It seems unlikely. It's just radio waves. Non-ionizing radiation. How have we all not been cooked by every other source of radio waves, many much more powerful than a cell phone, if this is so terrible?
I had to scroll for a while to get past the politics or explanations of how the radiation is produced. Here's the only explanation I could find of what "harmful" entails:
> Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, opening up calcium channels, for example, and allowing calcium to flow into the cell and into the mitochondria within the cell, interfering with our natural cellular processes and leading to the creation of stress proteins and free radicals and, possibly, DNA damage. And, in other cases, it may lead to cell death.
The concern is not the power. Look: maybe it's baseless. Misrepresenting the claims and calling them "mumbojumbo" isn't a good way of determining that.
Define any of the above, and point to a reputable source when any of the above phrases are used. It's a collection of phrases which are all "off", like a foreign person with broken english.
And there were a few others not quoted. But just because a crank is saying something, that doesn't mean it's wrong; this person seems inclined to complain about phones causing cancer independently of whether it's true, so his view shouldn't really affect what you think either way.
I doubt he's right, but I'm not confident enough to laugh at him. Even relatively low-intensity radio waves affect neurons, so it's not like they have no effect on the body.
RE: #2 It's not about any single word, it's about the use of words together. ex. "modulation of wireless devices" is not just modulation, what does the phrase as a whole mean and what is it's actual relevance to the matter at hand? In this specific case why would they not cite references for that claim?
Free radicals: It's very difficult to create free radicals with photons that has less energy than UV rays. And the photons of cell phones has a few order of magnitude less energy. The term is well defined, but it's almost impossible that it's relevant.
Stress hormone: Your link is about hormones produced by glands, and in the sentence it looks like some modification of each cell. Again, the term is well defined, but I'm not sure they are talking about the same thing, and it's not very probable that it's relevant.
The concern isn't the power now, after people point out that your cell phone is emitting less power than a single christmas tree light. Power absolutely was the concern, it was beaming energy right into your brain! Boiling your precious fluids! But power was shot down, so now it's not the power, it's the modulation!
Except the Sun generates a tremendous mish-mash of modulated EM radiation, so "modulation" is also a nonsense argument.
The problem is, the sun is more powerful, but the wavelength of the visible/UV light means it can't get past our skin. Radio waves obviously can penetrate much farther and get to the areas that you would want to be concerned about.
I'm not sure about the specifics, but the sun is a blackbody radiator. As visible light is orders of magnitude higher frequency than regular radio waves (say, AWS which uses 1.9/2GHz), the amount of radio-level RF emitted by the sun isn't as high as you'd think. Also, if it did emit high enough levels of RF, we wouldn't be able to use any radios here in earth because the SNR could never be high enough.
The sun is a blackbody radiator and does exactly what you think. However, RF from the sun basically only arrives at exactly one angle from the sky (or not at all, if it is night time). It does exactly what you describe, degrading SNR from signals in the same direction to the point of uselessness. If you've ever used satellite based services like television then you've probably experienced it. There is a long explanation here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-03-20/how-can-the-s...
> The period in which the Sun passes behind a geostationary satellite is brief — about 10 minutes at most according to Dr Carter — but the noise is enough to degrade or completely disrupt radio and television broadcasts, as well as satellite internet.
I would have thought the signals from the sun would bounce around on ground terrain, making things like WiFi useless. Does this also mean I should try to shield my outdoor wireless devices from sunlight?
>Radio waves obviously can penetrate much farther and get to the areas that you would want to be concerned about.
Is this correct? I'm not much more than a layman in physics, but I thought RF, being below the visible spectrum, is non-ionizing thus unable to cause any cell damage.
Edit: Besides from microwaves or similar oscillating fields.
Anything can cause damage if it is intense enough (intensity is a separate quantity from photon energy). You do not want to put your hand into a microwave oven. But a cellphone's level of radiant intensity is absolutely harmless.
I am no expert here, but there seem to be many pathways for damage other than ionization. The mention of calcium channels etc. shows a concern for unexpected triggering of normal cellular functions rather than direct molecular damage.
Remember that cells are stateful biochemical machines, so it's not just instantaneous damage from radiation as the only possible pathway. If the authors are right and the cells are in some way receptive to the modulated emissions, some bio-structures might be like antenna and demodulators, stimulating the cells at many lower frequency scales. An analogy here could be a crystal radio which demodulates AM broadcasts into an audible frequency, or the way old GSM call negotiation patterns would induce an audible pattern in computer speakers.
