indigenous cultures around the world whose heritage is predicated at least in part on the night sky, on celestial stuff. And not just really bright stars

like you could see at a city, but really subtle stuff too. And it's extensive and it's like a deep catalog of the cosmos that they use as part of their worldview and some of their religious and spiritual views. And that is being infringed upon just by satellites and light pollution too. Yeah, I think this one, it wasn't a direct quote, but Livia says that there are some scholars out there that are saying this is basically like a cultural genocide that we're seeing happening to some of these cultures that rely so much on the night sky for not just navigation but rituals. And this is happening in Australia and I think indigenous Hawaiians are kind of big on trying to preserve that starlight for their culture as well. Yeah, and it's being prevented

from being passed on from generation to generation because the same things that were there and could be talked about and passed on 100 years ago, you just can't see anymore in a lot of places. I thought that was really interesting. It comes up a lot and some people try to co-opt it to basically say like, see, see, we need to get rid of light pollution, but it does seem to be genuinely included at the table now for people like the International Dark Skies Association. This is a legitimate issue too that we need to be taking into account. Should we talk about animals? Yeah. So it's an annoyance to humans and we're going to also talk about real like health effects on humans in a bit, but it's obviously going to interfere with

animals and there are many, many examples. Everything from city birds thinking it's morning and five and six hours before they're supposed to be awake with their little friends in the countryside, they're up and chirping and singing their bird song to animals that navigate at night, like literally depend on the night sky for their migrations and it confusing or completely throwing off base their migration patterns to where they lose their way, they get lost, they could possibly even die. Yeah, and it's, I mean, I guess just cities having a lot of light tends to attract migrating birds in particular so that you see bird strikes, which usually results in the death of a bird, really increase a couple of times a year when they're migrating one way

and then when they're migrating back the other way at a different part of the year. And I came up with a website, Chuck, that I thought was really interesting. It's called birdcast.info. You came up with it meaning you designed it yourself? Just this very morning. It's pretty good considering I don't know what I'm doing and I did it in a couple of hours. Hey, thanks to Squarespace. Right. I really shouldn't take credit for somebody else's work. No, it's not my website, but they have migration forecasts like maps and you can type in your town and it will show you like the next few days of what the expected bird migrations are going to be like numbers wise basically. And you can actually adjust your outdoor lighting at night

to help those birds because they are attracted to light. They're normally diurnal, meaning that they're active in the daytime, those birds that are migrating, but they choose to migrate at night, which means they're not pros at navigating at night necessarily. So they can be easily thrown off, of course, by being attracted to like a city with a bunch of bright lights and then even worse than that, they frequently will dive bomb into windows with a lot of light. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on. Yeah, to the tune of, you know, and everyone's like sure that happens every now and then, there are about a billion birds a year that die from running into glass. In the US alone. Yeah, and we have lost 30, almost 30. We've lost 29% of our birds since the 1970s, like a net loss

overall. Not just from running into buildings, but that's a big chunk of it is bird strikes under buildings. Yeah, so a lot of cities are, I think Chicago started back in the late 90s, started with these lights out programs where, you know, they basically say, hey, if you live in a, or, you know, have a high rise office building, you turn that stuff off at night, or you close the blinds, or do both, or move to only task lighting, or at the very least, turn off decorative lighting at night. Right. And a lot of companies and buildings have gotten on board with this kind of thing, thankfully. Yeah, the guys who walk around with the huge ring of keys, they're getting on board with that kind of thing. Well, they like it dark. Something I didn't realize, Chuck, but

that I find kind of awesome is that there are a lot of insect species that pollinate and visit flowering plants at night. When you're asleep, like they're doing their thing, did not realize that. Same. But it turns out that those insects can be greatly impacted by artificial light. And so that apparently in turn has a deep impact on the near earth object callback, like has a deep impact on the pollination of flowering plants. And they did a study in the Bernese Pre Alps, beautiful name. And it's typically dark there. So what they did was, they surveyed how many insects arrived under normal conditions, right? Yeah, I think they worked with about 300 species of insects that do their business at night.

