I'm just looking at some of these graphs and they seem a little concerning? Like the y-axis on 3G and 4G is 0.1degC ... no measurable health effects measured for a few decades, easy done and justified.
But then these 5G graphs are measured at a scale 200-300x higher on the y-axis and have like 20x the energy penetration deep in the body. That's real brave. Should my next phone be 5G or is this saying no?
Just turn it down to use 4G. Sometimes I'll use LTE for meetings or big downloads. 5G - hard no. I sleep with my phone and Wi-Fi off. Don't knock it till you try it. Get a meter if you are serious about it.
Inverse square law. You would have no reasons to worry even if the closest neighbors would put a 5G tower on each of their houses. Your body would be exposed to a lot more power from your cellphone rather than any tower. That would mean if there is a real danger, we should be already counting several millions of deaths among all those people carrying a cellphone in their pocket every day. It is something that simply cannot go undetected.
Those technologies would either need extremely high power, and/or use much much higher frequencies (beyond visible light) then fall into ionizing radiations (which are dangerous indeed) to have any health effects.
The 4G tower about 500m puts out about 5x what my phone does. I shielded my bedroom with the paint and its close to zero now. I'm not really thinking much about 5 yet, too early for my area. I do agree with your statements.
I slept really well at my parents cabin over the years but not in the city where I lived. I could never figure out why. Then one summer they got Wi-Fi and I no longer had great sleeps there. Did some research and started experimenting with shielded clothing. Noticed much deeper rem sleep, dreams and all that again. I realize there's very poor research and low quality studies that support this. It's almost impossible to fund and find a group of people that can actually be shielded for a study.
But hey it works for me, enough that I invested significant time, effort and a bit of money to get a decently shielded sleeping area.
I have better concentration during the day in these same low emf conditions too.
Just slapping on a coat of the stuff would not work, but doing it correctly absolutely does work. It takes a few coats and you have to ground it. Done correctly, you won't be able to use Wifi or make a phone call. Yes you will get some leakage from windows, but that can be attenuated with metal screens or use steel roll-down shutters that have the benefit of improving the R/U insulation rating of the windows at night and improving physical security. I have tested this in two houses. I will also be adding the paint to a property I recently acquired. If you bookmark this thread, I will circle back in about six months after the snow to test the attenuation.
I think I do get leakage through the one window that has the film and the metal bug screen. The paint when grounded is very good shielding. You are describing all the right aspects of this!
Yes everything except the floor. The tower is above the floor. For widows I used the film and a metal bug screen on top of that. I did three coats of the YSheild HSF54 paint. The before and after ratings on my meter prove to me that it worked. I register less than background now in that room.I used the copper grounding strips that wire into my outlets and attach to the house ground circuit.
Certainly you can get a few db attenuation, but it's absolutely not possible to block all EM radiation with a cheap layer of paint.
Regarding "not treating the the floor", how to you prevent reflections? If there's any metal beneath the floor it will reflect the signals into the room.
Whatever, if your meter is reading "less than background" then it is clearly misleading you.
Agree the 4G towers are more dangerous especially at close range less than 200m, very difficult to shield and very unnatural for the body to live shielded in my own experience.
I don't think this is what the 5G conspiracy theorists claim, at all. Nobody is claiming people are going to drop dead from 5G.
The last 50 years have seen a dramatic rise in incidents of various less-than-lethal health issues: low sperm counts, autism, fibromyalgia, early puberty in girls, Chron's Disease, IBS, certain specific rare-but-treatable cancers, etc.
These are all very real and well-documented. And everybody has their pet explanation that happens to correlate with environmental increases of other things: sugar, seed oils, microplastics, glyphosate, vaccination, VOCs, birth control, and yes, mobile phone usage or HF exposure in general.
5G conspiracy theorists just happened to pick one of the possible correlates. You'll find anti-glyphosate crusaders on this very site who don't get nearly the vitriol that anti-5G people, or, god forbid, anti-vaxxers do.
But in the end, people are pattern-matchers, and evidenced-be-damned, this one particular pattern they spotted is the one they're going to go with.
Conspiracy theories of the pattern-matching type are kind of a built-in human problem, I think we're wired for it. I don't understand why we can't be more charitable towards them.
These aareas of West Virginia and Virginia are exceptionally beautiful and serene places to visit, if you ever get a chance to drive by the Green Bank telescope it is Massive! In fact the dish of the telescope has a diameter of around 300 feet.