I know you might say this is vastly different scales of energy between whole body vibration from an industrial job and emissions from a battery-powered cell phone. My observation is merely that there are many ways that we might naively think that our bodies are robust, while with repeated exposure to seemingly harmless conditions, subtle damage accumulates.
Yes. Otherwise a microwave oven would just sear stuff. Radio frequency penetrates meat. It doesn't do it well, because meat has high impedance, but it does penetrate.
Disclaimer: I don't believe cell phones are causing cancer; there just isn't enough power involved. It's all bunk.
It's non-ionising, thus unable to liberate electrons from their atoms. It can still do stuff like heat water up (though low-power signals have correspondingly low heating power) or communicate with electronics (e.g. firmware update your smartwatch to short the battery), though, so it's not unconditionally safe.
I'm sceptical that low levels of non-ionising radiation can do damage, but it's not physically impossible. (I know of no biological mechanism by which it could cause harm, but I'm no biologist.)
a) individual rays/particles have enough energy to knock electrons off ("ionizing radiation"). This is dependent on wavelength/frequency, not the amount of radiation, so even small amounts can be possibly problematic.
b) quantity of radiation brings enough energy to heat things up, cause damage through heating.
The reason that cellphones operate on sunny days is modulation matters — me posting this on a cellphone while sitting in sunshine makes your point wrong.
> Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, ...
The exact argument is you can’t compare the strength of signals alone when considering bio activity — just like strength alone doesn’t determine if a cellphone signal can be heard.
Well this can be easily measured empirically.
Oxidative stress, byproducts, biomarkers and damages are trivial to identify so no one care to do the study or what?
This isn't vampires. If there's a biological effect, it'll be visible even if someone attempts to induce it in an “impure” individual – unless you claim there's a one-shot permanent harmful effect that everybody in the world now has, that we've completely failed to notice.
I'm saying it will be extremely difficult to find human candidates that haven't been constantly exposed to man made pulsed emf fields that could serve as a control. So how do you study this now without controls?
EM fields are constantly modulated in nature with each slightly different medium they pass through. A rainbow for example is basically an EM modulation.
Are they really claiming that cell-phone radiation is dangerous because it's like rainbows?
Nobody questions the negative effects of ionizing radiation. The issue in question is the influence of non-ionizing radiation beyond short-term thermal effects.
I'm not a fan of the cell phone EM theories necessarily, but both of the reasons you gave aren't sound. First off, physicists will not be the ones conducting studies about the biological impact of EM waves. That is the wrong department. Secondly, an overall decline could be compatible with dangerous phone rays if there is a larger effect going on in the opposite direction, for example the decreasing environmental concentrations of carcinogens which were discovered and banned recently.
> these findings never come from physicists or engineers working on wireless technologies
It's not hard to believe that there's pressure from the telecom industry to not find out these kinds of things. However, it seems quite feasible for a lab today to rigorously measure the effect of cellphone radiation on voltage-gated calcium channels to verify these claims.
>these findings never come from physicists or engineers working on wireless technologies
nor would I expect them to. if we are talking about cell damage, i'm not wanting to hear from an electrical engineer. i want to hear from a medical professional specializing in cellular activity. a cancer doctor, some sort of micro biologist, or something in that realm would be much more credible when discussing the damage of cells due to whatever cause.
Show me studies where these doctors are working with physicists to setup the RF in controlled environments to study the effects of the radio waves on cellular activity, then I'll be much more interested. There's just too much fringe people pushing this that my natrual inclinations is to not believe it. However, that's not to say that I am unwilling to change my mind if shown actual evidence versus what's there now. I'm just saying I haven't seen any.
A simple Ames test study I found after doing quick googling: https://journals.lww.com/eurjcancerprev/Abstract/2005/04000/.... No real mutagenic effect. Granted this does not exclude the ability for it to be carcinogenic in another manner, but I would doubt such a result.
Edit: some additional thoughts. There is a controversial treatment using EMF to treat glial blastomas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_electric_field_the...), the proposed mechanism is that it interrupts mitosis. This method is unlike the one put forward by Dr. Moskowitz which relies on an increase in necrosis/apoptosis.
More importantly, most 911 emergency calls (and subsequent saved lives) are now done on cell phones presumably in situations where there are no land lines. This increase in saved lives massively outweights any tiny effects from RF.
This is tangential to the subject discussed. I don't think it's about banning wireless technologies but rather more responsible use - if the negative influence actually exists, and if it's significant enough.