And I think 60 plants. And they found that when they turned on these LED street lights, that near these meadows that the pollinator visits dropped 62%. And that was at 13. And people are like, Oh, you know, what's the big deal? I can just do it during the day. It led to an overall 13% drop in fruit production. So, you know, the trickle-down effect that this has, we talk about this kind of thing all the time in ecosystems, it's no different for nighttime pollinators. Like if you like to eat your fruit and have abundant, you know, fruits and vegetables, this is one thing that's disrupting that. And it can also impact the plants directly too. Like light can trick them into thinking that the

days are not getting shorter even though they are. So they're getting artificial feedback. And they're keeping their leaves longer. There's some types of cacti and palms, I think that have been shown to not flower at all when they're exposed to artificial light at night, which I don't think we said that. That's kind of like the in-group term for light pollution, artificial light at night, or Alan. Alan, poor Alan. Yeah. Sorry, all the Alan's listening. We're not picking on you from this point on. And Karen's. Sure. Thanks. Someone's name's been co-opted. Yeah, for now, I think that's fading. Yeah, it'll pass. It's already out, I think.

Oh, okay. Like if you're still saying that now, it's... You may be a Karen. What about those poor little sea turtles? Yeah. So one of the things that sea turtles use to get to the safety of the ocean after they hatch on the beach is light. They go toward the brightest light that they see. And normally, under normal circumstances, that's the sun or not the sun, but the moon reflecting off of the water kind of guides them. It can be very, very bright. And I found out recently, it had been a while since I guess it's seen the moonlight, like a full moon over the ocean. And when we went to Amelia Island after

Disney World, I had a night like that on the beach where it was like daylight out there. Yeah. Remember that great shot? It had to have been... Yeah, of course it was just made up, but it was a great-looking shot in Joe versus the volcano. When he's out there in the middle of the ocean on that steamer trunk and that moon just rises over him. I forgot how big it was. What a great movie that was. Yeah, we haven't talked about that one in a while. One of the best. So what did that have to do with... Oh, yeah, the sea turtles. Yeah, that's why they tell you to not use your flashlights on the beach during sea turtle season because that light confuses them. Yes, and if you have a beach house, typically you're asked to keep

your outside lights turned off and even inside lights turned off so that you don't accidentally attract the hatchlings. Because when they move away from the water where they're relatively safer, they sometimes walk right into the jaws of Wiley Coyote. Right, and I imagine beach house people comply because I think they probably love their sea turtles and they try to be generally good stewards of their area. Yeah, if there's anything people who own beach houses are known for, it's compliance. Should we take a break? Sure. All right, we'll be right back. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

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some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. So now we've reached the point where a lot of the humanists can start to get on board to this. Because artificial light at night, aka light pollution, has terrible effects on human beings

as well. Yeah. So I mean, obviously some of the stuff is just getting worse sleep and what that does to your body as far as anxiety and stress and headaches and migraines and things like that. But I know you dug up some interesting stuff on cancer even, right? Right. Yes. So that blue wavelength LED light has been linked to something called global DNA methylation. And methylation, do you remember way back in our episode on can your grandfather's diet change your, like, yeah, something? Uh-huh. And it was about epigenetics. Yeah. Well, DNA methylation is how epigenetics happens. It's where a methyl group is put onto a gene to turn it on or off. And what they found is that this is a huge trigger for things like

diabetes, type two diabetes, I should say, cancer, specifically breast cancer, as far as light's concerned, and that this DNA methylation can be triggered in turn by exposure to artificial blue wavelength light at night. It messes with our circadian rhythm. And that's one of the ways our bodies respond to it. So it is not an exaggeration to say that being exposed to blue wavelength light at night can trigger cancer in your body or potentially type two diabetes or a whole host of chronic conditions. Yeah. I mean, it's such a problem that the AMA, I think, in 2016, officially issued guidance on limiting the impact of LED outdoor lighting systems. And when the AMA is officially weighing in on something, that means it's got sufficient

evidence to do so. It's not saying, this is sort of annoying to your neighbors. It's saying this is legitimately impacting the health of people. Yeah. And it's definitely been linked to breast cancer, at least. But from what I was reading, the fact that it's been now shown to trigger DNA methylation suggests that there's a whole bunch of other terrible things that could happen as a result. So, steer clear. Seriously, if you have an iPhone, just go into your settings. I think it's oh, what's it called, Chuck? It's like nighttime or something like that. Sweet, sweepy time. It's in your display settings where you'll find brightness and all that. Yeah. And it's like night shift, I think, or something like that. And just turn that on. Just do sunset to

sunrise. Night shift. Night shift. Thank you. Yep. And you will be much the better for it. And I think there's apps also you can add on to your Android phone too. You don't have to have an iPhone. And you can probably do the same thing to your computer as well. Yeah, night shift. I had mine on. I didn't even realize it. Good for you, Jack. So, and I love how Livia put this, that the good news about fighting light pollution, she says, is there's a lot of low hanging fruit. Yeah. It really is kind of that easy. There are so many things that individuals can do on their own properties. The IDA estimates that 30% of outdoor lighting in the US is wasted. So, you know, a lot of this lighting that people have isn't even doing the thing that it's supposed to be

