It's good we are not all the same, as to not put all of our eggs in one basket, that's why humans have varying tendency toward conservatism and liberalism.
Maybe in 30 years we will notice something interesting about Berkeley's population and a multivariate study could even isolate the effect of 5G. But probably not.
I agree, ideological diversity is important for the same reason genetic diversity is important: the results of protracted inbreeding are almost always catastrophic. The price of tolerating a lot of woo-woo and other nonsense buys us a society where we don't end up forcing people to recant heliocentric astronomy.
If you’re actually curious about the topic, this is an even-handed (reasonably well-informed) take on the matter from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBsP-bmDLOo
One of the interesting points in the video is that 5G’s high frequency band of 24-48GHz is _not_ well understood with studies. The typical cell phone radiation/cancer studies deal with the much lower-frequency bands (hundreds of MHz or 1-5GHz), but that doesn’t necessarily transfer to the new higher frequencies.
Per the video, it is known that frequencies that high can warm the skin and irritate the eyes if they’re at really high power, but it’s not known exactly what power threshold for such millimeter waves is considered “safe”, and the number of studies isn’t sufficient to completely dismiss any safety concerns. She’s not saying “5G isn’t safe”, but rather “5G hasn’t been completely determined safe yet because more studies are needed for the newer mm-wave spectrum” and “studies showing the safety of previous generations of cell phone radiation don’t necessarily apply to the new frequency band.”
It’s not necessarily alarm-worthy, but it’s more nuanced than just “crystal-worshipping hippies”…
If you think those frequencies are bad, you're not going to believe how high the frequencies are that are emitted by your computer display, at 1000s of times the power of a communications radio.
The logical connection is that assuming you don't worry about computer monitors and your television, inferring that we should take pause and analyse mm-waves in depth seems like a misplaced focus
Your computer monitors and television are not, in fact, radiating substantial modulated microwave and mm wave radiation. In the US, the FCC would have something to say about anybody shipping stuff that did.
We've known the basic physics answer to this for ages, yet even my old physics teacher in high school used to say that he's careful around a lot of electromagnetic radiation like WIFI router at home because he can't be sure it doesn't have an impact.
Empirical evidence always helps, but in the discussion around science results etc. people always seem to forget that there's another important type of evidence, which is the mechanical understanding of a model/system.
You don't really need empirical evidence to know what happens when you throw a ball in the air inside a locked box. Technically the laws of physics could magically change and produce a different outcome, but using your understanding of the mechanics of the underlying system you can predict that the ball is going to fall inside the box with a very low error rate.
Still relevant since this applies to the new covid vaccines as well for example. People worrying about their potential negative effects are worrying for nothing, since even lacking long term empirical evidence we know how they work and have a deep mechanical understanding of mRNA vaccines, and they are not going to cause issues, period.
Your link is one person identifying as sceptic and who just circles around to the "non-ionizing can't harm" claim, again. The other attacks the publishing journal. Where were you going with this?
None of the commenters seem to bother to discover that the science review in question looks at DNA-damage and oxidative-stress mediated through other pathways than direct ionization. As I said: its more about complex biology, than simple physics/chemistry. Its about the sum of parts, not the reductionism that plagues the field of RF and health.
Obviously if you have read their criticism its gets much further than "non-ionizing can't harm", its a criticism of the methods use to analyze data from other studies in cherry picking fashion, they did no actual testing themselves and could easily have statistical issues with the positive outcomes.
Again there is no conclusive proof that RF exposure causes adverse non-thermal effects at cell phone power levels or even much higher power levels let alone being able to explain a mechanism that would cause those non-reproducible effects.
If you have better information please post it, one paper from a questionable journal using questionable methods is not enough.
Would it be big news? Forgive me for asking but why does UVA/UVB radiation cause skin cancer if it's non-ionizing? Especially from controlled sources like tanning beds. There has to be some pathway of mitochondrial dsyregulation/dysfunction induced by non-ionizing radiation that leads to DNA damage that leads to cancer that we don't fully understand.
We don't understand what causes many types of cancers so I don't get the chemistry-knows-all stance.
UVBA/UVB are near ionizing, UVB is right at the transition point, they have enough energy to cause photochemical reactions that damage DNA but not enough to cause full ionization. The key concept is that it is based on the energy of the photons and that above a certain energy chemical reactions occur which can damage DNA.
Radio waves are way way below this level of energy so for them to cause a non thermal effect would mean some new effect we have never seen before anywhere. No one is ruling it out completely but it is very unlikely with no plausible mechanism or data to back it up while UVA/UVB is well understood with respect to photon energy which is related to the ionizing threshold.
> for them to cause a non thermal effect would mean some new effect we have never seen before anywhere
100% false. Practically everything that goes on in your body involves, one way or another, motion of ions in solution. Varying E-M fields induce electrical currents carried by such ions. Where and how matters.
It is always a grave mistake to confuse your entire lack of knowledge of a topic with certainty about it.
There is absolutely no proof that cellphone levels of power induce ion motion as you have described, I can find some theoretical work at much higher power levels that proposes it as a mechanism but is not definitive.
You need to do better than saying someone is wrong before proclaiming radical new information.
Either there is evidence, or there isn't. With entire absence if evidence, your protestations of impossibility are exposed as threadbare wishful thinking.
>since even lacking long term empirical evidence we know how they work and have a deep mechanical understanding of mRNA vaccines, and they are not going to cause issues, period.
Erm, our understanding of the mechanics of COVID vaccines has changed dramatically over the period since their introduction. Initially it was thought that they provided longterm immunity, now boosters. The manufacturer said that spike proteins would not escape the muscle. Pfizers own post marketing study shows that they spread thru out the body. In short, we do not have a deep understanding of the long term impacts, as evidenced by the unexpected drop in efficacy. It may be that so-called "leaky" vaccines such as the COVID vaccines, which do not produce neutralizing antibodies result in strains with worse potential lethality evolving, as is the what happened with Marek's disease in chickens. Initially, vaccine manufacturers and the CDC alike claimed that vaccines were producing neutralizing antibodies. Now 4 out of every 5 hospitalized cases of Covid in Canada have received their 1st, 2nd and third shots.
The primary endpoint of the Pfizer trial was any symptomatic disease. That means they would monitor participants for symptoms, and if they had any they would be PCR tested to make sure it was not something else. They claimed the lower end of the 95 confidence interval relative risk reduction was ~90%. You can look at the prescribing guide on the FDA's website for more details. J&J did moderate to severe disease as the primary endpoint though.
Shall we move on to the talking heads from public health institutions and the politicians? I mean, examples abound and this would be a lay-up. Google is your friend here.
But how can you be unaware of these claims after two years of drama over them in the global public square? Vaccine mandate propositions were largely predicated on the inflated expectations of efficacy - people lost their livelihoods over this. We’re not talking about flippant one-off statements here, but the confidence and endorsement that moves government and corporate policy.
> initially it was thought that they provided longterm immunity
I don't remember that ever being said. Initially it was HOPED that it might provide longterm immunity - but the vaccines were launched into a world where we still didn't have a conclusive answer to the question "can you get covid twice". If anybody was saying that, they were speaking beyond their knowledge.
As for the unexpected drop in efficacy, that is at least in part due to the fact that the covid-19 we're exposed to today is not the same covid-19 that the vaccine was targeted against.
For the record, I agree with your overall point - mRNA vaccines were not and are not a well understood system with no potential for unknown effects. But neither is covid and given the two unknowns, the vaccine seems the safer choice.
It should be noted that with Marek's disease we have no desire to create an actually healthful living environment which would reduce the prevalence of the disease in the population and instead have been raising billions of chickens PER YEAR in hideous filth with the understanding that we would be killing them before their environment did for 50 years to get where we are with Marek's and despite all this vaccinated chickens are still better off now than unvaccinated chickens were before the vaccine was invented.
Marek's doesn't make a good argument for vaccine skepticism because it represents a worst case arms race in which modern medicine was still by far the better choice. Also we aren't chickens and most diseases on average tend to become less damaging in order to spread better. Neither this average case nor the extreme case of Marek's are fate but the logical thing is to vaccinate and just keep swimming as it will obviously decrease mortality in the short and long term.
Moving on to the percentage of individuals in the hospitals in Canada being vaccinated.
You have entirely misunderstood the numbers if indeed your numbers are actually even accurate. Vaccination rate is very high in Canada around 90% with vulnerable groups being more like 95-98%.
Lets take this to the logical extreme. Imagine that out of one million people you are the only one unvaccinated and are hospitalized along with 100 vaccinated folks. Even in a world where vaccination decreased hospitalization by 99% you could accurately say that most of the people in the hospital were vaccinated as if that proved somehow that vaccines didn't work.
Indeed one expects with a successful vaccination campaign that eventually most of the people in the hospital are going to be vaccinated no matter how effective it is at keeping them out of it because almost all the vulnerable people are. In the last vaccine skeptic in the world universe you could instead look at which portion of each population is sick. In the vaccinated it would be 0.01% vs 100% of the unvaccinated giving the lie to the prior analysis.
Indeed the only reason to lean on that number is deliberate deception or utter failure to apprehend what the numbers mean.
As someone deep into middle age with plenty of friends in their 50s, I strongly encourage young people to pay particular attention to their time spent in the sun. It is extremely obvious who has led a life outside without sun protection and who has spent most of their time indoors. It really does a number on your skin, especially your face (and scalp, if you are follicle challenged).
What are the natural background levels of RF vs. sunlight from an evolutionary perspective? Consider whether organisms would spend energy evolving protections against a dominant spectrum of wavelengths vs. hardly measurable spectrum.
Also, consider that the net resulting incidence voltage from unpolarised sunlight amounts to near zero, whereas man-made RF is polarized.
Are you saying that we understand the biological effects and their mechanisms for non-ionizing radiation exposure, or that we should be careful because we don't know all of them (specifically mechanisms)?
In fact we don't understand their effects. And, we don't even understand what is important about details of the exposure. About all we do know is that modulation is critically important, and that certain modulations under certain conditions of very low power transfer have profound effects.
Ask literally any biologist whether you should expect to be able to calculate the effects on an organism of some stimulus using only physical formulas.
We know pretty precisely how much of a microwave radiation exposure will be absorbed in various kinds of living tissue. We know that the mechanism of absorption is via induced nanoampere currents. We know with certaintly that those nanoampere currents will all end up, finally, as heat.
We don't know all of the effects of the nanoampere currents produced by that absorption, otherwise. We do know that induced nanoampere currents can, under certain circumstances, have profound biological effects.
> About all we do know is that modulation is critically important, and that certain modulations under certain conditions of very low power transfer have profound effects.
Citation needed.
Seriously, the burden of proof is on you for such a statement.
And be precise, which modulations, which conditions, what effects.
"Certain" and "profound" are filler words in this situation. They mean nothing.
super late response, but I'm saying we understand. EM radiation from your router is just way too low energy to enact any changes in the atoms making up the molecules in you for even chemical let alone biological effects to start playing a role.
the only thing they can do is transfer some heat energy to you, orders of magnitude lower than your average light bulb in the office (certainly entirely incomparable to sunlight).
That, we don't know. We don't know because no one has studied it in any detail. What we do know is that you can't calculate biological consequences using known physics. Which should be obvious to anyone who knows any biology or physics.
I assume it was simply down to having a pre-existing, conveniently-accessible large set of potential participants to analyse, in the form of those involved in the UK Million Women Study (sponsored again by Oxford), who had been asked about their phone use all the way back in 2001.
