It’s fitting that this, my last blog of 2020, is about blogs. The top three blogs of the year, that is, by the number of visits they earned from readers. If you’ve been following our other “top of 2020” coverage, you know that this was the year of ultraviolet (UV) light - not only in our lighting for health & wellbeing channel content, as I wrote last week, but also in our annual review of the top articles of the year across the entire LEDs Magazine website. Let’s take a look back at what readers browsed most in blogs.
1. Can disinfection be a shot in the arm to improve LED market health?
As I wrote early on in the year, before we learned that the novel coronavirus would be labeled a global pandemic by the World Health Organization, the ability of specific UV wavelengths to eradicate or deactivate pathogens is not a new discovery – but it is one that has been slow to emerge into LED-based end products due to efficacy concerns and questions about dosage, not to mention how to maintain safety in novel designs that have yet to catch on commercially. But I also noted that ubiquitous disinfection capabilities would be a boon to public health as UV LED challenges are tackled and the technology continues to come down in cost. In the meantime, traditional sources for UV germicidal disinfection (UVGI) captured plenty of attention, as you can see in our annual top articles review linked above.
2. Horticultural SSL market explodes, driven by cannabis greenrush
Chief editor Maury Wright officially plugged into the “greenrush” term coined to describe the fast-paced entry of many new participants in the legalized cannabis industry. As Maury noted, the number of companies manufacturing and/or specifying solid-state lighting (SSL) technology for cannabis grow, vertical farming, and indoor greenhouse supplemental lighting has grown considerably over the past couple of years since we began covering horticultural lighting in more depth and more often. He also observed that while any new technology tends to go through a rising and falling cycle, the peak hasn’t been hit yet and more opportunity in various horticultural scenarios awaits.
3. Circadian lighting gets front and center
I’m always gratified when more time-sensitive blogs get attention, but even more so when the messaging still applies even after an event or conference that’s referenced therein. January’s blog about the circadian lighting panels at the 2020 Strategies in Light conference made it to the third spot on our blog list, and participants including Mark Rea of the Lighting Research Center and Erik Swenson of Nichia provided some excellent viewpoints about the status of how to quantify circadian lighting impact, informing standards and bringing clarity to research efforts in commercializing products that can positively affect human health and wellbeing.
I’m looking forward to what new developments and questions will arise in 2021 so we can explore them together. See you next year.
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