![]() ![]() Glenn Rogers filed a bill this Texas legislative session that would allow Texans to vote on whether they want to adopt standard time or daylight saving time during the general election later this year. It takes an act of Congress to change time zones, which doesn’t happen often. He said every community west of I-35 in Texas, about two-thirds of the state, would better align with the Mountain Time zone. Gentry suggests delaying the start of the business and school day to after 8:30 a.m. Johnson and Gentry have both pitched time policy options that could benefit health and safety. “This goes along with hundreds of studies we have on the relationship between sleep, circadian rhythms and mood disorders.” “Morning light is the good kind of light,” Johnson said. The group, along with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, believes switching to Permanent Standard Time could help people get the right duration of sleep, which improves cognition, mood, cardiovascular health and overall well-being. Johnson works with the organization Save Standard Time, which advocates for Permanent Standard Time. Karin Johnson said Gentry’s research aligns with what others have found in the correlation between sunlight and health. The Pacific zone better matches the sun - and the analyzed data found that roads in that time zone are some of the safest in the country. The researchers found this trend in the Eastern, Central, and Mountain Time zones, but not Pacific Time. The data suggests living in the wrong time zone may impact Texas most of all. It’s worse in Amarillo, where the death rate skews 92% higher. By comparison, Lubbock has a 13% higher vehicle-fatality rate than the national average. Here’s an example: El Paso is in the Mountain Time zone and experiences a lower rate of fatal crashes. Across the country, they found higher crash fatality rates in places where social time doesn’t align with solar time. Researchers analyzed 12 years of county-level fatality data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Our study adds highway fatalities to the list of problems associated with artificial time,” he said. Gentry’s study, which was conducted with the help of Jayson Evaniuck and Ivana Mali also from ENMU and Thanchira Suriyamongkol from Southern Illinois University, found another impact. As he dug into the topic, he found research shows correlations between how you experience time and health conditions like diabetes and dementia, among others. Gentry is a communications professor at ENMU, so this science was new to him. ![]() “I had no idea there is an entire branch of biology called chronobiology.”Ĭhronobiology studies the effects of time on living systems. “Is there a way to judge whether the sun has anything to do with how we feel in the morning, and our alertness?” Gentry asked. I just thought, ‘Wow, it’s a lot easier to get up in the morning,’” Gentry said. Researcher Jeff Gentry says he first felt the effects of what are called misaligned time zones when he moved from Western Oklahoma, which observes Central Time, to Mountain Time in New Mexico. In many of the areas where this time zone is used, during fall to winter months Central Standard Time is observed, and then during Daylight Saving (spring to summer months) Central Daylight Time or CDT is used.Do you feel like you’ve adjusted to daylight saving time yet? Having a later sunset may be nice, but recent research from Eastern New Mexico University suggests traffic fatality rates are higher in places where people don’t wake up with the sun. Heure Normale du Centre or HNC (in French) Tiempo Central Estándar or CST (in Spanish) North American Central Standard Time or NACST states, as well as several Canadian provinces and Central American countries.ĭepending on where the time zone is being referenced, it may be called one of these additional names: Territories observing the time zone are primarily in North and Central America. That means to find the standard time in the zone you must subtract six hours from Coordinated Universal Time. Central Standard Time is six hours behind the Coordinated Universal Time standard, written as an offset of UTC - 6:00. ![]()
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