A bit late. The “controversy” has left thousands of pages with spurious but believable arguments, unfounded hypotheses, and fallacious reasoning, along with more or less conclusive studies that can be used to argue for any point of view.
Politics and opinions move too fast. Science does catch up eventually, but by then a lot of people end up with ossified beliefs with a significant emotional investment that are hard to challenge.
That said, I’ll take any good study. It’s useful to have more data even with no new insight.
Study highlights: device usage 1 - 20 minutes per WEEK. Study population born 1935-1950, less likely as users of tech. No actual exposure data. Can't take this seriously.
Luckily there are boatloads of other studies that show the exact same outcome.
Here's one from 2016 [1]
Overall evaluations show that the current evidence for a causal association between cancer and exposure to mobile radiation is weak and unconvincing. Some of the studies establishing association had significant limitations and weaknesses and, therefore, remain unreliable. Studies have highlighted that using these phones for about 10 years is unlikely to cause cancer.
EDIT: I also know we aren't dealing with "spheres", but... I get the gist. Dipole antenna emits in this weird doughnut shape, but as a 3-dimensional object, we can estimate it to be kinda-sorta like a sphere :-)
Actually though, I think a sphere is still in a way the right object. The weird donut is a representation of the amount that is emitted in different directions - I guess it's a contour of equal intensity. But the radiation is still emitted at the speed of light in every direction. So the wavefront at any given time is a sphere (until it is defracted or reflected).
(Edited to add) unless you're thinking of a really big dipole, so you can't treat it as a point source? Or close to it.
> But the radiation is still emitted at the speed of light in every direction.
I think that makes sense.
> (Edited to add) unless you're thinking of a really big dipole, so you can't treat it as a point source?
Honestly, didn't think of that issue either. You're right though, some antennas (especially AM antennas) are the size of Godzilla, and its absurd to even think of them as point-sources.
No antenna is a perfect point omni emitter, the weird non spherical shapes like doughnuts is the antennas gain, almost are antennas are somewhat directional, the shape is a plot of the measured radiation around the antenna. You take advantage of the fact that it radiates more to the sides than up and down and orient that so it putting more power to the horizon rather than up into space (for terrestrial transmission).
The term gain is just referring to the antennas directionality relative to a perfect spherical omni radiator that doesn't exist.
Cell phones aren't "emitting" signals while in your pocket. They're largely receiving signals and sleeping.
We have many devices that emit 10Watts of EM radiation at us every day: we call them light bulbs or LEDs. Cell phones are only allowed to emit 3W IIRC.
It wouldn't surprise me if the screen has more EM than the radio.
False. Cell phones are emitting signals throughout the day, in bursts.
LEDs and light bulbs do not emit modulated microwaves. If the screen emitted substantial RF radiation, the FCC (and related agencies in other countries) would have something to say about it.
Light is further up the energy-line of electromagnetic radiation.
Least-dangerous -- Radio / Infrared / Visible Light / Ultraviolet / XRays / Gamma Rays -- Most energy/dangerous
All light-bulbs, screens, LEDs (etc. etc.) emit visible light. There's a couple of bands in there that might be more dangerous than others (ex: Microwaves specifically resonate with water), but for the most part, Gamma Rays are the most dangerous, and Radiowaves have the least effect on our body.
@dragontamer: "Radiowaves have the least effect on our body" - but what happens when you modulate them at a secondary, low frequency, that disturbs voltage-gated cell-membrane ion-channels?
Just hoping to pique your curiosity into the field of biology and away from hyper-reductionistic physics models.
> that disturbs voltage-gated cell-membrane ion-channels?
You're begging the question.
You could have more easily stated your opinion as "low frequency radio waves disturb cells". Which is fundamentally false. There are lots of radio-waves being used around the world: RADAR systems, Radio-headquarter units... as well as people who live nearby radio-towers (TV, AM Radio, FM Radio), and cell phones.
Do you think WW2 units fielded with SCR-300 (World War 2 backpack radio) had increased amounts of cell membrane damage associated with them?
Your phone emits full transmit power, while in your pocket, in very short bursts.
Experiments with E-M effects on biology show that changes in current matter more than steady current. So, the effect of pulses could be larger than if it actually were transmitting full-time. We just don't know.
If you believe AC cannot be, at the same time, steady current, you are in for many more surprises. If you think your cell phone antenna picks up signals by some sort of "heating effect", you are in for many more surprises.
In fact all varying E-M fields induce electrical currents where they are absorbed. The effects of those electrical currents vary in myriad ways, depending both on the currents and on where they are absorbed. In living matter the currents are carried by motion of ions in solution. Not coincidentally, life is conducted largely by motion of ions in solution.
How is alternating current steady when varies in magnitude? There is no current flowing on a zero crossing, there is a reason AC and radio use RMS current, are you sure you know what your talking about?
Incidentally the ADC's that sample the input dissipate the electrical energy captured by the antenna as heat however little it may be as is the case with all electrical circuits that sink electrical energy. So yes your cellphone does use a "heating effect" because where else does the energy go? Do you think it charges the battery or emits light with the captured energy?
All energy, no matter where absorbed, ends up as heat. So, the heat is meaningless to talk about unless you are making popcorn.
It is not the heat, at the end, that makes your phone work. You may read up on how antennas work, if you care to have any actual, you know, facts. I promise it won't say one word about heat.
No the ADC use resistors to measure voltage, resistors turn electric energy into thermal energy, they literally use how much time it takes to dissipate electricity as heat to measure voltage.
I know someone who needs to read up on antennas and digital receivers and its not me.
Radio receivers do not depend on an analog to digital converter, or even a resistor, to extract a signal from an antenna. The essential component is a diode.
(That is not to say that, having detected, amplified, and demodulated an antenna signal, the result won't finally drive an A/D converter; you can drive anything you want to after all that. Even a speaker. But operation of the speaker, too, does not depend in any way on heat.)
Digital receivers which are in cellphones are most certainly based on A/D convertors which is what you originally referenced. All captured antenna energy is dissipated as heat through resistance in order to extract useful information and convert it into the digital domain.
Even in a analog receiver the power amplifiers used to drive a speaker or whatever are going to dissipate the signals power as heat in order to modulate the amplifiers output power (out power will always be less than power supply power).
If you are talking about a crystal radio, then yes the input power drives a speaker and is turned into sound instead (along with some power lost heat in the circuits resistance).
Such aggressive ad hominem attacks are not warranted, you want to dispute my position then have some class, its ok if you don't know how radio receivers work.
> The Wilkinson ADC is based on the comparison of an input voltage with that produced by a charging capacitor. The capacitor is allowed to charge until a comparator determines it matches the input voltage. Then, the capacitor is discharged linearly. The time required to discharge the capacitor is proportional to the amplitude of the input voltage. While the capacitor is discharging, pulses from a high-frequency oscillator clock are counted by a register. The number of clock pulses recorded in the register is also proportional to the input voltage.
The capacitor is discharged using a resistor of known value.
Also take it down to the comparator level which basically all ADC use the op-amps use transistors and resistors and are themselves dissipating the input power in order to measure voltage.
The word transistor is a contraction of transfer resistance, they are electronically variable resistors and as everyone knows dissipate power as heat during function.
I guess my degree in electrical engineering was a waste of time.
In no reference to electronics of radio reception, anywhere in the world, will you find even a single formula or equation with a reference to a change in temperature of a component being involved in detecting a signal. Period. None anywhere. No exceptions.
Also, nowhere in any reference on the operation of a cell phone will you find so much as a single analog-to-digital converter attached to its microwave antenna. Nowhere. Not one. No exceptions.
Your profound and aggressive ignorance is on display for all to see, and recorded for posterity.
Sorry. I always feel like a person opens themselves to this type of feedback after they attempt to assert their own subject matter authority, as has been done here.
I hear you! But these feelings are so common that if they justify breaking the guidelines, we might as well have no guidelines. Everyone always feels like the other person started it and did worse, and that their own contribution is always defensive and not-as-bad. Acting on that is a recipe for a downward spiral: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&da....
It follows that everyone needs to stick to the intended spirit of the site no matter how badly others are behaving or you feel they are. That's not easy of course. But it's the only way for this place not to destroy itself.
You also posted an astonishing number of these off-topic, nasty comments in this thread. That is one of the worst things you can do on HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Please don't stoop to this again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, and regardless of how provocative another comment was. Instead, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.
Yikes—your posts in this thread ended up going way outside what's acceptable here. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, stick to the rules from now on, and never stoop to this kind of thing again, we'd be grateful. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
After reading your comment a few times, I think now I understand the misunderstanding. There are two interpretations:
A) The main method that use a ADC to work is heating a resistance and then measuring the temperature or the time to cool down or something like that. [1]
B) As a side effect of the internal working, the ADC produce heat. The heat is not important for the operation, but it's an inevitable side effect.
My opinion: A) No, B) Yes
Can you both please answer A) and B) with "Yes" or "No"?
The population born in 1935-1950 is walking around the population of the people that did grow up with tech though. Their exposure is almost a certainty because cell towers didn't exist before 1979 in Japan. Now they're basically ubiquitous and unlike cell phones of the 80s which only transmitted when you were making a call, modern cell phones are constantly transmitting to maintain internet connection.
Rates of brain cancer before and after the 80s and 90s should've shown some sort of statistically significant spike in brain tumors if cell phones were an issue but it didn't because they're not. 800-2000MHz seems like a lot but radiation doesn't cause ionization until you get to the 2400 terahertz range. There's literally no mechanism known to PHYSICS that would result in cell phone radiation causing brain tumors.
> There's literally no mechanism known to PHYSICS that would result in cell phone radiation causing brain tumors.
False. We don't know that any form of microwave radiation can induce brain tumors, but we certainly don't now that they can't. It needs experiments, which are being performed (on the public) as I write this.
What we do know is that microwave radiation induces nanoampere currents where absorbed. The exact details of the currents, and where and how absorbed determines their effects. Insisting PHYSICS is a legitimate substitute for experimention is a failing that has become increasingly common, lately.
You didn't actually propose a mechanism that describes how this proposed effect causes damage to DNA and causes cancer and I'm not your Google-scholar to search for that for you. Provide evidence, here's mine:
"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of
brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of
the head and neck region." - European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks, 2015
There has never before been any substantial exposure to the wavelengths used for 5G, so there is exactly zero epidemiological data to consult.
We don't know what will happen, but we will find out, in time. Previous generations seem to have turned out OK. All we can be certain of is that, if anyone is harmed, no one will go to jail for it. Like the people putting lead in gasoline and paint, no one involved will have their retirement even slightly inconvenienced. (Unless, of course, they are personally harmed by it.)
Do I think harm is likely? I have no information to form an opinion from, so I would be guessing, just like everybody who insists it is all just fine. What I do know is that everyone who insists they know is lying.
We actually do in radar systems which range between 400 Mhz and 36 Ghz. We've also had 2.4 and 5 ghz wifi and other rf protocols ubiquitously deployed for years. Did you even look at my reference? It's a systematic review of 100s of studys several of which cover frequencies between 2.4gz to as high as 300 ghz. There's tons of them in there and the conclusion still came to no known mechanism for harm or observed harm. You are literally making assertions that research hasn't been done when it absolutely has and you're just being stubbornly assertive about something that's factually incorrect.
And this is the opposite of leaded gasoline because the first study that suggested a harmful mechanism was verifiable and produced reproducible results with a mechanism that was reasonable and testable.
The many hypothetical harms from RFR have been tested extensively and found no observable harm or mechanism for harm below the ionizing range of EM radiation.