Gamma radiation in-vivo cells have been shown to produce "a reduction in cell division; alteration in the ratio of the different phases of mitosis, and the appearance of degenerate cells in the germinative zone." [1] Also Le Pogam et al. [2019] found that "EM radiation in the 5G range affect cell permeability and metabolic profiles". [2] To me, that's not something to be discarded so easily, more research is needed. But there's already good one coming up. [3]
I think you are mistaken -- there is less penetration at 40GHz. The graphs show increased surface heating at 40GHz as a result of less penetration.
Informative exercise: put sunlight on that graph.
Note that the units (W/m^2*10^3) are such that F=1 roughly corresponds to the incident power of direct sunlight, 1kW/m^2. Results like 60 degree heating at the surface when it is illuminated with 15 times the intensity of direct sunlight suddenly don't quite seem so shocking. Yes, longer wavelengths were able to avoid absorption, but there had to be a frequency where it started behaving like visible light and shining on the surface instead, and 40GHz appears to be high enough. This is exactly what I would expect.
Is there a particular graph that had you worried that we could dig deeper into?
A. Does that paper have anything to do with any of the graphs in TFA? The point of the exercise was to calibrate intuition for trends and intensities, not to talk about damage models.
B. Has this line of research actually shown anything in a bulk setting at sane levels of incident RF or is it still "we built an antenna structure out of saline and showed that a neuron can respond to the resulting voltage if we really blast it?"
Thermalization mechanisms like rovibrational absorption (small scale) and conventional currents (large scale -- the focus of these new studies) aren't the only supporting evidence for thermal damage models, though. There is also the dose/response curve. We can generate RF at many thousands of times the intensity that we find in cell phones and observe the consequences. Often unintentionally. Those consequences look a heck of a lot like thermal burns. If there is an alternative damage mechanism, it has to saturate at a very low level, so that there are no observable acute effects from a wild overdose.
A. This is simply a rebuttal to the too easy dismissal that is comparing levels of man-made radiation to sunlight.
B. I am not a researcher, but you can read the paper and see for yourself. It was published in Nature in case you haven't noticed, this is not some kooky youtuber
A. The point of the exercise was to calibrate intuition for trends and intensities, not to talk about damage models.
B. I've read a large number of papers in this genre and this appears to be another. Just like I feel my time is wasted every time I read another mouse-in-a-microwave study, I feel my time is wasted every time I read another "we built an antenna out of bio parts" study. And no, it's not "published in Nature," it's published in Nature Scientific Reports. That's an important distinction. It puts the paper far above kooky youtubers, yes, but it doesn't really filter for impact in the way Nature would: for example, I would expect to be able to easily get a mouse-in-a-microwave study into Nature Scientific Reports, but not Nature.
Sunlight is much, much higher intensity than a cell phone, its photons are much, much higher energy, and it doesn't fall off to a tiny fraction if it is more than a few feet away.
I am not suggesting that 5G is anywhere near as bad as sunlight. I am suggesting using sunlight to understand the trend the parent post was concerned about and to understand that many of the intensities employed by this study are not at all typical of a cell phone.
Related: last month (Aug 16th), the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in the EHT (Environmental Health Trust) et al. v. FCC case that the December 2019 decision by the FCC to retain its 1996 safety limits for human exposure to wireless radiation was “arbitrary and capricious.” [0]
The court held that the FCC failed to respond to “record evidence that exposure to RF radiation at levels below the Commission’s current limits may cause negative health effects unrelated to cancer.”
Is this malice or stupidity? Does the FCC stand to gain anything by jeopardizing the health of the general public? Genuinely curious as I don’t know much about the lobbying or incentives that would lead to such a situation.
Ajit Pai, the commissioner at the time, was an ex-Verizon executive appointed by a corporate-friendly President.
The agency itself had nothing to gain, per se. Nor lose, really. There is a fair bit of speculation about who gained from its decisions during Pai's tenure and why.
As someone else mentioned this looks a bit worrying, until you realize that 5g has much lower penetration (and this experiment was carried out with tissue with no skull/skin etc surrounding it), that a live brain is actively being cooled by bloodflow, and also were you to carry out this same experiment with regular sunlight the graph would be off the charts even compared to 5g.
Although research like this is definitely very important. I would just be wary of drawing conclusions without listening to the opinions of people with more knowledge in the field than you or I.
I think that insect population collapse is very worrisome. Some very intelligent people claim that seems to be going towards that path. Electromagnetic pollution one of the main source of its decline. So, maybe yes.
I think Elizabeth Kolbert with her book "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" did a great job on the overall subject. "Mobile phone and Wi-Fi radiation in particular opens the calcium channels in certain cells, meaning they absorb more calcium ions." That seems not be very good for insects. [1] There are many, good articles coming up. [2] and anecdotal evidence [3] Not sure, of course but the science is unequivocal in that the impact is significant, not negligible.