> After reading many animal toxicology studies that found that this radiation could increase oxidative stress — free radicals, stress proteins and DNA damage
Not knowing enough about chemistry, I could imagine the radiation being able to affect some of the weaker bonds in certain chemicals, breaking them, and creating more energetic new compounds. This could be damaging to among other things, DNA.
I know the photo-voltaic effect means there is a certain threshold frequency needed to be able to affect such bonds. I have no idea whether there are any chemical bonds that can be affected by say 5.8Ghz radiation. (Highest frequency non 5G phones should be emitting)
> I could imagine the radiation being able to affect some of the weaker bonds in certain chemicals, breaking them,
Nope. Unless those bonds could break due to localised heating, that's not going to happen. Radio waves have lower per-photon energies than are required to break bonds (except really really weak ones, but those can barely be called bonds in the first place).
Not really. Ionizing radiation can knock electrons out of atoms. This sounds like knocking atoms out of molecules. But the wavelength these radio waves is several cm, so it's dubious that they would affect individual atoms, or even individual cells.
> In a recent opinion piece for Scientific American, Joel M. Moskowitz warned of the ostensible dangers of radio-frequency (RF) radiation, stating bluntly that 5G technology could be dangerous, causing cancers and untold harm. Moskowitz concluded by insisting readers join his fellow activists petitioning against the new technology. His piece has resonated with the anti-5G movement, generating heated discussion online—but, alas, it is one that pivots on fringe views and fatally flawed conjecture, attempting to circumvent scientific consensus with scaremongering.
It also ignores that each successive generation of wireless is lower power than the last, so the will be more antennas, but operating at much lower power, for a lower effective dose.
This implies lower effective dose per antenna, correct? Meaning it's conceivable to have a higher effective dose per person if there is a high enough increase in antenna exposure (wherever that antenna count threshold is)?
I'm not saying that means it's dangerous, just trying to clarify.
No, lower total dose, assuming other things stay the same, which they don't. Notably, your total traffic increases as your capacity does, and 5G has much higher total capacity than EDGE did.
If you assume that people use their 5G phones to transmit a terabyte per month because the speed is so convenient, while they used their EDGE phones for a kilobyte per month, that'a a higher total load, so you can reasonably say that 5G involves higher radiation. Or you can compare for the same transmission, and find that it's lower.
You may also assume that the damage done isn't linear with the transmission power or operating frequency, which complicates matters even more. But generally, 5G uses less power to do the same work than 4G, which in turn uses less… because in each new generation, there's a little better error correction and 64QAM is replaced by 128QAM or so, and so they reduce transmission power a little until the reduced power is again just enough for the better error correction and denser codec.
IMO, a lot of this comes down to "doing things is more dangerous than not", which is nearly always true. Sports may keep you fit but your risk of breaking a leg is higher than if you were sitting in front of a TV. Transmitting data is riskier than not. But also more useful, because not watching youtube in HD is clearly useless, while watching them is worth some risk.
5G the tiniest bit lower, because the error correction is a tiny bit better, so the receiver can tell the transmitter to adjust the volume a little bit, assuming the same distance/path.
Or the same if you want to compare early 5G with late 4G, because this is really the same thing. They deploy improvements all the time, and after some number of improvements they rename.
We did, it doesn't help that's the exact same article at a different URL. Their canonical headers each point to themselves too.. which, you know, defeats the purpose (presumably search engines suitably penalize one as a spam farm?) (Edit) Another copy here: https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/moskowitz-cellphone-rad...
> Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.
So less dangerous than bacon, then, and only if you appropriately exclude studies in the same manner that they did.
Just the 60% increase is obviously false. We've had cell phones for decades, and plenty are using them more than 17 minutes a day, so we should see that 60% increase in brain cancer... but we don't. In fact we've seen a steady decrease.
https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html
Maybe cell phones prevent brain cancer by exciting the immune system via whatever mechanism he proposes that it also "promotes the growth of drug-resistant pathogens" /s
>Millimeter waves can also harm insects and promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens
This gives me tinfoil-hat vibes to be honest. Why would millimeter waves specifically promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens? What's the overlap?
My guess would be conjecture that millimeter waves increase plasmid uptake/transformation above natural rates. I think this is unlikely given the feature sizes here and the energy typically required to ‘shock’ bacteria into plasmid uptake, but have not attempted to research.
Can someone educate me on this? I believed that cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation. I also believed that non-ionizing radiation doesn't cause chemical reactions. I also believed that generally chemical reactions would be required to have a negative effect on human biology.