You're just expressing doubt with arguments that are vague and untestable which is reasonable because all the testable hypothesis have been investigated.
Propose a mechanism for harm and provide evidence that it's actually happening. If we held off on advancing technology over fear, uncertainty, and doubt arguments like this we'd get no where.
You assume that work on 0.9 and 2.4GHz with 3G modulation generalizes to 20GHz and 5G modulation. But there is absolutely no reason to imagine so.
Every single modulation scheme has a completely different risk profile than every other. But almost every study starts out assuming that only heating can have any effect at all, and modulation never any, pre-loading failure.
It is equivalent to saying, "We tried some plants that turned out safe to eat. Therefore, all plants are safe to eat." No. Details matter. Wishing is opposite of facts. Facts are often inconvenient.
We conducted the analog, 2G, 3G, and 4G experiments on the general public, and they appear to have turned out OK--to the extent anybody has checked. Cancer is far from the only public health problem. Is anybody even looking at others? Auto-immune illnesses are way up, and could be caused by any of thousands of untested chemicals, or non-ionizing radiation, or hygiene, or some unholy combination. Who is even checking?
We will now run the 5G experiment on the public, and see again. Or, fail to see, for not looking even after the fact.
Does anybody even have a use for 5G, besides the telecomm companies hustling equipment? 4G barely works for me, most of the time. But I will certainly end up being made to pay for 5G, useful or not, because what I need is the very last consideration.
@nuvious Apparently, it ain't that simple. If you lump together all brain tumour types, you won't see much happening, but once you split the stats into tumour types an interesting picture emerges. The incidence of glioblastoma's increases at pretty much the same rate as more benign types decrease in incidence. What to make of that? Well, something ubiquitous in the environment seems to be "upgrading" benign tumours into aggressive malign tumours. UK scientists did some work on this, here: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2018/7910754/
I don't have an argument against that observation, but it's agnostic to my concern in people discussing RF as a risk to brain cancer. The rise in rates is an observation and probably a good one but they intentionally do not try to ascribe a cause in that study.
The potential causal mechanisms have been studied for a long time to contrast:
"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of
brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of
the head and neck region." - European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks, 2015
What I care about is people ascribing a casual effect by conjecture alone, especially when the research has actually been done to assess the probability/impact of a proposed mechanism. In all flavors and frequencies in the RF spectrum, this has turned up basically zero probability, uncertain impact (because how do you measure rhe impact on something that never happens), yielding zero risk out the other end.
Doesn't a person get more EM radiation from living under high tension lines than from a phone anyway? If there are no cancer clusters around them, I don't see how this idea ever got legs in the first place.
Which is why microwaves are known to be safe because they are lower frequency than even light so the only known biological effect is heating which is purely a function of watts per kg exposure.
Microwaves are not, in fact, known to be safe. About all we can have confidence about is that entirely unmodulated low-power microwaves seem to have little effect, and the modulation already used for the various generations of cell phones cause not very much trouble.
We have certainty that exposure to some E-M field modulations have profound effects.
The only known effect of microwaves is heating which is purely based on power hence why we cook food with them. They are also good at transmitting information quickly so we also use them at 4 orders of magnitude lower power in your cellphone. Its does heat the side of your head up a tiny bit about the same as if you held a small flashing LED light up to it.
So yes microwaves are indeed known to be safe at cell/wifi power levels unless you have data that shows otherwise then we need to figure how it causes damage in a non-thermal way.
You are 100% wrong on every detail (except that microwaves can be used to transmit information).
Your assumption that you know everything about a topic just because you don't know of anything that contradicts your beliefs is a condition we call profound ignorance.
Admitting your total ignorance of the topic could be seen as progress. But I doubt it will keep you from announcing certainty again almost immediately.
But you only seem to be pointing at the "the great unknown", yet we don't have a huge,sudden increase in cancers and other things associated with EM radiation by those who are concerned about it. Science is about proving things and speaking with authority on that. I can sling "what ifs" all day long and it's almost useless unless I have an intention to act on it and prove or disprove it.
The first and by far most important step in learning, as in science, is acknowledging that you do not already know the answer.
The subject here is people insisting, on the basis solely of wholesale ignorance of the whole subject, that they know all the answers.
We don't have any evidence whatsoever whether radiation from upcoming generations of cellphone will stimulate cancer growth, or cooties. People who insist, on basis of that entire lack of evidence, that they know it doesn't are the immediate problem.
Ultimately, whether opposition will turn out to have been right depends on things literally nobody has checked on. Never, in the history of life on earth up until just a few decades ago, had any organism been exposed to any hint of the radiation used for 5G cell phones.
If, in fact, it does turn out to be harmful, not having conducted so much as one test of any kind should figure in the prosecution of the people who promoted 5G and who worked to suppress opposition to it.
Thalidomide anyway went through a testing process. Pesticides don't. Yet, each time one is discovered to be carcinogenic or teratogenic, nobody is prosecuted. They count on that.
Who even holds their phone to their head anymore?
Everyone I see only uses bluetooth.
Seriously, how can you understand the inverse square law and be afraid of EM?
There are too many unknowns in biology for me to 100% dismiss the idea. I use a phone, I'm not worried about it - but it also wouldn't surprise me if there were mechanisms we are not yet aware of at play. e.g. specific frequencies that can do harm even at low levels.
I also know we don't have good quality baselines. Cell phones have only been here for 30-ish years, during a time when the resolution and detail at which we delineate and diagnose disease has gone up dramatically. There are diseases and conditions we know about today that didn't know about then. Until we understand all the mechanisms of those diseases - it's bad science to entirely dismiss EM radiation because of "inverse square law".
Similar view here. No harm in using a phone and no harm reducing exposure using basic techniques like speaker phone, not talking on it in the car, scheduling your router wifi to turn off during the hours you don't plan on using it, etc.
>No harm in using a phone and no harm reducing exposure using basic techniques like speaker phone
...except if you're in a room/bus and you're disturbing everyone by being on speaker phone.
>not talking on it in the car
What's the point of this? Are you trying to avoid brain cancer or distracted driving?
>scheduling your router wifi to turn off during the hours you don't plan on using it, etc.
I mean, if you want to go through the effort to set this up, that's your prerogative. I'd probably put more effort into chucking out the 1200W microwave before worrying about the 0.1W coming from router.
"except if you're in a room/bus and you're disturbing everyone by being on speaker phone."
You're likely disturbing everyone even if you're not on speaker. In general, I'm not going to talk on a phone in a crowded location unless I have to. This is one very small edge case which I don't see affecting my claim that it doesn't hurt to use speaker phone.
"What's the point of this? Are you trying to avoid brain cancer or distracted driving?"
Cars act as weak Faraday cages. Using a phone inside a car increases the power output required to reach the tower. Similar if you are in a low reception area.
"I mean, if you want to go through the effort to set this up, that's your prerogative."
It takes maybe 5 minutes to log into your router and set the schedule. Not much effort at all.
"I'd probably put more effort into chucking out the 1200W microwave before worrying about the 0.1W coming from router."
Why? You realize the microwaves are contained to to inside of the machine by it's shielding, right? The allowable lifetime escape limit is set at 5mW.
Routers can have much higher power output than that. I think the US limit is 1W. This is also something that runs almost continuously as compared to a microwave that runs for maybe a few minutes per day.
>You're likely disturbing everyone even if you're not on speaker.
yeah but in addition to one guy speaking normally half the time, you also hear a distorted voice coming out of the shitty speakerphone the other half of the time.
>Cars act as weak Faraday cages. Using a phone inside a car increases the power output required to reach the tower. Similar if you are in a low reception area.
That's partially canceled out by being able to use hands-free calling in your car, and placing the phone on the other side of the car. I suspect the inverse square law will cause you to get less radiation exposure than you holding the phone using your arms.
>It takes maybe 5 minutes to log into your router and set the schedule. Not much effort at all.
the "effort" also includes the time you have to fiddle with your router to turn it on when you need wifi during the night for whatever reason.
>Why? You realize the microwaves are contained to to inside of the machine by it's shielding, right? The allowable lifetime escape limit is set at 5mW.
yet, when I place my phone inside the microwave it still gets wifi reception (yes, I tested it with 2.4ghz wifi only).
>Routers can have much higher power output than that. I think the US limit is 1W. This is also something that runs almost continuously as compared to a microwave that runs for maybe a few minutes per day.
inverse square law applies here. chances are when you're operating a microwave you'll be standing near by. at the very least you need to be next to it to turn it on. meanwhile the router is probably tucked in some corner of your house.
also, I suspect you can apply the "runs for maybe a few minutes per day" argument to wifi as well. if you're not torrenting on your wifi 24/7, it's probably not pumping 1W 24/7.
Microwave oven leakage exposure, while it can be quite large compared to a cell phone's average radiated power, is not modulated. So, the small amount of research we have, which almost all tested wholly unmodulated radiation, suggests that it would have little or no effect.
About the phone, we don't have any good information. That doesn't stop people from insisting they, personally, know, without any.
"Microwave oven leakage exposure, while it can be quite large compared to a cell phone's average radiated power,"
Is this really true under most circumstances? I think lifetime leakage limit is set at 5mW for microwaves and a cellphone is much higher during tx at around 800mW.
"yeah but in addition to one guy speaking normally half the time, you also hear a distorted voice coming out of the shitty speakerphone the other half of the time."
True. I suppose what I'm saying is that with proper etiquette this shouldn't be issue, at least not often.
"the "effort" also includes the time you have to fiddle with your router to turn it on when you need wifi during the night for whatever reason."
This has never been an issue for me for 10 year of doing this.
"That's partially canceled out by being able to use hands-free calling in your car, and placing the phone on the other side of the car. I suspect the inverse square law will cause you to get less radiation exposure than you holding the phone using your arms."
True. However, if we are comparing being in a car to not being in a car, then you would still have more exposure (eg putting on the other side of the room vs other side of the car. Plus, many cars are no bigger than arms length, and of you can put it further than that, toad noise becomes an issue.
"yet, when I place my phone inside the microwave it still gets wifi reception (yes, I tested it with 2.4ghz wifi only)."
Perhaps you should have it tested and get a new one if it's not conforming to safety specs. However, my guess is that since it isn't causing interference with you or your neighbors phone that it's really just a slight difference in the frequency the shielding is designed for.
"inverse square law applies here."
As it does for the microwave. Im frankly tired of everyone going "inverse square law" with nothing substantive. How about you crunch the numbers for someone 3 feet from a microwave at 5mW and someone 15 feet from a 1W router and tell me what you get... just because a concept is true does not mean you are correctly applying it in your argument.
"also, I suspect you can apply the "runs for maybe a few minutes per day" argument to wifi as well. if you're not torrenting on your wifi 24/7, it's probably not pumping 1W 24/7."
Well, routers are generally transmitting multiple times per second just for the beacon/name (yes, probably at 1W since TX rate is gwnerally separate from TX power). How many minutes per day does your household use on wireless internet vs the microwave? I'm guessing it's a close to a factor of 10 difference. How many minutes do you use either during your typical sleep hours? Even if you're TX is 5% of the time during 6 core sleeping hours, that's likely to approach the amount of time you use your microwave.
The act of having the discussion not just the act of pushing buttons or holding the phone is the primary distraction. Anyone using hands free for safety is doing safety wrong. You might as well be driving drunk for the duration of the conversation.
You are constantly bathed in your neighbors wifi, emf from nearly cell phone towers and even more intense from the sun. Scheduling your routers wifi to turn off is absolute nonsense.