The first source use the word "probably" to describe the impact and there's no mention of how large an impact is found
Second article lists it as a "potential cause"
Third article defines it as a "possible cause"
I have a hard time seeing how "the science is unequivocal in that the impact is significant, not negligible.", from the articles presented.
What I read is that EMR is a possible cause among many, like known contributors such as loss of habitat and pesticide use, but there further research is needed.
This is not the same as saying it's not possible that the effect is true - there just isn't enough evidence to support a definitive conclusion on the impact at this point.
I'm not an environmental scientist, so I don't have the required knowledge on the current state of research in the area. There might be newer research that is solid enough to warrant making a definitive statement, but what I read in these articles definitely does not.
Nobody said a definitive conclusion or statement, but this is an overlooked AND significant one. I'm not an environmental scientist either, but I do see evidence of this point as a hobbyist beekeeper and casual reader of the science literature. The effect is true, and I agree with you, more research is needed.
"millimeter waves have short ranges of propagation, they are absorbed by water vapor and oxygen in the atmosphere, by vegetation, very strongly by water in the tissues of people and animals, and they are readily reflected off, and scattered by, small metallic and dielectric objects, urban clutter and large manmade and natural structures"
I'm no physicist...but this makes me think of my microwave oven and how super-uneven the heating is.
Is it possible that all the reflecting and scattering can create problematic spots where things accidentally focus?
Incidentally, I've found a way to improve my oven - I add a container of a small amount of water separate from what I'm heating. It quite definitely keeps, for instance, butter from exploding like it normally would.
Microwaves in a microwave oven form standing wave patterns that heat unevenly, hence the rotating table. Not sure if newer microwave ovens have improved this.
You have to look at the bright side. Now when an annoying family member who talks too long calls you, you can tell them you have to go because you are microwaving your brains.
As I scroll through the wall of heat transfer equations and long-winded extrapolations of how some derived formulae can be used to predict a temperature rise in a specific contrived scenario.. I can't help but wonder if the paper is attempting to disguise a mundane conclusion (when we crank radio waves into a waveguide we can heat stuff up, obviously) within a wall of intimidating text.
I feel like if there were anything to be worried about re:5G, they'd be presenting the conclusion front and center in the abstract?
im sure city infrastructure worked even before cellphones. Higher bandwidth allows for far more things to be done where value can be extracted. Google has already tried their Sidewalk Labs, not going to be the last attempt.
as for self driving cars, fully 3D mapped city roads will be eventually needed to improve ride quality, and they will be constantly uploaded/downloaded by vehicles.
"This “digital chassis” consists of four electro-hydraulic “activalves” installed on the shock absorbers at each wheel, and it collects and stores road data in the cloud for analysis and retrieval at a later date."
for the money it would cost to map the city streets every week I imagine they could just fill the potholes and make sure the lane markers are painted
there’s a lot of chicago that is really ambiguous about being one or two lanes, you just kind of cross your fingers and hope everyone else also has a fear of death (this is why i dont trust ai, no fear of death in em)
> collects and stores road data in the cloud for analysis and retrieval at a later date
This sounds terrible for a lot of other reasons, but anyway. It sounds like they want to rely on collected data about roads which is great, but cars still have to have safety measures for pedestrians/unexpected obstacles like trucks or new road issues.
5G would improve this but I still don't see how it's necessary. Even now it sounds like it's collecting data and uploading it on WiFi or something later. I'd be surprised if it was too much data for 4G.
Self-driving cars, of course, and city infrastructure, are both completely irrelevant to this issue, since neither of those applications involves holding the 5G hardware up to your head.
Come to think of it, a vanishingly small and steadily-shrinking percentage of cell phone users hold their phones up to their heads, these days, too, so really, it's hard to see the relevance of this research.
I barely even use my iPhone as a phone, at all, these days, let alone in a baroque fashion like holding it up to my head.
I would not dismiss so easily the potential environmental hazards of electromagnetic pollution. It's not just about humans, but whole ecosystems. Starting by insect population collapse. BTW, even if you think those applications are not relevant, satellite-based internet is on the rise at record speed.
There is zero evidence that EM signals have anything to do with the insect population issue, and a lot of evidence for more obvious causes: climate change, pesticides, et al.
You literally have to 3D map roads. Then upload that data. Allow cars to download that data, and upload updates (road closures/constructions, new potholes etc), telemetry etc.
Control will not happen over 5G, but the volumes of data being passed around certainly will likely require a good amount of bandwidth.
Do you see this happen over LTE?
Idk. maybe its not cars, but simply a much better surveillance system somehow.