doing if 30% of it is wasted. And it's a financial loss too. About $3.3 billion annually and 21 million tons of CO2 emissions. And this is just from wasted light, not from just having lights. Right, exactly. So, like I was saying before, like it goes hand in hand talking about light pollution and mitigating it. It goes hand in hand with keeping people from wasting electricity too. And some of that low hanging fruit, like this is stuff you can do on an individual basis. And then, if you really get into this and you really want to make a difference, you can like teach yourself and arm yourself through kind of outreach that the IDA has to go educate your city and get your city to put in different kinds of street lights that shield from light pollution so that you do

have to like go stand underneath it to get that glare. And so, there isn't light trespass and there's less sky glow. There's a lot of things that you can do. So, a lot of things you can do on the local level. But one of the big ones is just like stop and think like, do I really need light in this area? Like, does there need to be some blaring like blue LED street light on my shed that I don't even have anything in? Is it really like needed? And that raises a big question, Chuck. Like, a lot of people are saying like, well, what about crime? That's why we light the night, is to prevent crime. And there's plenty of studies that say, yeah, if you add some artificial light, it'll reduce crime. But there's apparently an equal amount of studies that say actually,

not only does that not have an impact on lowering crime, in some cases it actually increases some kinds of crime. Like if you want to make sure that the side of your school building is really well lit for graffiti artists at night, you should make sure that you have all sorts of artificial lighting. Some studies make the case that it's easier to size up a person for whether they're a target by a criminal in a really well lit place. And vice versa, in the dark your eyes are more acclimated to seeing things in the dark like a criminal who might be waiting up ahead for you. Yeah, like, I mean, think about it, if you're on a really well lit pathway, the nearby shadows are really, really dark. And that's where these people could be, you know, not to be too,

you know, fear-mongering. Sure. But that's where they're laying in wait for you. Right. But that's true, like big light creates big shadow and darkness nearby. And, you know, when they do studies, they do show that is reduction in crime. But when you look at like the overall number, like it reduces crime at night, but the overall number of crimes is a much less percentage. I think 30% reduction at night in a place like New York. Whereas if you take a whole day, it's about 4% overall, which means most of the crimes are committed during the day. You think of nighttime as being more scary, but more crime is committed during the day. Right. And also when you're considering whether you need a light or not, like one that I saw,

Chuck, was like, do you need to leave your like back porch light on? And normally when you leave a light on, it's to do two things. It's to deter somebody. But in that case, you might actually be making it easier for the criminal to see their way into breaking into your house. Right. And then secondly, the other reason you would do it is to expose those people, to provide witnesses. Well, who's watching the back of your house at night? Probably no one. And in fact, if you don't have that light there, you may force the criminal to use a flashlight, which is going to be even more suspicious than somebody standing at your back door. Or you might use a motion detection light, which is from what I've seen the optimal thing to do

if you're worried about security, but also concerned about light pollution. Yeah. Cause then they walk back there in the dark and then boom, boom, hit him with the spotlight. And if you, you know, if you have the security cameras at your house, those things work really well in the dark these days. Sure. So if security is your issue, there are ways to get around that, that's not like lighting up your house like a prison yard. Right. What else? That's all I have to say. That's it? I got nothing else. I don't think I do either actually. So that's it for artificial light at night, Alan, aka light pollution. Hopefully this has opened your eyes a little bit to it,

but not so much that you're blinded by the glare, you know? Right. And since we front loaded listener mail, we'll just use this and say spread the word about stuff you should know here in your 14. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Yes. Not just basically. Yes. Like next month we'll be in your 14 and we don't talk a lot about trying to grow the show, which we should probably do more. So tell a friend, tell a neighbor, tell a colleague about stuff you should know and introduce them to the podcast. And it really helps us continue to do what we do. Yeah. And that's just a podcast. Chuck, we have a book, a New York Times bestseller. We do in fact. We have a trivial pursuit game.

That's right. It'll hopefully be on store shelves again soon. Yeah. And what else? We sell tufts of our hair. Sure. I got a lot of hair right now. I can send out tufts. Oh, we can make some money with that. You got to cut me in, okay? All right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us and try to purchase some of Chuck's hair, you can email me at stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite

shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.