Not everyone lives close enough for their neighbor's wifi.
These comparisons are very sloppy. Different frequencies act differently, have different limits of exposure, and have different effects. First you need to establish which frequencies are comparable or fit the same category/type. Then you have to set exposure limits (acute and cumulative). Reducing one's RF exposure by 5mW (1W at 15 feet) while one sleeps could be significant in these respects depending on what those limits and baseline exposures are. The fact is, there is little known about the mechanisms and the limits. For example, why does glucose metabolism increase in the brain when exposed to cell RF and how does that increased glucose metabolism affect the rest of the biological system it's a part of? (Honest question. It's something that I found interesting but seems it's lacking research.)
My point was that it doesn't hurt to take basic steps like turning off wifi or using speaker phone. We can show that it measurably reduces exposure, but we don't know if it helps or makes a difference when it comes to outcomes.
Who wants to when you have an inkling to use your computer go to the bother of going to a hard wired computer and turning on the network. It is an absolutely ridiculous workflow which we have absolutely no reason to believe has any benefit whatsoever. You might as well hop on one foot and turn in a circle while making the sign of the evil eye.
"You might as well hop on one foot and turn in a circle while making the sign of the evil eye."
Any evidence to support that?
I've run my wireless on a schedule for about 10 years. I've never had any problems, nor has the workflow been ridiculous. The wired network stays on, which is what I primary use for everything except the phone or occasional laptop use. What exactly do you envision needing the wifi for when waking up in the middle of the night?
That's part of the logic - if you're looking to reduce exposure then designing your network to be primarily wired is part of that, which is usually easy. Generally it provides better performance (eg gaming) or options (PoE cameras) anyways.
Oh I absolutely believe in wiring everything stationary. That doesn't need justification beyond reliability and performance.
I'm talking about the logical inconsistency of scheduling wifi to avoid exposure. Your phone used without headset or speaker is a cm from your brain putting out up to 2W and your wifi access point conversely is 1/10th of a watt 30 meters away. You are getting up to 180 million times less exposure than up against your head.
Comparing speakerphone usage 15cm away isn't much better. It's up to 800,000 times the exposure vs your wifi.
If that is dangerous enough to schedule your phone logically needs to go straight in the trash.
You are underestimating how low energy your wifi is and how much the difference the distance makes.
"wifi access point conversely is 1/10th of a watt 30 meters away."
Not in the US I guess? Also 30m is a massive house. In the US routers are 1W (although I believe many could reduce it per device with the newer tech, but many still have set limits; although this is also true of the 2W you mention for cell).
"You are underestimating how low energy your wifi is and how much the difference the distance makes."
My house is not 30m in any dimension. Probably about 5m router to bed, and that's one of the longest distance in the house. I don't think I am overestimating router power for my region. US limits are about 10x higher than Europe for wifi, while i believe Europe is about .4W higher for cell tx allowance.
You mention power and distance. What about time for cumulative exposure?
"15cm away"
I think this is underestimating speaker phone usage. Usually I keep it .75-1m away from me. 15cm is very close and not even worth using at that distance.
"I'm talking about the logical inconsistency of scheduling wifi to avoid exposure."
Not avoid, but reduce. The biggest point,since you brought up logic: baseline-5mW < baseline. There is a quantifiable reduction, at no cost (in my experience/situation, since I'm not using it at that time). Eliminating cell usage would require a cost (in my situation). So I accept that exposure with mitigating factors, like speaker phone and not sleeping with it next to my head. Likewise, I am a ham and except that exposure with mitigating factors (ground planes to limit RF back into the house, typically 1W but always QRP, and compared to cell phones it's about 1/2 the RF since isn't not full duplex), even though I don't use it very often.
You could limit your exposure more by not putting your router in the same room as your bed more so than scheduling it.
Of course the whole exercise is somewhat like playing like the floor is lava and hopping from couch to chair as a kid nothing happens when you fall unless you break a lamp on the way down.
"You could limit your exposure more by not putting your router in the same room as your bed more so than scheduling it."
It's not. I just don't have a huge house.
"There is no evidence of injury by virtue of WiFi."
The research seems to be mixed when searching PubMed. At the very least, there are confirmed biological effects for microwave RF for which we don't understand the mechanisms or their implications (eg increased cellular glucose metabolism). To me, these unknowns warrant some caution, especially if I can make reductions in exposure without any reduction in utility.
It’s not moving the goalpost to say that OP’s dismissal of risk (because inverse square law) is imo just a little bit too broad. I know it’s not moving the goalpost because there is no goal. I’m not trying to win or defeat anyone or anything - i’m just trying to talk about an interesting topic.
I absolutely hate bluetooth. I'm not walking around with something in my ear at all times nor rushing to shove one in when I get a call. Do you wear your bluetooth headset at all times?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That said, if we start with the premise that
> Mobile phones emit radio frequency waves which, if absorbed by tissues, can cause heating and damage
then there is no need to do a study. Knowing transmitted power, frequency, distance, SAR, and thermal conductivity of human tissues we can calculate how big the change in temperature can be (should be way less than one degree, not enough to cause any damage).
Assuming that the only possible effect is heating guarantees not learning anything.
Modulated E-M radiation has been demonstrated to produce profound biological effects that cannot be accounted for by heating. Each of an infinite variety of modulations has its own effect, most of them probably negligible. The ones that do have effect are the ones that are interesting.
Back in the 80s, I attended a talk in Hungary where an American biologist showed growing beetle larvae to 4x normal size under magnetic stimulation. No heating there. At the time somebody in the US was succeeding, over many decades, in suppressing almost all research into biological effects of E-M exposure. About the only person with a free hand was George Becker, author of The Body Electric, because he worked for the Veterans Administration on what they hoped would lead to limb regeneration.
Every controlled study of microwave exposure I have encountered used entirely unmodulated radiation at a single frequency, which is where we would expect the least effect.
"Being unsure (about the roundness of the earth, about the age of the world, about the origin of humans, about who built the pyramids, etc.) is better, anyway, than feeling sure of something false."
The burden of proof is still on the one claming the existence of something.
The burden of proof is on the person claiming a thing, existence or no. Insisting something does not happen, in the total absence of evidence, is exactly as wrong as claiming it does happen.
Knowing there is no much evidence, it is absolutely dishonest to make the claim. The honest statement is that nobody knows.
Very well, in that case, since there isn't much evidence, the honest claim is that you do not exist. For all I know, I am a brain in a vat and you are just a figment of my imagination.
Playing the solipsism game does not make for a productive conversation.
The linked article shows biological effects of low frequency electromagnetic fields, then argues that cell phone signals contain low frequency components "in the form of on/off pulsations, modulation, and signal variability". But cell phones cannot really transmit at low frequencies because their antennas are too small compared to the wavelength. That's why they use high frequency carrier and modulate it. If you look at the spectrum of the transmitted signal, there's almost nothing at the low end.
For this effect to exist, something in the living cells need to rectify the high-frequency radio signal. I wonder what it is. There are no semiconductors or p-n junctions inside the cells. There are bug detectors that work by using this principle, and they are not triggered by living tissue.
Was anybody actually making the claim that increased cancer rates were due to heat? I always thought the idea was that electromagnetic fields by themselves can be genotoxic.
It doesn't seem like the causality is something very mysterious either, we know electromagnetic fields have an effect on chemistry. It's the very nature of molecules to be affected by electromagnetism, so the idea that DNA can be damaged by electromagnetic fields isn't much of a stretch...
High-frequency electromagnetic field aka ionizing radiation (X-ray, gamma) is well known to be genotoxic because it can break molecular bonds. The question is how non-ionizing radiation can affect molecular structure, if not by heating. I don't think there is a well-understood mechanism of such effect.
When talking about RF effect on living things it helps to take a step back and look at the bigger picture: biology. Consider secondary effects like RF causing overproduction of reactive-oxygen-species (free radicals) leading to damage in exposed cells. Its well documented now. If you care to look.
That's a lucky outcome of a very public, impromptu experiment.
Each new version has a different modulation profile. Biological effects of E-M exposure at sub-heating levels depend utterly on modulation. Analog, gen 2, gen 3, gen 4, now gen 5, are all different and on a random collection of frequency bands. Gen 5 uses a band not used before.
There is no reason to think results from one modulation scheme and frequency band would match those from another.
What does “There’s no reason to think…” mean in this argument?
What burden of proof does this line of reasoning impose? We are supposed to provide the absence of an effect every time a modulation scheme changes, or otherwise must assume just the latest scheme is somehow a novel deadly cocktail?
It means that negative results for existing phones tells you literally nothing about effects of 5G phones. We are embarking on another very large-scale experiment on the general public, whose consequences will not be known for, most likely, decades, unless any harm is actually very large.
Assuming it is not a novel deadly cocktail makes exactly as much sense as assuming it is one. We are in a condition of total ignorance, and have done nothing to reduce that ignorance.
Just looking at macro trends: cell phone usage has exploded, have we seen a similar explosion in brain tumors over the last two decades or so? Anybody knows where to get this data?
All kinds of tumors have exploded in recent decades. Nobody knows why, specifically. We know of lots of mutagenic and teratogenic toxins recently introduced, including BPA and its analogs, thousands of pesticides, PFAs, hormone analogs, you name it, that pervade our water systems, food sources, and lived environments.
What, that we are all exposed to BPAs, PFAs, and thousands of other poorly-understood industrial chemicals? That many nobody can avoid are known to be teratogenic at very low concentration?
That's one theory. But it is contradicted by facts, in detail.
For example, a growing variety of cancers turn out to be induced by HPV, human papilloma virus. (The cancers were mostly there already, but we don't know they are caused by HPV without a lot of work.) Any cancer caused by HPV is one you will not get without exposure, regardless of your age.
Nobody can say, with any justifiable confidence, whether it is a bad idea. Maybe you will find out.
But there is quite a lot of research suggesting that doomscrolling in bed is psychologically harmful. Leave the phone in the other room, for sanity's sake.
Staring at electronic displays is generally considered unhelpful for trying to get to sleep due to both the light and rapid-attention span activities, having it under the pillow is probably equally harmless as the dozen other EMF sources around your bedroom.
Unless the lithium battery catches fire. That might be bad for you.
I have yet to see any evidence for it doing harm or seen anything pointing towards a mechanism for harm. Not only is your phone transceiver pretty weak, usually 3W or less, but it is also running far below even visible light on the EM spectrum. If we aren't concerned about a 3 watt LED shining light on you, I don't think there is any reason to worry about far less energetic EM waves. And people have been trying to find proof of harmful effects from low level radio emissions since radio transceivers were invented. If there is an effect at all, which has yet to be shown, it must be absolutely minuscule to go completely unknown despite endless studies on it.
Your ignorance of an effect is not the same as lack of effect. And, your demonstrated entire ignorance of the mechanism of absorption of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation in living tissue inspires no confidence in your judgment.
Nothing so reliably induces non-biologists to insist they are certain of facts no competent biologist would confidently speculate on as talk of microwave radiation.
Do people even put their mobile phone up to their head enough any more that we are worried about this? I would be more worried at this point about cancer risk to my other regions......
Not really all that worried at all though - just saying
We really need studies on the 5G small cell radios that are right outside people's apartment windows. Would also like to know if wearing bluetooth headphones all day is a risk.
The amount of time I spend actually talking on my phone has dropped by about 90% since ~2004. Now that we've entered the covid/pandemic WFH era my phone mostly lives on a desk/table 18-24" from me. Mostly using 5ghz local wifi. The radiation profile has changed dramatically.