That's the problem with Conspiracy theories, people tend to polarize in order to avoid being flagged as such. I think that, indepently whatever you think about 5G and its implications. It's a new tech, and it must be studied thoroughly with highly accurate methods, specially if there are used to regulate and prevent damage of any kind.
I think the paper makes a mistake by giving it that title and including the first line of the abstract, but otherwise it's not actually trying to figure out if 5g is harmful - such a title and outcome '5g = more radiation' makes it insanely easy for this to be used as ammunition for people who love a conspiracy like '5g bad' (just as groups did with 4g) even if the conclusion doesn't make any claim that this has a chance of causing medical problems for users.
The paper did a great job raising concerns about the limits of gel simulants to study potential health hazards. The '5G bad' is pointless. More studies are needed, specifically about the environment impact. Electromagnetic pollution is already causing insect population collapse at an alarming pace.
more broadly, our collective penchant for killing everything that’s not corn or soy. insects are co-evolved to pollinate all the flowering plants of the world, and we’ve replaced a lot of flowering plants with farmland and concrete. so it’s no mystery to me what happened to the bugs.
so what’s the theory with electromagnetism? only correlation i can imagine is the more urbanized an area is, the better the 4G coverage.
Insecticides are the main vector of attack of course, they're designed for that. The problem is not identifying properly other substantial vectors.
As a hobbyist beekeeper can confirm the impact of EM pollution. EM fields are a big deal for bees. I see trends like 5G-based satellite internet growing which are amazing technologies, opening fantastic use cases. But we should be more cognizant of its impact in the long run over the environment. BTW, high correlation with insect population collapse.
Like usual with papers, skip to the summary - the first sentence: "In this paper, we present for the first time, a simple, highly accurate test system for measuring [...]"
Good reason to talk a lot about the measuring methodology.
The intent of this paper seems to have been to invent/improve methods for measuring the effects of 5g radiation on tissue, not necessarily to prove/disprove harm.
It looks like you expected a study answering the question "Is 5G harmful or not" to which the authors have no pretense. Instead, they address a different topic: how to precisely assess the effects of the radiation on tissue. They present at least one conclusion: that the method of using gel for assessing it in other studies is not as precise as it had been thought, and that studies using it might underestimate the effect.
The study is more for having a more precise base for further studies and discussion that could answer key questions and help to establish safer SAR levels for device manufacturers/policy makers.
First of all, it is an "ex vivo" experiment, which means they took a chunk of brain tissue out and tested it in a measurement device all by itself.
That means: No skull, no skin, and -- most importantly -- no blood flow.
Animal brains are thermally regulated. We're liquid cooled!
This matters, because in their tests they heated a piece of dead tissue with no blood circulation for minutes, and tried to extrapolate from that for biological systems. That time frame is plenty for normal blood flow to remove (or reduce) the heat.
To simplify: If it can damage your brain, it would definitely also burn your skin. If it doesn't burn your skin, it's almost certainly safe. This is basic physics: it has to go through your skin (and skull!) to get to your brain, and your skin has similar electrical properties and worse cooling than your brain.
"There is a need for research regarding local heat developments on small surfaces, e.g., skin or the eye, and on any environmental impact." [1]
I would not discard research because its "ex vivo" qualia. I think you are missing the point. It is not about if short-term 5G exposure can damage a extracted bovine brain, but the worrisome part. it is that current gel-based models to study its effects are at least, limited in their scope. All of that, without mentioning anything regarding insect population which are rapidly declining due to primarily electromagnetic pollution [2].
This is misrepresenting the referenced paper. They specifically tested brain tissue, but in a context that invalidates their results for realistic (in-vivo) scenarios.
And anyway, heat is not some mysterious cancer-causing phenomena that's insufficiently studied by science. It's heat! You know, warmth. It's not only necessary for mammalian life, it's downright pleasant. People voluntarily put themselves in saunas, hot tubs, and pay to get hot stone massages. It's nice.
When it stops being nice, you can definitely tell! There's no need for "5G radiation" measurements with scientific instruments. When you're heated to the point that you take damage, it hurts. You have a built-in sensor for that. No need for lab tests.
If your phone isn't burning your hand, it's not burning your brain. It's just that simple.
PS: insects are 100% for certain being wiped out by pesticides, which are poisons specifically designed to kill insects. You'd have to have fantastically good evidence to argue that no-no-no-no, it's not the millions of tons of insect poison killing them, it's the microwaves that we've always used before, but suddenly they're deadly because they're used for mobile phones... slightly differently to how they've been used previously.
"...according to the study presented in Stuttgart, which is yet to be peer reviewed."
Marie Curie doesn't realized "the hurt" as a test, for sure.
