As the weather gets colder, we start wearing jackets, and most of us stop thinking about the sun. But the sun’s rays can be just as harmful when it’s cold and cloudy outside. “Any exposed area of your body can still get sunburned,” Dr. Apple Bodemer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science.

Whether you spend a day on the slopes, skating on a pond or clearing snow out of your driveway, your face is still getting exposed to the sun’s radiation in the form of ultraviolet (紫外线) (UV) light, which can go deep into your skin cells causing DNA damage, according to Bodemer.

The sun’s long ultraviolet A (UVA) waves can cause earlier aging, sunspots and wrinkles, while its short ultraviolet B (UVB) rays are known for causing skin reddening and burns.

Skin damage caused by UV exposure increases over time. More exposure to radiation contributes to more severe damage, even skin cancer. In addition, snow and ice can also make sun damage worse. They reflect up to 80 percent of UV rays reaching the ground. That means you get hit from both the sky and the ground. And skiers and snowboarders increase their risk of getting sunburned even more because UV exposure increases at higher altitudes.

“Generally, the biggest factor for sun-sensitivity is how pale your skin is,” he said. “But, the reality is that even the darkest individual can get sun damage.”

Luckily, the solution for protecting your skin is simple: Wear sunscreen every day. Rigel recommended using sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of at least 30, and going higher at high altitudes. As a rule of thumb, SPF 30 will block 97 percent of UVB rays, SPF 50 blocking 98 percent, and SPF 100 blocking 99 percent. Whatever kind of sunscreen you use, it’s important to apply SPF about once every 2 hours.

Rigel also suggested sunscreens with “broad spectrum (光谱)”—to protect against both UVB and UVA rays—as well as sunscreens that are water resistant for up to 80 minutes. That way, you can go about your day without it wearing off too quickly.

Large oceangoing vessels like oil tankers and cruise ships produce noise that travels long distances underwater. That audio pollution can disturb the sounds that marine mammals, fish and other animals use to communicate.

Emily Carter, a sensory ecologist from University of Exeter wondered whether ship noise might also be harmful to animals that don’t rely on sound for communication. For example, young shore crabs that use camouflage (伪装) to hide from predators. “So they can actually change their color to match whatever it is that they’re sitting on, basically to make it harder for predators to find them.” Carter explained.

She suspected that stress from ship noise might affect the change process. To find out, she and her colleagues collected shore crabs with dark shells and brought them back to the lab. They placed the crabs in tanks full of white small stones. An underwater speaker in each tank played quiet natural sounds at all times. One group of crabs also heard loud natural sounds every hour. But another group was subjected to hourly recordings of large ships.

Carter says shorebirds, which eat the crabs, can see UV light, so she used ultraviolet (紫外线) photography to determine how well the crabs blended into their new habitat over time.

“Through the eyes of a shorebird — so through bird’s perspective — were they camouflaged? Weren’t they camouflaged? How obvious would they be?”

After eight weeks, the crabs that heard only natural sounds had become much lighter and were well camouflaged. But the ones that were exposed to the ship noise didn’t change color as much. And then, as a result, they weren’t as camouflaged at the end of the experiment. So they’d be much more manifest to predator.

Carter says the stress caused by ship noise may affect hormones that regulate color change in crabs or destroy the energy needed to make the change efficiently. The research not only puts a spotlight on the unintended consequences of noise pollution, but is a reminder that too much stress isn’t just bad for people — it can also be deadly to wildlife that needs some peace and quiet.