We had a physics teacher who thought cell phones may cause brain damage and my immediate thought was to ask him about the electron well discussion we had had previously when discussing ionizing radiation and how the mechanism for damage from cell phone waves was basically impossible. He still stuck to his concern but didn't offer up a proposed mechanism for harm.
The radio waves used for cell phones are between about 800 and 2000 Mhz. Visible light which we all know is not a concern is 490 to 790...terahertz. You don't get to ionizing radiation until you get to roughly 2400 terahertz which is roughly 10 eV.
Was very frustrating learning all that physics just for dumbasses to claim your brain was getting fried so they could sell you a sticker with a metal screen for $40 that does nothing.
1 watt laser can burn through your eyeball. 1 watt regular LED is a fun Christmas decoration.
Details matter.
There are theories that radio waves can activate small nerve fibres that are located closely to the edge of your skin, where EMF can penetrate, even if only couple millimetres deep.
Those nerve fibres are often located near the mast cells, which form part of your innantr immune system, and have a two-way communication with your CNS via these fibers.
Constant inflammation driven by mast cells is a proven cause of autoimmune disease and increased risks of cancer, osteoporosis, many other chronic illness.
It’s not just ionisation that can do that. That’s only one mechanism. Induce enough inflammation and you could have risks of cancer go up, and not only locally, like skin cancer, but systemically as well, because the immune cells release mediators into the systemic circulation, and in rare cases even causes anaphylaxis, like with solar urticaria: https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/what-is-s...
Masers are cool. My dad worked in an optics lab that used Masers in college and they used Styrofoam for lenses because it's transparent in the microwave spectrum and induces refraction well.
>There are other mechanisms by which non-ionizing radiation can induce cancers, such as the one I've described.
Link please, there are no proven mechanisms such as you describe I am aware of. Your only link points to sun exposure and UVB rays which are near ionizing and cause cancer through DNA damage based on photon energy.
Your example of a laser vs led is on point because its purely based on inverse-square, watt per kg and and thermal heating of tissue which is the only known mechanism which cellphone RF frequencies can cause tissue damage and only at orders of magnitude more power levels.
It's too long of a reasoning chain, maybe that's why it's not obvious? it is also an underfunded area of ongoing research with not enough publications, one paper mentioned only 90 papers are published on this specific issue, which is a tiny number, but seems about right.
So anyway, the mechanism:
"emf does penetrate skin few mm deep" > "that's deep enough to hit mast cells and small nerve fibers" > "we have plenty of evidence non-ionizing radiation can cause mast cell degranulation"/"we have evidence EMF can produce current in nerves" > "mast cells drive inflammation" > "inflammation causes DNA damage and increase risks of cancer."
Any of these steps seem controversial to you? you can verify them independently easily.
Maybe claim #3. Plenty of papers on that:
https://scielo.conicyt.cl/pdf/ijmorphol/v37n2/0717-9502-ijmorphol-37-02-00719.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0891061816300576
the only real question that remains is how big of an effect this will have on humans. Cars kill over a million EVERY year. Every 5 years we kill as many people as this pandemic. Nobody seems to particularly care.
Maybe it will be a small effect, maybe it will kill millions per year, but it seems everyone has made up their minds either way, and unless people start dropping dead in the streets nobody will change their mind.
Light also penetrates the skin few mm or more (hold a flashlight to you finger) why aren't we studying similar effects with artificial lights which have much more radiative power?
>Maybe claim #3. Plenty of papers on that
I can find one paper, mast cell degranulation has lots of causes, maybe just from thermal heating? Always worth looking into I wouldn't call it conclusive by any stretch.
I don't think anyone has made up their mind, only that jumping to conclusions isn't warranted base don our understanding of physics, sure we should keep studying but as yet there are no proven non-thermal effects or direct correlation or causation between low power microwave and cancer.
>Light also penetrates the skin few mm or more (hold a flashlight to you finger) why aren't we studying similar effects with artificial lights which have much more radiative power?
We do study such effects. It's called a highly lucrative field of dermatology. Luckily, however, humans had billions of years to evolve alongside the sunlight, but phototherapy of all sorts is quite popular, and skin photo-damage is discussed at probably every appointment?
Ok, about mast cells and degranulation, I'll be very frank with you: literally nobody in the entire world understands them fully. Yes. Nobody. Entire world. Not even the absolute best of the best. I mean it. Mast cels supposedly release 200+ mediators, 90%+ of which are not even characterized. Tons of receptors on them that nobody bothered to figure out what they do. There is even a newly recognized clinical entity MCAS/MCAD (mast cell activation disorder), in which physicians and patients are attempting educated guesswork with various treatments to see what sticks. The clinical presentation can be anything from itchy cheeks to having near-fatal anaphylaxis hourly, and everything in between. It doesn't even have a settled consensus on diagnostic criteria yet - ongoing disputes SINCE 1991 (as per wikipedia). Some sources claim 10-18% prevalence in various degrees of severity, fun stuff.
This is mainstream allergy specialty we are talking about. Peanuts, eggs, pollen, that type of mundane stuff. So just to set your expectations right: nothing around peanut allergy is conclusive to physics's standard of five sigma.
Absolutely nothing. Maybe aside from the fact peanuts contain peanuts, and some people tend to be allergic to them. Nobody seems to dispute that. That's where we stand with mast cells.
EMF and mast cells? Now that's really pushing the envelope. That sort of research isn't going to get you anything but a tinfoil hat. Nobody does it. No money or fame in it. Why do it?
The theory about EMF and mast cells (and more recently, associated small nerve fibers) is fairly old though, at least 20 years now, seems like credible people, and plausible enough mechanism. Is it jumping to conclusions? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10859662/
Not conclusive enough? Tons of studies on mast cells and EMF/radiation. Here's 1st page hit on google (pubmed search sucks): https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41129
N.B.: the SAR in that study is on the same order of magnitude as your iphone.
Demyelination if found in humans could mean dx of multiple sclerosis, a devastating illness...and ADHD-like hyperactive behaviour? Wonderful.
Still not sufficiently conclusive? You might want to travel, examine brain slices with your own eyes, and report back in this thread. The study seems fresh, slides might still be in storage.
The only absolutely conclusive anything might ever come up in the next 50-100 years (if you live that long), just like we found out our way with thalidomide, leaded gas, BPA, perfluorinates, and many other toxins, poisons, viruses and other such cooties we've survived for billions of years right up until this very moment.
>We do study such effects. It's called a highly lucrative field of dermatology. Luckily, however, humans had billions of years to evolve alongside the sunlight, but phototherapy of all sorts is quite popular, and skin photo-damage is discussed at probably every appointment?
I said artificial light as in visible, not near-ionizing UV which has well understood mechanisms that lead to cancer.
There are multi tens of watt transmitters all around us for hours per day that nobody seems to worry about, yet everyone seems worried about milliwatt transmitters of much lower photon energy.
We have evolved to sunlight and yet we still get cancer from it and its due to the photon energy, shouldn't we be looking at artificial terahertz radiation at much higher power levels with more vigor than gigahertz?
>EMF and mast cells? Now that's really pushing the envelope. That sort of research isn't going to get you anything but a tinfoil hat. Nobody does it. No money or fame in it. Why do it?
If anyone publishes a paper that implies cellphone radiation causes health issues it gets quite a bit of attention, not really buying that there is no motivation, there are countless books and websites making money off these papers lately.
>N.B.: the SAR in that study is on the same order of magnitude as your iphone.
No its 4 W/kg whole body for 5 hours per day for 12 weeks unmodulated continuous 835Mhz, FFC regulates to 1.6 W/kg over the gram getting the most power (basically the gram of flesh where antenna is closest to your head).
>Demyelination if found in humans could mean dx of multiple sclerosis, a devastating illness...and ADHD-like hyperactive behaviour? Wonderful.
From the paper: "The rota rod test was done to determine the impact of chronic RF-EMF exposure on behavioural changes. This test is widely used to evaluate motor dysfunctions, especially coordination and balance. There was no significant difference between the control and RM-EMF groups"
and "The observations of autophagosome formation and down-regulation of pro-apoptotic factor Bax suggested a lack of neuronal damage."
They then go on to pick some slides of what might be myelin damage hopefully they didn't cherry pick them. Should be easy to reproduce the results.
The mice seemed to move more in the study so thus where called "hyperactive" hopefully there wasn't a buzzing noise from the transmitter or some other environmental factor agitating the RF group. Again this stuff should be easily reproducible in further studies.
>Could be safe. Could be multiple sclerosis. NBD.
Could cure MS, could give you superpowers as others have cited in this post have suggested, could be a teapot orbiting the sun we don't know about. We should keep looking but lets be level headed about it.
> There are theories that radio waves can activate small nerve fibres that are located closely to the edge of your skin, where EMF can penetrate, even if only couple millimetres deep.
Great. Can you provide a reference to this premise at all? There are theories doesn't mean there are verifiable observations to support them. You based your entire argument on this, and eventually connected to a WebMD reference to a condition caused by exposure to solar energy...
...which is orders and orders of more magnitude greater energy than microwave transmitters used in cell phone...
...also a cell phone transmitter maxes out at 1 watt to the antenna and solar energy at the earth's surface is 1000 watts per meter...
...oh yeah, and SOLAR FLUX UNCLUDES UV RADIATION WHICH IS IONIZING RADIATION!
Provide a peer reviewed reference to your proposed mechanism that actually connects it to damage in DNA that leads to cancer in the context of cell phones please.
Solar urticaria has nothing to do with ionizing radiation. as per the CDC, UVA is not ionizing. You can review this on cdc.gov, and maybe inform them they are wrong? A discovery that ionizing radiation is the causative factor of anaphylaxis in solar urticaria would probably get you quite a few awards. Looking forward to your contributions to health sciences.
It also doesn't matter, as the same occurs with infrared: google "heat urticaria". def not ionizing? You can use this link www.google.com to confirm, and also this one maybe: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
maybe also google "cold urticaria"? is negative (inverse?) infrared ionizing? Pressure urticaria is also cool, no radiation required at all.
Given the subject matter at hand is quite involved and requires fairly up to date expertise in neurology, allergy and immunology, oncology and dermatology to be able to evaluate mechanisms at hand, I have prepared for you a decent list of peer reviewed materials to begin your preparation:
a) ISBN: 0-87893-106-6
b) ISBN: 9780123851574
c) ISBN: 9780199558322
d) ISBN: 978-1-62618-166-3
e) ISBN: 978-92-4-157238-5
f) ISBN: 3034808372
g) ISBN: 9783034808378
h) ISBN: 978-92-76-29839-7
Once you have covered the basics in the above peer reviewed literature, most of which is even approved for training, you will then have no difficulty at all accepting the following:
1) Mast cells are located at the junction point of the host and external environment.
2) EMF penetrates into the skin tissue by several millimiters.
3) There is voluminous clinical evidence of mast cell degranulation by non-ionizing radiation
4) Mast cells produce inflammation, both local AND systemic.
5) Chronic inflammation causes DNA damage and increases risks of cancer and many other diseases.
Clinical implications of the interplay between EMF and mast cells is an ongoing area of research. There is like less than 90 papers published on this specific topic, which is miniscule. However, you should not review those papers until after you completed with basics.