Nobody is talking just about the brain either, pesticides are a huge part of the equation, it's a no brainer. But EM pollution is not easily dismissible. You know, this is the problem with the subject, people should talk a lot more about possible long-term implications of every new tech deployed. Peer reviewing is a slow process, I'm happy that there's at least research being conducted seriously.
Evidence for the ignorance of other people when faced with novel phenomena is not evidence that we are ignorant of all phenomena.
Just because some things are a mystery to you, doesn't make them have mysterious properties.
Microwaves cause heating. That's why we have an appliance that generates them in our kitchens. Heating is nice, to a point, afterwards it's very obvious that it's too much.
No mobile phone, has anywhere, ever, burnt someone through microwave radiation. Not 3G, not 4G, not 5G, not any # G. The power levels are just too low. It's like trying to do a spot weld with a laser pointer.
Their experiment has a serious flaw: live brains have active temperature regulation and wouldn't see these large temperature rises. Put that dead cow brain out in the sun and its temperature would rise too. But that solar radiation isn't causing brain cancer in cows out in fields.
I'm not sure what that paper is trying to prove by killing E Coli with polarized 50Ghz, as we humans use all kinds of EM waves to our advantage already.
We use ultraviolet radiation (750 THz range) to kill germs:
This is a good point that was acknowledged in the study and by other commenters here. However don’t you think comparing with the sun is a slippery analogy? Specifically when discussing the health effects of duration of exposure, beam shape, pulse pattern, etc?
Any actual physicists around who can weigh in with a "for dummies" explanation of this?
I'm worried I'm having knee jerk reaction dismissing this as not evidence that 5g could be harmful because of the sheer amount of total nonsense 5G conspiracy theories I've also been exposed to.
Especially interesting was someone mentioning potential affects on insects, who do have much thinner barriers between air and their internal organs/brains.
A lot of people are trying to interpret this. I read the complete paper. This is very far from any kind of conclusive result that says 5G presents serious risks to human health. However it does raise a couple of important considerations that warrant further study.
This study was done on cow brain tissue outside of a skull cavity and found that in certain specific circumstances the radio frequencies used by 5G can transmit energy to brain tissues and pathways that warrant further study. That's all this paper says and it's methodology appears to be pretty credible for the conclusion reached. In somewhat of a rarity these days, this appears to be "good science".
Read The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life,
I am predicting in the next 5-10 years there will be a great change of view on how we see the impact of electromagnetic fields on health.
Also the 5G appeal in europe, over 230 scientists from more than 40 countries have expressed their “serious concerns” regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF generated by electric and wireless devices already before the additional 5G roll-out. [1]
118 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadBut then these 5G graphs are measured at a scale 200-300x higher on the y-axis and have like 20x the energy penetration deep in the body. That's real brave. Should my next phone be 5G or is this saying no?
Those technologies would either need extremely high power, and/or use much much higher frequencies (beyond visible light) then fall into ionizing radiations (which are dangerous indeed) to have any health effects.
How did you come to the conclusion it disrupts sleep?
But hey it works for me, enough that I invested significant time, effort and a bit of money to get a decently shielded sleeping area.
I have better concentration during the day in these same low emf conditions too.
Did you also paint the doors, windows, ceiling and floor?
If you want further information, talk to the people who build shielded rooms. Cutting down EM radiation by more than a few db is incredibly difficult.
Plus you can't effectively earth something when your earth leads is multiple wavelengths long (eg at UHF)
Regarding "not treating the the floor", how to you prevent reflections? If there's any metal beneath the floor it will reflect the signals into the room.
Whatever, if your meter is reading "less than background" then it is clearly misleading you.
I don't think this is what the 5G conspiracy theorists claim, at all. Nobody is claiming people are going to drop dead from 5G.
The last 50 years have seen a dramatic rise in incidents of various less-than-lethal health issues: low sperm counts, autism, fibromyalgia, early puberty in girls, Chron's Disease, IBS, certain specific rare-but-treatable cancers, etc.
These are all very real and well-documented. And everybody has their pet explanation that happens to correlate with environmental increases of other things: sugar, seed oils, microplastics, glyphosate, vaccination, VOCs, birth control, and yes, mobile phone usage or HF exposure in general.
5G conspiracy theorists just happened to pick one of the possible correlates. You'll find anti-glyphosate crusaders on this very site who don't get nearly the vitriol that anti-5G people, or, god forbid, anti-vaxxers do.
But in the end, people are pattern-matchers, and evidenced-be-damned, this one particular pattern they spotted is the one they're going to go with.
Conspiracy theories of the pattern-matching type are kind of a built-in human problem, I think we're wired for it. I don't understand why we can't be more charitable towards them.
