5 Things to Know:  September 19

As reported by NewsChannel 5 Nashville, the Tennessee State Capitol Commission has rewritten its rules for lighting the building's cupola, a shift triggered by a single, sentimental request: turning the dome pink for Dolly Parton.

Under the revised policy, the governor, the speaker of the House, and the speaker of the Senate can now jointly approve special colored lighting without convening the full commission for a vote.

The change reverses ground the commission had staked out earlier this year, when it moved to keep the cupola lit white rather than opening it to color changes for various causes and occasions. That white-only stance did not survive contact with Parton's popularity. Legislative leaders and the governor requested the pink illumination last month, the commission accommodated it, and the policy followed suit rather than the other way around.

A second Parton tribute is already scheduled: the cupola will glow pink again on September 25 to mark "Nine to Five Day," timed to her hit song and film. For lighting people watching statehouse fixtures nationally, it is a reminder that public policy committees bend fastest for beloved icons.

Disney's World Celebration Gardens, the plaza built behind Spaceship Earth as part of EPCOT's multi-year overhaul, has spent nearly three years fighting its own centerpiece lighting system. As reported by Inside the Magic, the programmable in-ground fixtures embedded in the walkways began malfunctioning almost immediately after opening in December 2023, with sections going dark or failing to sync with Spaceship Earth's nighttime effects. Protective covers over the lights warped and lifted next, creating a tripping hazard along high-traffic paths.

By mid-2025, maintenance crews were fastening the strips down with visible screws. This past August, Disney pulled the lighting entirely from portions of the plaza and began filling the empty channels with concrete, but photographs from September show exposed trenches still remain in parts of the walkway. Disney has not said whether the lighting concept is permanently dead or might return in another form.

As reported by HortiDaily, Hortilux Schréder, the Dutch company that develops and sells lighting installations for greenhouse horticulture and vertical farming, has been declared bankrupt. The company was granted a suspension of payments on September 10, which the court converted to bankruptcy at the request of the court-appointed administrator, now serving as trustee.

The bankruptcy also covers parent and sister companies Dool Industries, Dool Industries Holding, Agrilight, Lights Interaction Agro, and AP Nederland, the last of which manufactures Agrilight-branded lighting for cattle and poultry housing alongside electrical control cabinets. Several parties have already expressed concrete interest in restarting parts of the business, and the trustee says he's hopeful for a positive outcome within a few weeks. Hortilux had been showing financial strain for some time, having withdrawn abruptly from planned trade show participation earlier this year. The company employs 24 people.

It was an unusually busy week for airport lighting news, with three unrelated incidents landing within days of each other.

1. In New Haven, NBC Connecticut reported that a portion of Tweed-New Haven Airport's airfield lighting system failed Monday night, closing the runway and diverting seven Avelo Airlines flights to Bradley International, with one continuing on to Albany. Technicians restored the lighting by midday Tuesday; officials are still investigating whether Sunday's flash flooding was the cause.
2. In Minnesota, MPR News reported that MSP Airport closed Runway 17-35 for six weeks to replace its electrical system, swapping halogen fixtures for LED across 436 runway lights and 617 taxiway lights, cutting runway light wattage from 120 to 50 watts. It's the final phase of a multi-year, four-runway LED conversion begun in 2019.
3. In Ohio, WFMJ reported that Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport received a $1.71 million JobsOhio grant for runway resurfacing and airfield lighting upgrades meant to improve inclement-weather visibility.

Interest in infrared spectral exposure has been building steadily in lighting science circles, and our own numbers back it up: a recent Inside Lighting piece on the topic, drawing on research from Oregon Health & Science University questioning whether LED sources shortchange the body on red and near-infrared content, became arguably our most-read lighting science article of the year.

Glazing, the engineered glass used in windows and building facades, not a floor finish, is moving in the opposite direction. A new review in Communications Materials tracks smart windows evolving toward dual- and multi-band systems that deliberately suppress near-infrared transmittance, the same band researchers now flag as depleted indoors, specifically to cut solar heat gain. Occupant exposure isn't a design variable anywhere in the window engineering surveyed; it's purely an HVAC and energy-payback calculation.

Neither body of research cites the other, and neither claims a proven problem. But for lighting people, the direction is worth watching: as windows get better at filtering infrared out of daylight for efficiency reasons, medicine is just starting to ask what removing that band indoors might actually cost occupants.