It’s hard to imagine a life without electric lighting: we’d be in the dark, and probably inactive and unproductive, for about half the day. But would we be healthier without it?
A University of Colorado Boulder research team set out to quantify the effects of electric lighting, which became widely available in the 1930s. They monitored eight participants – six men and two women with an average age of 30 – for one week as they went about their normal lives, and a second week as they camped in Colorado’s Eagles Nest Wilderness.