The sun emits more than just UVA and high energy UV light is ionizing. Further my point was that you chained together a mechanism and tried to prove it with something completely unrelated vice trying to address the broader observational evidence in the OP. If your proposed mechanism was real it should've resulted in a significant spike in brain tumors which had not happened. Citing solar urticaria is a complete non sequitur to the point the OP is making with their direct observation that show a lack of increased cancer rates.
I'm also aware of the number of papers out there proposing harm but in the broader picture they don't pan out as reproducible or actually demonstrating sufficient evidence to show harm. That's what the OP is talking about. Despite all the hypothetical mechanisms brain cancers did not increase between the time we had no cell phones to when they became ubiquitous in society.
Here's the contribution I've been responding with all over this thread:
"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of the head and neck region."
The EU routinely surveys the literature to review the research on RFR and EMF exposure and time and time again does not turn up any statistically significant proof of harm. It covers way more than 90 studies; the citation section alone is 55 pages of the 288 in this systematic review.
This is why I get so frustrated about people asserting a cause without providing real data the effects are real or insisting effects exist as a response to data like the OP that suggest there's no interaction.
Provide this thread some explanation regard why the OP is is wrong and cancer cells are going up and then connect that to your assertion of a mechanism similar to solar uticara. If you can't do the first part of that and discredit the observational data your mechanism is just a data-less hypothesis and is just sewing fear uncertainty and doubt for no reason.
My comment stated the mechanism can be chronic inflammation, which among MANY OTHER THINGS, can also lead to DNA damage.
MANY. OTHER. THINGS.
There is a study in this thread where rats irradiated with 835 mhz (commonly used in Wi-Fi, cellular, wireless phone etc), at SAR 4 (iPhone is at 2) produced demyelination in rats.
Is multiple sclerosis better than cancer?
Finding the link of the study is an exercise left to reader. It’s somewhere here in one of my comments.
Evaluating these studies would require at least the ISBNs I’ve linked, which can take over a decade.
It's a bit bold to only consider ionization as a possible cause of damage.
Molecular chemistry where e.g. protein clusters copy DNA, is very intricate, and introducing electromagnetic resonances in such processes could be potentially disruptive. It's not just your receiver that picks up energy from radio waves, molecules can too (even without losing electrons).
In fact, someone cannot prove mobile phones are safe once and for all unless they tested the entire set of frequencies used in future phone models too.
At the molecular level, basically all photon modes associated with the thermal energy (or lower) will be already thermally occupied. E = hf = k_bT/2. This frequency at room temperature is about 30THz. So on the microscopic level, any frequencies under 30THz are constantly irradiated by thermal fields anyway.
Edit: Furthermore, the Gibb's free energy of any molecular process determines the reversibility of the process at a given temperature. Any molecular process with Gibb's free energy that is lower than the thermal mean energy is going to be essentially a reversible equilibrium process, and stimulating it with radiation will only shift the equilibrium very slightly I believe. I think it's for this reason that we don't see radio catalysed reactions in chemistry, unlike photocatalysed reactions.
But the only electric current on the molecular level is coherent current...? Chemical reactions are not macroscale phenomena, and so it shouldn't really matter if the energy comes from a random distribution or not. Also please don't insinuate that I'm "profoundly ignorant", that certainly isn't relevant to the discussion.
Profound ignorance is insistence of certainty in the entire absence of knowledge of a subject.
Microwaves absorbed in tissue induce electrical currents carried by ions in solution. Just about everything that happens in your body involves ions moving in solution, one way or another. Details matter.
But the movement of ions in solution is almost completely dominated by thermal motion. Your signal doesn't matter if the signal to noise ratio is essentially zero.
No, the molecular machinery of cells uses energy level differences that are far above the thermal energy level at body temperature, which allows them to actually make changes to things irreversibly. Enzymes are a great example of this.
Try to use microwaves to move ions from one side of a container of salt solution to the other and then get back to me on the ability of microwaves to control ion movement. Hint: you basically can't without obscene levels of radiation. The thermal "pressure" due to the diffusion of ions is enormous.
For a sense of scale, the thermal velocity of water molecules at room temperature is about 500m/s. The drift velocity(average movement of charge carriers, i.e. coherent current) of typical electric currents is on the order of 1mm/s.
For microwaves to produce currents that could plausibly have an effect, there would need to be rectification and resonance, so that current could ratchet up. Unfortunately, both are known to occur in living tissue, as may be observed in people whose dental fillings enable them to pick up AM radio broadcasts.
On top of rectification and resonance, the signal would need to be carried in a place where its current has a persistent effect, and the nature of the signal itself, the modulation, would need to be such as to drive some cellular-scale electrochemical process. It is not possible to predict what that would be for the signal in question, if indeed there are any.
We appear to have got lucky with previous generations, but that tells us nothing about the next.
So, getting quantitative, suppose you have a modulation that gives you, at the membrane, a nanoamp average current, rectified, with a modulation resonant with the nanostructure, so each cycle pumps ions in just one direction. A nanoamp of +1 ions is 6 billion of them moving per second.
Now, 6B ions is hardly any, in the grand scheme of things, but they are in a very small space, and another 6B are moving in the next channel over. The only places we know of (well, that I know of) where these nanoamp currents are important is in organizing healing, and in embryo development. Old people have a hard enough time mustering healing activity without anything disrupting the process. I don't know what other processes might involve such currents.
Again, we don't know whether 5G modulation will affect healing in old people, but it is certainly physically possible that it can. It will be very hard to measure, but that doesn't mean the physiological effect must be small.
If there is an effect, will we notice? Is anybody monitoring healing rates in old people, at the population level, today? How do you even measure that?
I'm not talking about noise. I'm talking about a spike in the frequency spectrum.
If you can build a protein that can tune to e.g. 3GHz (or whatever frequency a phone uses), thus behave differently at that frequency, then basically that proves that radio waves can theoretically alter the reactions in the molecular soup that is a cell. All I'm saying is that I'm not so sure that this can't be done.
I think though that any biological process using these sorts of energies on the molecular level will be swamped with noise and therefore wouldn't be a useful mechanism. 3GHz is like 0.00001eV. A process with Gibb's free energy change of 10ueV has an equilibrium constant of essentially 1 at room temperature, and so is almost completely reversible.
The reason why we can make things interact with radio waves at all is essentially because electrical conductors provide coherent modes for low energy photons to couple to. Without conductors and their free electron cloud we would have a very hard time building anything to receive or transmit radio in any way that isn't thermal.
It is true that there is some degree of conductivity in cells but without a non-thermal way of coupling between current and molecular processes I don't see how radio waves could affect cells in a non-thermal manner
Edit: I guess nerves have a non-thermal coupling mechanism from low frequency currents to molecular mechanisms, so it must be possible. But the machinery for that has been highly evolved for that specific task, I'm not sure if it follows that such machinery would appear commonly in cell processes.
Are single-photon models even useful here? What about aggregate photon effects? The sheer amount of photons hitting you from a cell-tower is enormous. Perhaps an "optical tweezer" type effect could happen?
And for the non-thermal effect discussion, have you considered voltage-gated ion-channels in cell-membranes?
You're gish galloping. Rather than continue to propose arguments without evidence of actual risk, find a citation that has a salient hypothesis that's tested that shows risk.
We aren't your Google-scholar and you're just promoting FUD by asking into the ether "but couldn't X cause Y". Me typing this message COULD cause a butterfly effect that leads to an earthquake. In any "does X cause Y" scenario you have two answer what the probability is that X causes Y and what's the impact of X does cause Y.
In RFR exposure terms it's what is the probability that RF below ionizing levels cause damage to DNA to promote cancer. The vast majority of the research says no and theoretical mechanisms for harm of RF below ionizing levels has never been proven to anything close to a statistical significance or in ways that are reproducible. Even if you did you'd have to assume impact. The OP study is basically assuming there's some impact and studying the population broadly and observed none.
Low probably, low impact, low or no risk.
Please present evidence that presents a high risk argument that is backed by some research showing an increase of the probability and/or impact or rfr exposure to DNA damage.
Until you do that, you're gish galloping. Please respond to our arguments (or consider if we're right) instead of declaring new ones with no references.
I'm usually very patient with the leftovers of the "ionizing only" crowd and what you call "gish galloping" (huh?!) was my attempt at nudging you to discover the science that shows that worldview to be outdated.
So when you write:
"...and theoretical mechanisms for harm of RF below ionizing levels has never been proven to anything close to a statistical significance or in ways that are reproducible" ...I lose that patience with people not even interested in looking.
Excerpt: "...among 100 currently available peer-reviewed studies dealing with oxidative effects of low-intensity RFR, in general, 93 confirmed that RFR induces oxidative effects in biological systems. A wide pathogenic potential of the induced ROS and their involvement in cell signaling pathways explains a range of biological/health effects of low-intensity RFR, which include both cancer and non-cancer pathologies."
Yes, the word "cancer" is in there along with "low-intensity RFR". The pathway is free-radical promotion in cells by RF and subsequent damage to proteins, DNA etc.
Keep believing the "ionizing only" line if you want. You're allowed to have an opinion. But then its just you against the peer-reviewed & published data.
I've actually already heard of this study and it's another proposed mechanism without any actual evidence in the wild that the proposed mechanism is happened or results in any significant health outcomes. It's a well known study in science circles because of how bad it is in spreading FUD over rfr.
"While the evidence may support the notion that RFR can increase markers of oxidative activity in tissue, it does not establish that this increase is biologically important and can actually lead to specific diseases. It also does not establish that cell phone use causes any harm by this mechanism."
They used the word cancer but didn't provide any real data that linked the proposed mechanism to cancer. Please stop believing fear mongerers and demand not just a hypothesis but actual data that a mechanism causes harm.
Oh, and not all oxidative stress in the body is bad. There are oxidative compounds that benefit human health and too much antioxidant can produce adverse effects.
Oxidarive stress and free radicals are turning into buzzwords that ignore how our bodies balance that and just stating something causes oxidative stress in vitro or ex vivo doesn't say whether our antioxidant system can handle that and in the end negate any potential harm. This is why in vivo studies are done and the OP is a massive in vivo experiment that's been naturally happening since cell phones were first deployed.
I'm also going to highlight that I'm trying to pursuade you that we know the risks, they're low (basically zero), and you don't have to be worried about them. To contrast you're proposing unproven mechanisms for an uncertain risk that contradicts the observations do the original post while repeating arguments used by snake oil salesman that sell Faraday cages for people's wifi routers.
Stop being afraid, the world is way less scary when it comes to RFR exposure than these fear mongerers want you to belive.
Last time I had an MRI scan, I had strong sensations throughout my body where exposed to the MRI's radio emissions. I rather enjoyed the sensation, it felt like a massage and I would have enjoyed it for longer.
I was surprised, as they didn't mention this before the scan. After, I asked about it, and they told me most people don't feel anything, but some do like me, and for a few it's so painful they have to stop the scan.
They told me it was my peripheral nervous system interacting with the radio emissions, not a physical (non-signal) effect as it felt like. From that conversation I learned there was about 10kW transmitted through my body during the scan.
MRIs have been studied for dangerous effects, of course, and all the evidence shows them to be extremely safe... provided there is no metal in the body which can heat up or be displaced by the field, and not counting risks from the contrast agents which are sometimes injected, which some people are more susceptible to than others.
I was never convinced by dismissive arguments that non-ionising radiation "can't" have any biological effect other than localised heating, or that the thermal background spectrum means infrared and below can't have an effect. (I know the physics pretty well; it's not lack of understanding.)
But after those sensations caused directly by the emissions, I'd experienced a biological, non-thermal effect from radio in the microwave-or-below frequency range directly and clearly. That was really interesting.