Would be silly to discard such a nicely tuned learning model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...
I'm against 5G for now, just because I don't see what I need it for, and I resent being forced to pay even if it's not harmful.
Higher frequency radiation will be absorbed by the skin more easily and I think it will not reach the brain.
[1]: https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/1059...
[1]: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1259/0007-1285-14-158-...
[2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45662-6
[3]: https://sci-hub.st/10.3390/ijerph16183406
Informative exercise: put sunlight on that graph.
Note that the units (W/m^2*10^3) are such that F=1 roughly corresponds to the incident power of direct sunlight, 1kW/m^2. Results like 60 degree heating at the surface when it is illuminated with 15 times the intensity of direct sunlight suddenly don't quite seem so shocking. Yes, longer wavelengths were able to avoid absorption, but there had to be a frequency where it started behaving like visible light and shining on the surface instead, and 40GHz appears to be high enough. This is exactly what I would expect.
Is there a particular graph that had you worried that we could dig deeper into?
Polarization: A Key Difference between Man-made and Natural Electromagnetic Fields, in regard to Biological Activity [0]
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914
B. Has this line of research actually shown anything in a bulk setting at sane levels of incident RF or is it still "we built an antenna structure out of saline and showed that a neuron can respond to the resulting voltage if we really blast it?"
Thermalization mechanisms like rovibrational absorption (small scale) and conventional currents (large scale -- the focus of these new studies) aren't the only supporting evidence for thermal damage models, though. There is also the dose/response curve. We can generate RF at many thousands of times the intensity that we find in cell phones and observe the consequences. Often unintentionally. Those consequences look a heck of a lot like thermal burns. If there is an alternative damage mechanism, it has to saturate at a very low level, so that there are no observable acute effects from a wild overdose.
B. I am not a researcher, but you can read the paper and see for yourself. It was published in Nature in case you haven't noticed, this is not some kooky youtuber
B. I've read a large number of papers in this genre and this appears to be another. Just like I feel my time is wasted every time I read another mouse-in-a-microwave study, I feel my time is wasted every time I read another "we built an antenna out of bio parts" study. And no, it's not "published in Nature," it's published in Nature Scientific Reports. That's an important distinction. It puts the paper far above kooky youtubers, yes, but it doesn't really filter for impact in the way Nature would: for example, I would expect to be able to easily get a mouse-in-a-microwave study into Nature Scientific Reports, but not Nature.
But there can be 100 mobile phones in a room, or 100,000 in a football stadium I guess. I know exposure distance is a factor...
I am not suggesting that 5G is anywhere near as bad as sunlight. I am suggesting using sunlight to understand the trend the parent post was concerned about and to understand that many of the intensities employed by this study are not at all typical of a cell phone.
It’s not the heat that causes skin cancer. UV radiation is intense enough induce chemical changes in DNA.
The court held that the FCC failed to respond to “record evidence that exposure to RF radiation at levels below the Commission’s current limits may cause negative health effects unrelated to cancer.”
[0] https://ehtrust.org/in-historic-decision-federal-court-finds...
The agency itself had nothing to gain, per se. Nor lose, really. There is a fair bit of speculation about who gained from its decisions during Pai's tenure and why.
That and the fact that the FCC is basically a revolving door for Telecom executives.
Draw your own conclusions
How Lobbying Became A $3.5 Billion Industry - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZVfTCBUkgM
Although research like this is definitely very important. I would just be wary of drawing conclusions without listening to the opinions of people with more knowledge in the field than you or I.
Please be specific - which intelligent people? Who disagrees with them?
"Electromagnetic pollution one of the main source of its decline"
What are the other sources? How do they compare to electromagnetic pollution in terms of impact?
[1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-mobile-insects-german.html
[2]: https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.pathophys.2009.01.007
[3]: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10...
Second article lists it as a "potential cause"
Third article defines it as a "possible cause"
I have a hard time seeing how "the science is unequivocal in that the impact is significant, not negligible.", from the articles presented.
What I read is that EMR is a possible cause among many, like known contributors such as loss of habitat and pesticide use, but there further research is needed.
This is not the same as saying it's not possible that the effect is true - there just isn't enough evidence to support a definitive conclusion on the impact at this point.
I'm not an environmental scientist, so I don't have the required knowledge on the current state of research in the area. There might be newer research that is solid enough to warrant making a definitive statement, but what I read in these articles definitely does not.
I'm no physicist...but this makes me think of my microwave oven and how super-uneven the heating is.
Is it possible that all the reflecting and scattering can create problematic spots where things accidentally focus?
