After street lights in an entire county were swapped to LEDs, light pollution got worse
"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry"—this famous paraphrase of Scottish poet Robert Burns sometimes sums up human ingenuity. That is exactly what happened when a county in Washington State decided to replace all of its county-owned streetlights with LEDs, at least partially in an effort to combat light pollution. New research shows that they actually made the light pollution worse.