And here’s your pop-science news story of the day, from the Courant:
Women who live in neighborhoods with large amounts of nighttime illumination are more likely to get breast cancer than those who live in areas where nocturnal darkness prevails, according to an unusual study that overlaid satellite images of Earth onto cancer registries.[...]
In the study, reported in this week’s online issue of the journal Chronobiology International, researchers found the breast cancer rate in localities with average night lighting to be 37 percent higher than in communities with the lowest amount of light; and they noted that the rate was higher by an additional 27 percent in areas with the highest amount of light.
Apparently the relationship between ambient light in the environment and cancer rates has been known about for a while, through other means. The theory is that exposure to certain frequencies of light may impact melatonin production, and that somehow is linked to risk of developing cancer.
However, the use of a mashup to test existing theories seems kind of cool, in a Web 2.0 kind of way.