The body clearly does a lot of things based on countless subtle signalling pathways. Pretty much anything any pathway can sense could have an effect, even if it's not a conventional chemical reaction. One of the more interesting technological ideas around this is the use of high coherence terahertz signals that resonate with DNA molecular dynamics.
Oh yeah I don't doubt it. I think though that there is many orders of magnitude difference in the field strengths between cell phone radiation and MRI, and this makes all the difference.
THz radiation is a different story too as it has about enough energy such that it could influence irreversible processes.
And, indeed, all the modulations. Exposure to unvarying microwaves at various frequencies and low exposure has fairly often shown no obvious effect, but modulations completely change the picture as regards induced electric currents.
Cell phones are not likely to go anywhere close to the ionizing range of frequencies because things like walls become opaque at those frequencies. Fun fact, if you could see in the microwave spectrum you could see through many plastics which is why Styrofoam and similar materials are used in microwave safe containers and in the lenses for microwave lasers. The higher the energy the waves, the higher the frequency and the greater the absorbption by walls and even just water vapor in the air.
5+ Ghz frequencies are often used in precision radar and I worked with people who worked on them in the Navy. A few had stories of getting "zapped" by them if they were left on against safety guidelines. The feeling is like having popcorn pop under your skin because the waves are quickly absorbed by the water in the dead layer of your skin. No one in the entirety of military radar had ever got cancer from one of these radars but sometimes they get a fun wake up call to get back down the radar mast to slap whoever left the dish spinning.
There is NO mechanism you're actually providing because you are saying molecules can be "damaged" without actually describing what that even means. DNA is ionic bonds only so enlighten me how they are ever "damaged" because we're aren't in the territory of covenant or hydrogen bonds that can be affected by stuff like heat.
You can KILL cells with high frequency RF but cancer doesn't come about when a cell dies but when the DNA is DAMAGED through and IONIZING event.
"they can't prove its safe... unless they test the entire set of frequencies used in future phone models too"
Your premise is bad. We can't prove anything is 100% safe ever. We instead try to assess risk which is probability of the adverse event multiplied by its impact and reduced by mitigations if available.
And we've done that TIME AND TIME AGAIN for the tin-foil-hat crowd that doesn't understand basic physics:
"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of
brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of
the head and neck region."
Please at least Google for the research before declaring it doesn't exist. You're using the same logic as anti-vax/anti-gmo/anti-science in general; just declare no/not enough research had been done and gish gallop arguments to promote fear, uncertainty and doubt when in reality scientists HAVE been at work making sure the risks are low and you're just denying their efforts.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadMaybe in 30 years we will notice something interesting about Berkeley's population and a multivariate study could even isolate the effect of 5G. But probably not.
One of the interesting points in the video is that 5G’s high frequency band of 24-48GHz is _not_ well understood with studies. The typical cell phone radiation/cancer studies deal with the much lower-frequency bands (hundreds of MHz or 1-5GHz), but that doesn’t necessarily transfer to the new higher frequencies.
Per the video, it is known that frequencies that high can warm the skin and irritate the eyes if they’re at really high power, but it’s not known exactly what power threshold for such millimeter waves is considered “safe”, and the number of studies isn’t sufficient to completely dismiss any safety concerns. She’s not saying “5G isn’t safe”, but rather “5G hasn’t been completely determined safe yet because more studies are needed for the newer mm-wave spectrum” and “studies showing the safety of previous generations of cell phone radiation don’t necessarily apply to the new frequency band.”
It’s not necessarily alarm-worthy, but it’s more nuanced than just “crystal-worshipping hippies”…
I just said there’s nuance to the discussion (nuance which you’re apparently not seeing), and I'm not a crystal worshipping hippie.
Empirical evidence always helps, but in the discussion around science results etc. people always seem to forget that there's another important type of evidence, which is the mechanical understanding of a model/system.
You don't really need empirical evidence to know what happens when you throw a ball in the air inside a locked box. Technically the laws of physics could magically change and produce a different outcome, but using your understanding of the mechanics of the underlying system you can predict that the ball is going to fall inside the box with a very low error rate.
Still relevant since this applies to the new covid vaccines as well for example. People worrying about their potential negative effects are worrying for nothing, since even lacking long term empirical evidence we know how they work and have a deep mechanical understanding of mRNA vaccines, and they are not going to cause issues, period.
None of the commenters seem to bother to discover that the science review in question looks at DNA-damage and oxidative-stress mediated through other pathways than direct ionization. As I said: its more about complex biology, than simple physics/chemistry. Its about the sum of parts, not the reductionism that plagues the field of RF and health.
Again there is no conclusive proof that RF exposure causes adverse non-thermal effects at cell phone power levels or even much higher power levels let alone being able to explain a mechanism that would cause those non-reproducible effects.
If you have better information please post it, one paper from a questionable journal using questionable methods is not enough.
We don't understand what causes many types of cancers so I don't get the chemistry-knows-all stance.
Radio waves are way way below this level of energy so for them to cause a non thermal effect would mean some new effect we have never seen before anywhere. No one is ruling it out completely but it is very unlikely with no plausible mechanism or data to back it up while UVA/UVB is well understood with respect to photon energy which is related to the ionizing threshold.
100% false. Practically everything that goes on in your body involves, one way or another, motion of ions in solution. Varying E-M fields induce electrical currents carried by such ions. Where and how matters.
It is always a grave mistake to confuse your entire lack of knowledge of a topic with certainty about it.
You need to do better than saying someone is wrong before proclaiming radical new information.
Here is what I found: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-69561-3
Erm, our understanding of the mechanics of COVID vaccines has changed dramatically over the period since their introduction. Initially it was thought that they provided longterm immunity, now boosters. The manufacturer said that spike proteins would not escape the muscle. Pfizers own post marketing study shows that they spread thru out the body. In short, we do not have a deep understanding of the long term impacts, as evidenced by the unexpected drop in efficacy. It may be that so-called "leaky" vaccines such as the COVID vaccines, which do not produce neutralizing antibodies result in strains with worse potential lethality evolving, as is the what happened with Marek's disease in chickens. Initially, vaccine manufacturers and the CDC alike claimed that vaccines were producing neutralizing antibodies. Now 4 out of every 5 hospitalized cases of Covid in Canada have received their 1st, 2nd and third shots.
In short, I hope you were kidding saying that.
Here’s a link from Pfizer themselves talking about the vaccine *preventing* COVID infection, not just severe symptoms. This is basic Google stuff. https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Shall we move on to the talking heads from public health institutions and the politicians? I mean, examples abound and this would be a lay-up. Google is your friend here.
But how can you be unaware of these claims after two years of drama over them in the global public square? Vaccine mandate propositions were largely predicated on the inflated expectations of efficacy - people lost their livelihoods over this. We’re not talking about flippant one-off statements here, but the confidence and endorsement that moves government and corporate policy.
I don't remember that ever being said. Initially it was HOPED that it might provide longterm immunity - but the vaccines were launched into a world where we still didn't have a conclusive answer to the question "can you get covid twice". If anybody was saying that, they were speaking beyond their knowledge.
As for the unexpected drop in efficacy, that is at least in part due to the fact that the covid-19 we're exposed to today is not the same covid-19 that the vaccine was targeted against.
For the record, I agree with your overall point - mRNA vaccines were not and are not a well understood system with no potential for unknown effects. But neither is covid and given the two unknowns, the vaccine seems the safer choice.
Marek's doesn't make a good argument for vaccine skepticism because it represents a worst case arms race in which modern medicine was still by far the better choice. Also we aren't chickens and most diseases on average tend to become less damaging in order to spread better. Neither this average case nor the extreme case of Marek's are fate but the logical thing is to vaccinate and just keep swimming as it will obviously decrease mortality in the short and long term.
Moving on to the percentage of individuals in the hospitals in Canada being vaccinated.
You have entirely misunderstood the numbers if indeed your numbers are actually even accurate. Vaccination rate is very high in Canada around 90% with vulnerable groups being more like 95-98%.
Lets take this to the logical extreme. Imagine that out of one million people you are the only one unvaccinated and are hospitalized along with 100 vaccinated folks. Even in a world where vaccination decreased hospitalization by 99% you could accurately say that most of the people in the hospital were vaccinated as if that proved somehow that vaccines didn't work.
Indeed one expects with a successful vaccination campaign that eventually most of the people in the hospital are going to be vaccinated no matter how effective it is at keeping them out of it because almost all the vulnerable people are. In the last vaccine skeptic in the world universe you could instead look at which portion of each population is sick. In the vaccinated it would be 0.01% vs 100% of the unvaccinated giving the lie to the prior analysis.
Indeed the only reason to lean on that number is deliberate deception or utter failure to apprehend what the numbers mean.
Also, consider that the net resulting incidence voltage from unpolarised sunlight amounts to near zero, whereas man-made RF is polarized.
Ask literally any biologist whether you should expect to be able to calculate the effects on an organism of some stimulus using only physical formulas.
We know pretty precisely how much of a microwave radiation exposure will be absorbed in various kinds of living tissue. We know that the mechanism of absorption is via induced nanoampere currents. We know with certaintly that those nanoampere currents will all end up, finally, as heat.
We don't know all of the effects of the nanoampere currents produced by that absorption, otherwise. We do know that induced nanoampere currents can, under certain circumstances, have profound biological effects.
Citation needed.
Seriously, the burden of proof is on you for such a statement.
And be precise, which modulations, which conditions, what effects.
"Certain" and "profound" are filler words in this situation. They mean nothing.
the only thing they can do is transfer some heat energy to you, orders of magnitude lower than your average light bulb in the office (certainly entirely incomparable to sunlight).
What is the authorative physics answer which proves this goes one way or another, applied to cell biology, in the human head?
It is not rocket science: biology is complicated and messy.
Politics and opinions move too fast. Science does catch up eventually, but by then a lot of people end up with ossified beliefs with a significant emotional investment that are hard to challenge.
That said, I’ll take any good study. It’s useful to have more data even with no new insight.
Here's one from 2016 [1]
I agree.[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4922278
That explanation makes a lot of sense.
EDIT: I also know we aren't dealing with "spheres", but... I get the gist. Dipole antenna emits in this weird doughnut shape, but as a 3-dimensional object, we can estimate it to be kinda-sorta like a sphere :-)
Actually though, I think a sphere is still in a way the right object. The weird donut is a representation of the amount that is emitted in different directions - I guess it's a contour of equal intensity. But the radiation is still emitted at the speed of light in every direction. So the wavefront at any given time is a sphere (until it is defracted or reflected).
(Edited to add) unless you're thinking of a really big dipole, so you can't treat it as a point source? Or close to it.
> But the radiation is still emitted at the speed of light in every direction.
I think that makes sense.
> (Edited to add) unless you're thinking of a really big dipole, so you can't treat it as a point source?
Honestly, didn't think of that issue either. You're right though, some antennas (especially AM antennas) are the size of Godzilla, and its absurd to even think of them as point-sources.
The term gain is just referring to the antennas directionality relative to a perfect spherical omni radiator that doesn't exist.
We have many devices that emit 10Watts of EM radiation at us every day: we call them light bulbs or LEDs. Cell phones are only allowed to emit 3W IIRC.
It wouldn't surprise me if the screen has more EM than the radio.
LEDs and light bulbs do not emit modulated microwaves. If the screen emitted substantial RF radiation, the FCC (and related agencies in other countries) would have something to say about it.