Incidentally, I've found a way to improve my oven - I add a container of a small amount of water separate from what I'm heating. It quite definitely keeps, for instance, butter from exploding like it normally would.
No need to worry about anything accidental.
I thought later, I wonder if putting it on the top of my microwave while it's in use did anything to it. So I stopped doing that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_55jXNOVXAc
My conclusion: the blue line is too high.
I guess my iPhone 13 will have 5G disabled.
I feel like if there were anything to be worried about re:5G, they'd be presenting the conclusion front and center in the abstract?
self-driving cars/etc, more integrated city infra cannot happen without 5G, way too much money on the line.
What do you mean? We basically have the first prototype of self driving cars already and what city infrastructure works on 5G but not 4G?
as for self driving cars, fully 3D mapped city roads will be eventually needed to improve ride quality, and they will be constantly uploaded/downloaded by vehicles.
Here is one example: https://www.clearmotion.com/
"This “digital chassis” consists of four electro-hydraulic “activalves” installed on the shock absorbers at each wheel, and it collects and stores road data in the cloud for analysis and retrieval at a later date."
more use cases, more data, etc etc.
there’s a lot of chicago that is really ambiguous about being one or two lanes, you just kind of cross your fingers and hope everyone else also has a fear of death (this is why i dont trust ai, no fear of death in em)
This sounds terrible for a lot of other reasons, but anyway. It sounds like they want to rely on collected data about roads which is great, but cars still have to have safety measures for pedestrians/unexpected obstacles like trucks or new road issues.
5G would improve this but I still don't see how it's necessary. Even now it sounds like it's collecting data and uploading it on WiFi or something later. I'd be surprised if it was too much data for 4G.
Come to think of it, a vanishingly small and steadily-shrinking percentage of cell phone users hold their phones up to their heads, these days, too, so really, it's hard to see the relevance of this research.
I barely even use my iPhone as a phone, at all, these days, let alone in a baroque fashion like holding it up to my head.
The control of a vehicle is never going to be performed over an RF link like 5G.
What is suggested for self-driving is higher level traffic management which is more "advisory" and is non-critical (think "waze" or google maps).
Control will not happen over 5G, but the volumes of data being passed around certainly will likely require a good amount of bandwidth.
Do you see this happen over LTE?
Idk. maybe its not cars, but simply a much better surveillance system somehow.
more broadly, our collective penchant for killing everything that’s not corn or soy. insects are co-evolved to pollinate all the flowering plants of the world, and we’ve replaced a lot of flowering plants with farmland and concrete. so it’s no mystery to me what happened to the bugs.
so what’s the theory with electromagnetism? only correlation i can imagine is the more urbanized an area is, the better the 4G coverage.
As a hobbyist beekeeper can confirm the impact of EM pollution. EM fields are a big deal for bees. I see trends like 5G-based satellite internet growing which are amazing technologies, opening fantastic use cases. But we should be more cognizant of its impact in the long run over the environment. BTW, high correlation with insect population collapse.
Good reason to talk a lot about the measuring methodology.
The study is more for having a more precise base for further studies and discussion that could answer key questions and help to establish safer SAR levels for device manufacturers/policy makers.
First of all, it is an "ex vivo" experiment, which means they took a chunk of brain tissue out and tested it in a measurement device all by itself.
That means: No skull, no skin, and -- most importantly -- no blood flow.
Animal brains are thermally regulated. We're liquid cooled!
This matters, because in their tests they heated a piece of dead tissue with no blood circulation for minutes, and tried to extrapolate from that for biological systems. That time frame is plenty for normal blood flow to remove (or reduce) the heat.
To simplify: If it can damage your brain, it would definitely also burn your skin. If it doesn't burn your skin, it's almost certainly safe. This is basic physics: it has to go through your skin (and skull!) to get to your brain, and your skin has similar electrical properties and worse cooling than your brain.
Source of the quote:
[1]: https://sci-hub.st/10.3390/ijerph16183406
[2]: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-mobile-insects-german.html
And anyway, heat is not some mysterious cancer-causing phenomena that's insufficiently studied by science. It's heat! You know, warmth. It's not only necessary for mammalian life, it's downright pleasant. People voluntarily put themselves in saunas, hot tubs, and pay to get hot stone massages. It's nice.
When it stops being nice, you can definitely tell! There's no need for "5G radiation" measurements with scientific instruments. When you're heated to the point that you take damage, it hurts. You have a built-in sensor for that. No need for lab tests.
If your phone isn't burning your hand, it's not burning your brain. It's just that simple.