I do understand there can be heating effects from non-ionizing radiation but the power levels seem really, really low, <2 watts. That seems like an amount of heat that can be easily dissipated.
This article says that I'm missing something. I'm wondering what that is.
Here is a decent overview with links to further reading: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/5g-is-coming/ The author is the host of a science-based skepticism podcast who I have come to trust to handle science and medicine topics well.
You're not missing anything. We already did a huge natural experiment with the analog phones of the 1980s. They put out a full watt of power, and headsets weren't so common so it was going straight into peoples brains. Then we switched to digital, which use 88% less power, at peak. There was no mass drop in brain cancer.
>I also believed that non-ionizing radiation doesn't cause chemical reactions. I also believed that generally chemical reactions would be required to have a negative effect on human biology.
These aren't true as a rule, but generally good as guidelines. Ionizing radiation gives way to widespread, molecule agnostic damage in molecular systems; it's powerful enough to pop pieces of molecules off. Ionizing energy is the equivalent of firing a light cannon to blow chunks off molecules; the damage is immediate, consistent, widespread and dangerous.
Non-ionizing radiation, by contrast, is absorbed selectively. A given wavelength will only be absorbed if it corresponds with the specific quantum of an excitation level of the target system. This means uptake of energy will be molecule specific; chromophores are examples of molecules specifically designed to take advantage of this; it's how we see.
Microwaves, for instance, are non-ionizing radiation. We know a surplus of microwave radiation can cook people through. It does this because microwaves are the right wavelength to vibrate the bonds in water. UV radiation is also considered non-ionizing, but DNA will absorb it, and the photochemical result of that absorption is the formation of Pyrimidine dimers (TT dimers). This direct damage to our genetic codes is the primary cause of skin cancer and is so dangerous that we have evolved an extensive set of molecular machines to excise and repair this specific problem.
So no, non-ionizing radiation is not uniformly safe and biologically inert. This isn't to say 5G is unsafe - remember things are wavelength and dose specific; it's just to say the reasoning "non ionizing never causes biological harm" is very wrong.
The best argument I can think of is "cells have sensors for EMF that lead to genetic expression changes, the results of which could lead to cancer" (there is plenty of ambiguous literature on how cellular response can increase the risk of cancer).
The argument "since cell phones don't emit non-ionizing radiation, they can't cause cancer" is simply incorrect.
There is an issue with definitions in this thread. Mutagens which cause mutations in nucleotides are always Carcinogens. But not all carcinogens are mutagens. Carcinogens may instead promote prooncogenic pathways within the cell. The mechanism proposed of RF inducing apoptosis seems a bit far fetched to me imo.
This article links to research that shows some of these claims are spurious:
“The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”
If I'm reading that report correctly, there's a gem in the report that basically says that the small studies confirm that RF causes cancer, but as you roll that out to larger cohort studies and entire-population studies, the effect disappears entirely. So we should dismiss the negative evidence of the large-group-size studies in favor of the small-group-size studies and conclude that RF causes cancer, it concludes.
That... kind of feels backwards. If the effect is real, it should show up more powerfully in larger studies, not smaller studies. Especially if you're crusading against purported broad environmental harm, the whole-environment studies seem the most relevant: even if some specific uses of cell phones may be harmful, that the way the average public uses it isn't one of those uses is important (that's one way to square the evidence, but I don't entirely believe it's the best way).
Wouldn’t that be super easy to measure? Just map cancer incidents alongside with cell phone antenna locations. If it isn’t that easy, the “correlation“ probably is also way less clear than the headline suggests.
I'm confused as to how millimeter wave can be first described as not being able to "travel very far, and they’re blocked by fog or rain, trees and building materials" and "largely absorbed in the skin" and them immediately after "this radiation may cause hypersensitivity and biochemical alterations in the immune and circulatory systems — the heart, the liver, kidneys and brain" - how is the radiation penetrating deep enough into the body to affect those organs?
We know that ionizing radiation has no safe upper limit.
We know that non-ionizing radiation can be harmful at a high enough dose (like sticking your hand in a microwave.)
This research suggests that non-ionizing radiation might not have a safe upper limit, either, only that we haven't totally quantified the damage it causes.
Note that this isn't research; it's an opinion piece that doesn't really cite anything, except vaguely. It's at least two levels removed from the research – it seems to be a summary of a meta-analysis.
The microwave causes harm by it's ability to heat water, not by the nature that it's a microwave, doesn't it? Wouldn't we also need to treat any source of heat as similarly dangerous given that it produces infrared radiation?
