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People are spending every waking hour looking at screens up close and our eyes are adjusting.

This isn't new, nor is it surprising. Many optometrists know this.

Insufficient exposure to bright light is the most accepted explanation, not time spent focusing up close. 90% of Asian schoolchildren are shortsighted.
I think there might be some cause and effect there... how often do you look at a screen in bright light?
You know, I really wish PixelQI took off, I would kill for a 12" ThinkPad that I could actually use outdoors.
Um, unsurprisingly, they thought of that

> Rose's team tried to eliminate any other explanations for this link — for example, that children outdoors were engaged in more physical activity and that this was having the beneficial effect. But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less time with books, screens and close work. “We had these children who were doing both activities at very high levels and they didn't become myopic,” says Rose. Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to matter most was the eye's exposure to bright light.

http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120

The evidence is far from overwhelming, but the data is a lot more useful than your layman intuition...

Calm down fancy pants. I'm sorry I was responding to the information in the article rather than going out and doing more research.
This is a topical click bait tittie for Wired.

Researchers and medical community already are reaching consensus on the why. Being the leading theory a deficiency in the sphericity of the ocular globe due to a lack of a growth hormone that ought gets triggered correctly if you have enough exposition to sun light while growing up.

Up until just very recently everything we viewed was reflected light, now we are bombarding our eyes with light shining directly into our eyes, TV, Computer screens, phone screens.

It's impacting our vision, and I think it's playing a role in concussion issues.

Nobody knows why? I don't believe that. I can tell you why. Because they keep looking and focusing on their computer monitors, their laptop screens, their tablets, and their phones, and rarely look up. For hours, for weeks, for months, for years. For kids who are still developing, surely this will be an issue. People playing computer games that create effects that their eyes would normally do; blur effects, dust effects, light effects... Prolonged usage is confusing their eyes - Eyes trying to unblur a blurred screen. Eyes trying to look deep into the distance, but in truth they are focusing on a screen 12 inches away... When's the last time these people 'losing distance vision' got outside and looked around?
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