PS: insects are 100% for certain being wiped out by pesticides, which are poisons specifically designed to kill insects. You'd have to have fantastically good evidence to argue that no-no-no-no, it's not the millions of tons of insect poison killing them, it's the microwaves that we've always used before, but suddenly they're deadly because they're used for mobile phones... slightly differently to how they've been used previously.
"...according to the study presented in Stuttgart, which is yet to be peer reviewed."
No peer review? Shocker.
Marie Curie doesn't realized "the hurt" as a test, for sure.
Nobody is talking just about the brain either, pesticides are a huge part of the equation, it's a no brainer. But EM pollution is not easily dismissible. You know, this is the problem with the subject, people should talk a lot more about possible long-term implications of every new tech deployed. Peer reviewing is a slow process, I'm happy that there's at least research being conducted seriously.
Just because some things are a mystery to you, doesn't make them have mysterious properties.
Microwaves cause heating. That's why we have an appliance that generates them in our kitchens. Heating is nice, to a point, afterwards it's very obvious that it's too much.
No mobile phone, has anywhere, ever, burnt someone through microwave radiation. Not 3G, not 4G, not 5G, not any # G. The power levels are just too low. It's like trying to do a spot weld with a laser pointer.
Meanwhile, high-power radar has warning signs on it, because -- duh -- it's powerful enough to cause burns: https://www.safetysign.com/rf-warning-signs
It's not some magical property of radar or 5G that does this! It's just the power level. No mystery. You turn it down... you don't get hurt.
Polarization: A Key Difference between Man-made and Natural Electromagnetic Fields, in regard to Biological Activity [0]
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914
We use ultraviolet radiation (750 THz range) to kill germs:
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and...
Or lower RF (40Mhz) to transfer heat and kill germs in foods:
https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma...
However I do see papers like https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531 which talk about 'voltage gated calcium channels' etc. being affected. It seems to be a very complex subject...
It is either there or it's not.
I'm worried I'm having knee jerk reaction dismissing this as not evidence that 5g could be harmful because of the sheer amount of total nonsense 5G conspiracy theories I've also been exposed to.
Especially interesting was someone mentioning potential affects on insects, who do have much thinner barriers between air and their internal organs/brains.
This study was done on cow brain tissue outside of a skull cavity and found that in certain specific circumstances the radio frequencies used by 5G can transmit energy to brain tissues and pathways that warrant further study. That's all this paper says and it's methodology appears to be pretty credible for the conclusion reached. In somewhat of a rarity these days, this appears to be "good science".
People harp on about tobacco, but the evidence for illness caused by smoking was immediately evident the first time it was examined.
These days even school kids learning about statistics can download the data and see the correlation.
However any correlation between EM and health has never been detected in spite of hundreds of careful studies.
Also the 5G appeal in europe, over 230 scientists from more than 40 countries have expressed their “serious concerns” regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF generated by electric and wireless devices already before the additional 5G roll-out. [1]
[1]: https://www.5gappeal.eu/
In fact they completely discredit themselves in their first paragraph:
They clearly don't understand that 5G is a modulation mode, which can operate on any of the existing phone bands.
And of course they offer no evidence that modulation is relevant.
Secondly, the whole point of 5G is to replace the existing high-powered phone bases with multiple sources using much lower power.
So if anything 5G will dramatically reduce the average power levels.
It's pretty obvious that their push for a further study is a rather pointless scare campaign.
If they are so concerned, why don't they start a "fund-me" campaign and do their own study?
Designing a worthwhile study is surprisingly simple, and the equipment can be rented quite cheaply.
Whatever, there have already been a large number of independent and well funded studies, none of which have demonstrated a convincing correlation.
I believe that the issue of health and EMF is so important, that the issue must be decided by science and hard evidence.
The reality is that it would be easy to demonstrate a correlation if one did exist.
Humanity has lived with all kinds of EM radiation for a hundred years. Virtually all frequencies, power levels, and types of modulation.
If there was a risk, then a simple statistical study of health statistics v/s EM levels would quickly demonstrate it.
The scientific record shows many well funded and independent studies, however none have ever demonstrated a convincing correlation.
For example greenhouse gas emissions were not realised to be harmful for something like 146 years (from the beginning of the industrial revolution)
The effectiveness of green-houses and cold-frames has been known since medieval times.
And Wickipedia tells us that in the 1920's Joseph Fourier proposed that the "greenhouse effect" is responsible for the warming of the earth.
At any time after that, the amount of heating which would come from increased levels of CO2 (and other gasses) could have been directly calculated.
So none of this is at all controversial to atmospheric scientists.
About the only "unknown" was just how quickly our use of fossil fuels would alter the earths atmosphere.
However the actual level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been tracked since 1958 at the Mauna Loa Volcanic Observatory.