Wavelength matters - it's the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing. This article seems to indicate that not all of the non-ionizing radiation is harmless.
And heat itself is carcinogenic, yes -- drinking hot beverages is independently associated with a higher risk of mouth, throat, esophageal, and stomach cancer.
I thought this whole article was a joke parody based on its content. But it's on a .edu domain?
Among many sentences that made me chuckle, "Millimeter waves can ... promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens." What? How?
You don't have to tell me it's a bad idea to stand on top of an FM radio tower emitting kilowatts of RF energy in the VHF spectrum. That's gonna burn pretty bad.
But I'm going to need some more serious scientific analysis of how a <5W transmitter in my pocket or home is doing anything more serious than my yearly dental X-Ray's.
Plot twist: 5G is actually harmful to your health, but nobody believes it due to all of the harebrained conspiracies that have come to be associated with this stance.
I guess even if I believe everything here and we overstate a bit and say normal cell phone use increases your risk of developing brain cancer by 2x. That's about half the extra mortality you get from driving a car. I'm glad this reasearch is being done but it seem that even if this overstate case is true it's well within the levels of risk people take on every day without second thought. I'm skeptical but curious to see how this bears out over the coming decades.
> What are some simple things that each of us can do to reduce the risk of harm from radiation from cellphones and other wireless devices?
> First, minimize your use of cellphones or cordless phones — use a landline whenever possible. If you do use a cellphone, turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you’re not using them. However, when near a Wi-Fi router, you would be better off using your cellphone on Wi-Fi and turning off the cellular because this will likely result in less radiation exposure than using the cellular network.
> Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure. So, keep your phone away from your head and body. Store your phone in a purse or backpack. If you have to put it in your pocket, put it on airplane mode. Text, use wired headphones or speakerphone for calls. Don’t sleep with it next to your head — turn it off or put it in another room.
> Third, use your phone only when the signal is strong. Cellphones are programmed to increase radiation when the signal is poor, that is when one or two bars are displayed on your phone. For example, don’t use your phone in an elevator or in a car, as metal structures interfere with the signal.
Is there any science to this at all? However tenuous it may be I’m curious about the underlying rational for these recommendations. Particularly the first and third. They come across as a bit... superstitious? And unfortunately the article make no attempt at explaining the “why” behind the “what”.
> Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.
It appears some health authorities are in agreement?
> In 2001, based upon the biologic and human epidemiologic research, low-frequency fields were classified as “possibly carcinogenic” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization. In 2011, the IARC classified radiofrequency radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based upon studies of cellphone radiation and brain tumor risk in humans. Currently, we have considerably more evidence that would warrant a stronger classification.
> Most recently, on March 1, 2021, a report was released by the former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which concluded that there is a “high probability” that radiofrequency radiation emitted by cellphones causes gliomas and acoustic neuromas, two types of brain tumors.
And why this?
> Our government, however, stopped funding research on the health effects of radiofrequency radiation in the 1990s
> It appears some health authorities are in agreement?
In 2011 (maybe 2013?[1]), the IARC put radiofrequency electromagnetic fields in group 2B,[0] which is basically “we're a little worried there might be a problem, but we haven't actually replicated it”.
I thought I remembered them taking it off that list sometime around 2017, but apparently they didn't. Nonetheless, this isn't them agreeing with the claim.
Per the 2021 citation, here is the former CDC director claiming he believes RF tech in cellphones causes types of brain tumors. This was part of a lawsuit by plaintiffs with alleged brain tumors from heavy cell phone use:
The CDC guy at least seems to think there's plenty of evidence at this point. There are also citations claiming government tests are outdated fwiw, .e.g. maybe we're not appropriately testing the health effects.
>Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.
> Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure.
So logically if there was a correlation of any kind between cell phone use and brain cancer we could virtually eliminate the effect by all using headsets which sounds less dramatic and interesting than cell phone usage is the new smoking.
It doesn't help that the person calling out the dangers is in psych as opposed to medicine or physics.
Headsets also emit radiation in order to talk to the phone, though. (Potentially less than the phone though since they need to cover a smaller distance.)
Yeah, no. Phrases like "makes the energy more biologically active" and "increase oxidative stress ... stress proteins" heightened my skepticism alert because they sound so pseudoscientific; similar to the kind of language you'd find in an essay that alleges "water memory" and efficacy of homeopathy.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] thread> Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, opening up calcium channels, for example, and allowing calcium to flow into the cell and into the mitochondria within the cell, interfering with our natural cellular processes and leading to the creation of stress proteins and free radicals and, possibly, DNA damage. And, in other cases, it may lead to cell death.
