Swirly things everywhere.

Association between sunshine and suicide examined in study

Lower rates of suicide are associated with more daily sunshine in the prior 14 to 60 days.

Light interacts with brain serotonin systems and possibly influences serotonin-related behaviors. Those behaviors, such as mood and impulsiveness, can play a role in suicide.

The authors examined the relationship between suicide and the duration of sunshine after mathematically removing seasonal variations in sunshine and suicide numbers. They analyzed data on 69,462 officially confirmed suicides in Austria between January 1970 and May 2010. Hours of sunshine per day were calculated from 86 representative meteorological stations.

There was a positive correlation between the number of suicides and hours of daily sunshine on the day of the suicide and up to 10 days before that seemed to facilitate suicide, while sunshine 14 to 60 days prior appeared to have a negative correlation and was associated with reduced suicides. The correlation between daily sunshine hours and suicide rates was seen largely among women, while negative correlations between the two were mainly found among men.

"Owing to the correlative nature of the data, it is impossible to directly attribute the increase in suicide to sunshine during the 10 days prior to the suicide event. … Further research is warranted to determine which patients with severe episodes of depression are more susceptible to the suicide-triggering effects of sunshine."

If you woke up tomorrow, and your internet looked like this, what would you do? 

Imagine all your favorite websites taking forever to load, while you get annoying notifications from your ISP suggesting you switch to one of their approved “Fast Lane” sites.

Think about what we would lose: all the weird, alternative, interesting, and enlightening stuff that makes the Internet so much cooler than mainstream Cable TV. What if the only news sites you could reliably connect to were the ones that had deals with companies like Comcast and Verizon?

On September 10th, just a few days before the FCC’s comment deadline, public interest organizations are issuing an open, international call for websites and internet users to unite for an “Internet Slowdown” to show the world what the web would be like if Team Cable gets their way and trashes net neutrality. Net neutrality is hard to explain, so our hope is that this action will help SHOW the world what’s really at stake if we lose the open Internet.

If you’ve got a website, blog or tumblr, get the code to join the #InternetSlowdown here: https://battleforthenet.com/sept10th

Case

Any

Of

You

Have

Doubts

About

This

Fact

The Stanford prison guard experiment done by Philip G. Zimbardo is one of the most well known psychology classics. The experiment is critiqued on ethical grounds because the participants suffered emotional and even physical abuse but it still is extremely insightful and important.