Light from the sun is more powerful than cell phone radiation. Being outside, or by a window, is far more dangerous.
> modulation of wireless devices
> makes the energy more biologically active
> our cellular mechanisms
> natural cellular processes
> stress proteins and free radicals
Define any of the above, and point to a reputable source when any of the above phrases are used. It's a collection of phrases which are all "off", like a foreign person with broken english.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulation
• No clue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_activity doesn't apply. (This is a crank warning sign.)
• This is too generic to answer out of context.
• Same as the above, perhaps with the naturalistic fallacy thrown in (also a crank warning sign).
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_hormone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-radical_theory_of_aging
Of your six quotes, only two (maybe three) of them are crank warning signs, and two have clear, well-defined meanings.
I doubt he's right, but I'm not confident enough to laugh at him. Even relatively low-intensity radio waves affect neurons, so it's not like they have no effect on the body.
Free radicals: It's very difficult to create free radicals with photons that has less energy than UV rays. And the photons of cell phones has a few order of magnitude less energy. The term is well defined, but it's almost impossible that it's relevant.
Stress hormone: Your link is about hormones produced by glands, and in the sentence it looks like some modification of each cell. Again, the term is well defined, but I'm not sure they are talking about the same thing, and it's not very probable that it's relevant.
Except the Sun generates a tremendous mish-mash of modulated EM radiation, so "modulation" is also a nonsense argument.
What's next for the Gish gallop crowd?
> The period in which the Sun passes behind a geostationary satellite is brief — about 10 minutes at most according to Dr Carter — but the noise is enough to degrade or completely disrupt radio and television broadcasts, as well as satellite internet.
Is this correct? I'm not much more than a layman in physics, but I thought RF, being below the visible spectrum, is non-ionizing thus unable to cause any cell damage.
Edit: Besides from microwaves or similar oscillating fields.
Remember that cells are stateful biochemical machines, so it's not just instantaneous damage from radiation as the only possible pathway. If the authors are right and the cells are in some way receptive to the modulated emissions, some bio-structures might be like antenna and demodulators, stimulating the cells at many lower frequency scales. An analogy here could be a crystal radio which demodulates AM broadcasts into an audible frequency, or the way old GSM call negotiation patterns would induce an audible pattern in computer speakers.
This summary of occupational safety concerns for mechanical vibration covers a topic I found interesting when it first appeared as a news item years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6415671/
I know you might say this is vastly different scales of energy between whole body vibration from an industrial job and emissions from a battery-powered cell phone. My observation is merely that there are many ways that we might naively think that our bodies are robust, while with repeated exposure to seemingly harmless conditions, subtle damage accumulates.
Yes. Otherwise a microwave oven would just sear stuff. Radio frequency penetrates meat. It doesn't do it well, because meat has high impedance, but it does penetrate.
Disclaimer: I don't believe cell phones are causing cancer; there just isn't enough power involved. It's all bunk.
I'm sceptical that low levels of non-ionising radiation can do damage, but it's not physically impossible. (I know of no biological mechanism by which it could cause harm, but I'm no biologist.)
a) individual rays/particles have enough energy to knock electrons off ("ionizing radiation"). This is dependent on wavelength/frequency, not the amount of radiation, so even small amounts can be possibly problematic.
b) quantity of radiation brings enough energy to heat things up, cause damage through heating.
Cell phones have neither problem.
The reason that cellphones operate on sunny days is modulation matters — me posting this on a cellphone while sitting in sunshine makes your point wrong.
> Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, ...
The exact argument is you can’t compare the strength of signals alone when considering bio activity — just like strength alone doesn’t determine if a cellphone signal can be heard.
Are they really claiming that cell-phone radiation is dangerous because it's like rainbows?
If cell phones caused even a small increase in cancer rates we would be seeing a massive epidemic, what we see instead is a steady decline in overall cancer rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184566/deaths-by-cancer-...
It's not hard to believe that there's pressure from the telecom industry to not find out these kinds of things. However, it seems quite feasible for a lab today to rigorously measure the effect of cellphone radiation on voltage-gated calcium channels to verify these claims.
nor would I expect them to. if we are talking about cell damage, i'm not wanting to hear from an electrical engineer. i want to hear from a medical professional specializing in cellular activity. a cancer doctor, some sort of micro biologist, or something in that realm would be much more credible when discussing the damage of cells due to whatever cause.
Show me studies where these doctors are working with physicists to setup the RF in controlled environments to study the effects of the radio waves on cellular activity, then I'll be much more interested. There's just too much fringe people pushing this that my natrual inclinations is to not believe it. However, that's not to say that I am unwilling to change my mind if shown actual evidence versus what's there now. I'm just saying I haven't seen any.
Edit: some additional thoughts. There is a controversial treatment using EMF to treat glial blastomas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_electric_field_the...), the proposed mechanism is that it interrupts mitosis. This method is unlike the one put forward by Dr. Moskowitz which relies on an increase in necrosis/apoptosis.
The only time I have ever seen anyone consider biology has been work outsourcing modelling hands for antenna design for handsets.
> After reading many animal toxicology studies that found that this radiation could increase oxidative stress — free radicals, stress proteins and DNA damage
Not knowing enough about chemistry, I could imagine the radiation being able to affect some of the weaker bonds in certain chemicals, breaking them, and creating more energetic new compounds. This could be damaging to among other things, DNA.
I know the photo-voltaic effect means there is a certain threshold frequency needed to be able to affect such bonds. I have no idea whether there are any chemical bonds that can be affected by say 5.8Ghz radiation. (Highest frequency non 5G phones should be emitting)
Nope. Unless those bonds could break due to localised heating, that's not going to happen. Radio waves have lower per-photon energies than are required to break bonds (except really really weak ones, but those can barely be called bonds in the first place).
What you are describing is ionizing radiation, which RF and microwave is not.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...
I'm not saying that means it's dangerous, just trying to clarify.
If you assume that people use their 5G phones to transmit a terabyte per month because the speed is so convenient, while they used their EDGE phones for a kilobyte per month, that'a a higher total load, so you can reasonably say that 5G involves higher radiation. Or you can compare for the same transmission, and find that it's lower.
You may also assume that the damage done isn't linear with the transmission power or operating frequency, which complicates matters even more. But generally, 5G uses less power to do the same work than 4G, which in turn uses less… because in each new generation, there's a little better error correction and 64QAM is replaced by 128QAM or so, and so they reduce transmission power a little until the reduced power is again just enough for the better error correction and denser codec.
IMO, a lot of this comes down to "doing things is more dangerous than not", which is nearly always true. Sports may keep you fit but your risk of breaking a leg is higher than if you were sitting in front of a TV. Transmitting data is riskier than not. But also more useful, because not watching youtube in HD is clearly useless, while watching them is worth some risk.
With that in mind, what's the relative transmission power for 4G vs 5G if both are using all their respective maximum bandwidth?
Or the same if you want to compare early 5G with late 4G, because this is really the same thing. They deploy improvements all the time, and after some number of improvements they rename.
So less dangerous than bacon, then, and only if you appropriately exclude studies in the same manner that they did.
Maybe cell phones prevent brain cancer by exciting the immune system via whatever mechanism he proposes that it also "promotes the growth of drug-resistant pathogens" /s
This gives me tinfoil-hat vibes to be honest. Why would millimeter waves specifically promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens? What's the overlap?
I do understand there can be heating effects from non-ionizing radiation but the power levels seem really, really low, <2 watts. That seems like an amount of heat that can be easily dissipated.
This article says that I'm missing something. I'm wondering what that is.
These aren't true as a rule, but generally good as guidelines. Ionizing radiation gives way to widespread, molecule agnostic damage in molecular systems; it's powerful enough to pop pieces of molecules off. Ionizing energy is the equivalent of firing a light cannon to blow chunks off molecules; the damage is immediate, consistent, widespread and dangerous.
Non-ionizing radiation, by contrast, is absorbed selectively. A given wavelength will only be absorbed if it corresponds with the specific quantum of an excitation level of the target system. This means uptake of energy will be molecule specific; chromophores are examples of molecules specifically designed to take advantage of this; it's how we see.
Microwaves, for instance, are non-ionizing radiation. We know a surplus of microwave radiation can cook people through. It does this because microwaves are the right wavelength to vibrate the bonds in water. UV radiation is also considered non-ionizing, but DNA will absorb it, and the photochemical result of that absorption is the formation of Pyrimidine dimers (TT dimers). This direct damage to our genetic codes is the primary cause of skin cancer and is so dangerous that we have evolved an extensive set of molecular machines to excise and repair this specific problem.
So no, non-ionizing radiation is not uniformly safe and biologically inert. This isn't to say 5G is unsafe - remember things are wavelength and dose specific; it's just to say the reasoning "non ionizing never causes biological harm" is very wrong.
The argument "since cell phones don't emit non-ionizing radiation, they can't cause cancer" is simply incorrect.
“The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”
That... kind of feels backwards. If the effect is real, it should show up more powerfully in larger studies, not smaller studies. Especially if you're crusading against purported broad environmental harm, the whole-environment studies seem the most relevant: even if some specific uses of cell phones may be harmful, that the way the average public uses it isn't one of those uses is important (that's one way to square the evidence, but I don't entirely believe it's the best way).
We know that non-ionizing radiation can be harmful at a high enough dose (like sticking your hand in a microwave.)
This research suggests that non-ionizing radiation might not have a safe upper limit, either, only that we haven't totally quantified the damage it causes.
And heat itself is carcinogenic, yes -- drinking hot beverages is independently associated with a higher risk of mouth, throat, esophageal, and stomach cancer.
Among many sentences that made me chuckle, "Millimeter waves can ... promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens." What? How?
You don't have to tell me it's a bad idea to stand on top of an FM radio tower emitting kilowatts of RF energy in the VHF spectrum. That's gonna burn pretty bad.
But I'm going to need some more serious scientific analysis of how a <5W transmitter in my pocket or home is doing anything more serious than my yearly dental X-Ray's.
How so?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-control-by-c...
> First, minimize your use of cellphones or cordless phones — use a landline whenever possible. If you do use a cellphone, turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you’re not using them. However, when near a Wi-Fi router, you would be better off using your cellphone on Wi-Fi and turning off the cellular because this will likely result in less radiation exposure than using the cellular network.
> Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure. So, keep your phone away from your head and body. Store your phone in a purse or backpack. If you have to put it in your pocket, put it on airplane mode. Text, use wired headphones or speakerphone for calls. Don’t sleep with it next to your head — turn it off or put it in another room.
> Third, use your phone only when the signal is strong. Cellphones are programmed to increase radiation when the signal is poor, that is when one or two bars are displayed on your phone. For example, don’t use your phone in an elevator or in a car, as metal structures interfere with the signal.
Is there any science to this at all? However tenuous it may be I’m curious about the underlying rational for these recommendations. Particularly the first and third. They come across as a bit... superstitious? And unfortunately the article make no attempt at explaining the “why” behind the “what”.
> Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.
he's a known crank; he's been on this for years; you'd think he'd see a reasonable effect size by now!
If there’s a tower in your neighborhood the. Your kid’s phone will emit less power than it would to reach a farther away tower.
> In 2001, based upon the biologic and human epidemiologic research, low-frequency fields were classified as “possibly carcinogenic” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization. In 2011, the IARC classified radiofrequency radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based upon studies of cellphone radiation and brain tumor risk in humans. Currently, we have considerably more evidence that would warrant a stronger classification.
> Most recently, on March 1, 2021, a report was released by the former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which concluded that there is a “high probability” that radiofrequency radiation emitted by cellphones causes gliomas and acoustic neuromas, two types of brain tumors.
And why this?
> Our government, however, stopped funding research on the health effects of radiofrequency radiation in the 1990s
In 2011 (maybe 2013?[1]), the IARC put radiofrequency electromagnetic fields in group 2B,[0] which is basically “we're a little worried there might be a problem, but we haven't actually replicated it”.
I thought I remembered them taking it off that list sometime around 2017, but apparently they didn't. Nonetheless, this isn't them agreeing with the claim.
[0]: https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....
[1]:
https://www.publicnewsservice.org/2021-03-24/health/prominen...
https://www.saferemr.com/2021/03/expert-report-by-former-us-...
The CDC guy at least seems to think there's plenty of evidence at this point. There are also citations claiming government tests are outdated fwiw, .e.g. maybe we're not appropriately testing the health effects.
All mostly new to me.
Regulatory capture?
Sanity check:
If that study would be correct, it should show up national statistics. Brain cancers rates have decreased from the 90s. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html
> Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure.
So logically if there was a correlation of any kind between cell phone use and brain cancer we could virtually eliminate the effect by all using headsets which sounds less dramatic and interesting than cell phone usage is the new smoking.
It doesn't help that the person calling out the dangers is in psych as opposed to medicine or physics.
In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limited to 2.5 milliwatts, giving it a very short range of up to 10 meters (30 feet).
If I read correctly a cell phone is using more like 1-2W so 800 times as strong. One could also use something, the horror, with a wire!