Least-dangerous -- Radio / Infrared / Visible Light / Ultraviolet / XRays / Gamma Rays -- Most energy/dangerous
All light-bulbs, screens, LEDs (etc. etc.) emit visible light. There's a couple of bands in there that might be more dangerous than others (ex: Microwaves specifically resonate with water), but for the most part, Gamma Rays are the most dangerous, and Radiowaves have the least effect on our body.
Just hoping to pique your curiosity into the field of biology and away from hyper-reductionistic physics models.
You're begging the question.
You could have more easily stated your opinion as "low frequency radio waves disturb cells". Which is fundamentally false. There are lots of radio-waves being used around the world: RADAR systems, Radio-headquarter units... as well as people who live nearby radio-towers (TV, AM Radio, FM Radio), and cell phones.
Do you think WW2 units fielded with SCR-300 (World War 2 backpack radio) had increased amounts of cell membrane damage associated with them?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Scr300.p...
Experiments with E-M effects on biology show that changes in current matter more than steady current. So, the effect of pulses could be larger than if it actually were transmitting full-time. We just don't know.
Are you claiming a heating effect or something else?
In fact all varying E-M fields induce electrical currents where they are absorbed. The effects of those electrical currents vary in myriad ways, depending both on the currents and on where they are absorbed. In living matter the currents are carried by motion of ions in solution. Not coincidentally, life is conducted largely by motion of ions in solution.
Incidentally the ADC's that sample the input dissipate the electrical energy captured by the antenna as heat however little it may be as is the case with all electrical circuits that sink electrical energy. So yes your cellphone does use a "heating effect" because where else does the energy go? Do you think it charges the battery or emits light with the captured energy?
It is not the heat, at the end, that makes your phone work. You may read up on how antennas work, if you care to have any actual, you know, facts. I promise it won't say one word about heat.
I know someone who needs to read up on antennas and digital receivers and its not me.
I never heard that, and looking at the list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog-to-digital_converter#Ty... I can't find any that work this way.
Radio receivers do not depend on an analog to digital converter, or even a resistor, to extract a signal from an antenna. The essential component is a diode.
(That is not to say that, having detected, amplified, and demodulated an antenna signal, the result won't finally drive an A/D converter; you can drive anything you want to after all that. Even a speaker. But operation of the speaker, too, does not depend in any way on heat.)
Even in a analog receiver the power amplifiers used to drive a speaker or whatever are going to dissipate the signals power as heat in order to modulate the amplifiers output power (out power will always be less than power supply power).
If you are talking about a crystal radio, then yes the input power drives a speaker and is turned into sound instead (along with some power lost heat in the circuits resistance).
The capacitor is discharged using a resistor of known value.
Also take it down to the comparator level which basically all ADC use the op-amps use transistors and resistors and are themselves dissipating the input power in order to measure voltage.
The word transistor is a contraction of transfer resistance, they are electronically variable resistors and as everyone knows dissipate power as heat during function.
In no reference to electronics of radio reception, anywhere in the world, will you find even a single formula or equation with a reference to a change in temperature of a component being involved in detecting a signal. Period. None anywhere. No exceptions.
Also, nowhere in any reference on the operation of a cell phone will you find so much as a single analog-to-digital converter attached to its microwave antenna. Nowhere. Not one. No exceptions.
Your profound and aggressive ignorance is on display for all to see, and recorded for posterity.
That much is abundantly clear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It follows that everyone needs to stick to the intended spirit of the site no matter how badly others are behaving or you feel they are. That's not easy of course. But it's the only way for this place not to destroy itself.
Please don't stoop to this again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, and regardless of how provocative another comment was. Instead, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.
A) The main method that use a ADC to work is heating a resistance and then measuring the temperature or the time to cool down or something like that. [1]
B) As a side effect of the internal working, the ADC produce heat. The heat is not important for the operation, but it's an inevitable side effect.
My opinion: A) No, B) Yes
Can you both please answer A) and B) with "Yes" or "No"?
[1] Note that something similar is used to measure pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirani_gauge .
I’m not saying it’s a great study, but please at least skim the study before being so dismissive and slightly misleading in the comments.
Rates of brain cancer before and after the 80s and 90s should've shown some sort of statistically significant spike in brain tumors if cell phones were an issue but it didn't because they're not. 800-2000MHz seems like a lot but radiation doesn't cause ionization until you get to the 2400 terahertz range. There's literally no mechanism known to PHYSICS that would result in cell phone radiation causing brain tumors.
/sarcasm off
False. We don't know that any form of microwave radiation can induce brain tumors, but we certainly don't now that they can't. It needs experiments, which are being performed (on the public) as I write this.
What we do know is that microwave radiation induces nanoampere currents where absorbed. The exact details of the currents, and where and how absorbed determines their effects. Insisting PHYSICS is a legitimate substitute for experimention is a failing that has become increasingly common, lately.
"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of the head and neck region." - European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks, 2015
http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/emerging/do...
We don't know what will happen, but we will find out, in time. Previous generations seem to have turned out OK. All we can be certain of is that, if anyone is harmed, no one will go to jail for it. Like the people putting lead in gasoline and paint, no one involved will have their retirement even slightly inconvenienced. (Unless, of course, they are personally harmed by it.)
Do I think harm is likely? I have no information to form an opinion from, so I would be guessing, just like everybody who insists it is all just fine. What I do know is that everyone who insists they know is lying.
And this is the opposite of leaded gasoline because the first study that suggested a harmful mechanism was verifiable and produced reproducible results with a mechanism that was reasonable and testable.
The many hypothetical harms from RFR have been tested extensively and found no observable harm or mechanism for harm below the ionizing range of EM radiation.
You're just expressing doubt with arguments that are vague and untestable which is reasonable because all the testable hypothesis have been investigated.
Propose a mechanism for harm and provide evidence that it's actually happening. If we held off on advancing technology over fear, uncertainty, and doubt arguments like this we'd get no where.
Every single modulation scheme has a completely different risk profile than every other. But almost every study starts out assuming that only heating can have any effect at all, and modulation never any, pre-loading failure.
It is equivalent to saying, "We tried some plants that turned out safe to eat. Therefore, all plants are safe to eat." No. Details matter. Wishing is opposite of facts. Facts are often inconvenient.
We conducted the analog, 2G, 3G, and 4G experiments on the general public, and they appear to have turned out OK--to the extent anybody has checked. Cancer is far from the only public health problem. Is anybody even looking at others? Auto-immune illnesses are way up, and could be caused by any of thousands of untested chemicals, or non-ionizing radiation, or hygiene, or some unholy combination. Who is even checking?
We will now run the 5G experiment on the public, and see again. Or, fail to see, for not looking even after the fact.
Does anybody even have a use for 5G, besides the telecomm companies hustling equipment? 4G barely works for me, most of the time. But I will certainly end up being made to pay for 5G, useful or not, because what I need is the very last consideration.
The potential causal mechanisms have been studied for a long time to contrast:
"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of the head and neck region." - European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks, 2015
http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/emerging/do...
What I care about is people ascribing a casual effect by conjecture alone, especially when the research has actually been done to assess the probability/impact of a proposed mechanism. In all flavors and frequencies in the RF spectrum, this has turned up basically zero probability, uncertain impact (because how do you measure rhe impact on something that never happens), yielding zero risk out the other end.
We have certainty that exposure to some E-M field modulations have profound effects.
So yes microwaves are indeed known to be safe at cell/wifi power levels unless you have data that shows otherwise then we need to figure how it causes damage in a non-thermal way.
Your assumption that you know everything about a topic just because you don't know of anything that contradicts your beliefs is a condition we call profound ignorance.
The subject here is people insisting, on the basis solely of wholesale ignorance of the whole subject, that they know all the answers.
We don't have any evidence whatsoever whether radiation from upcoming generations of cellphone will stimulate cancer growth, or cooties. People who insist, on basis of that entire lack of evidence, that they know it doesn't are the immediate problem.
If, in fact, it does turn out to be harmful, not having conducted so much as one test of any kind should figure in the prosecution of the people who promoted 5G and who worked to suppress opposition to it.
Thalidomide anyway went through a testing process. Pesticides don't. Yet, each time one is discovered to be carcinogenic or teratogenic, nobody is prosecuted. They count on that.
I also know we don't have good quality baselines. Cell phones have only been here for 30-ish years, during a time when the resolution and detail at which we delineate and diagnose disease has gone up dramatically. There are diseases and conditions we know about today that didn't know about then. Until we understand all the mechanisms of those diseases - it's bad science to entirely dismiss EM radiation because of "inverse square law".
...except if you're in a room/bus and you're disturbing everyone by being on speaker phone.
>not talking on it in the car
What's the point of this? Are you trying to avoid brain cancer or distracted driving?
>scheduling your router wifi to turn off during the hours you don't plan on using it, etc.
I mean, if you want to go through the effort to set this up, that's your prerogative. I'd probably put more effort into chucking out the 1200W microwave before worrying about the 0.1W coming from router.
You're likely disturbing everyone even if you're not on speaker. In general, I'm not going to talk on a phone in a crowded location unless I have to. This is one very small edge case which I don't see affecting my claim that it doesn't hurt to use speaker phone.
"What's the point of this? Are you trying to avoid brain cancer or distracted driving?"
Cars act as weak Faraday cages. Using a phone inside a car increases the power output required to reach the tower. Similar if you are in a low reception area.
"I mean, if you want to go through the effort to set this up, that's your prerogative."
It takes maybe 5 minutes to log into your router and set the schedule. Not much effort at all.
"I'd probably put more effort into chucking out the 1200W microwave before worrying about the 0.1W coming from router."
Why? You realize the microwaves are contained to to inside of the machine by it's shielding, right? The allowable lifetime escape limit is set at 5mW.
Routers can have much higher power output than that. I think the US limit is 1W. This is also something that runs almost continuously as compared to a microwave that runs for maybe a few minutes per day.
yeah but in addition to one guy speaking normally half the time, you also hear a distorted voice coming out of the shitty speakerphone the other half of the time.
>Cars act as weak Faraday cages. Using a phone inside a car increases the power output required to reach the tower. Similar if you are in a low reception area.
That's partially canceled out by being able to use hands-free calling in your car, and placing the phone on the other side of the car. I suspect the inverse square law will cause you to get less radiation exposure than you holding the phone using your arms.
>It takes maybe 5 minutes to log into your router and set the schedule. Not much effort at all.
the "effort" also includes the time you have to fiddle with your router to turn it on when you need wifi during the night for whatever reason.
>Why? You realize the microwaves are contained to to inside of the machine by it's shielding, right? The allowable lifetime escape limit is set at 5mW.
yet, when I place my phone inside the microwave it still gets wifi reception (yes, I tested it with 2.4ghz wifi only).
>Routers can have much higher power output than that. I think the US limit is 1W. This is also something that runs almost continuously as compared to a microwave that runs for maybe a few minutes per day.
inverse square law applies here. chances are when you're operating a microwave you'll be standing near by. at the very least you need to be next to it to turn it on. meanwhile the router is probably tucked in some corner of your house.
also, I suspect you can apply the "runs for maybe a few minutes per day" argument to wifi as well. if you're not torrenting on your wifi 24/7, it's probably not pumping 1W 24/7.
About the phone, we don't have any good information. That doesn't stop people from insisting they, personally, know, without any.
Is this really true under most circumstances? I think lifetime leakage limit is set at 5mW for microwaves and a cellphone is much higher during tx at around 800mW.
True. I suppose what I'm saying is that with proper etiquette this shouldn't be issue, at least not often.
"the "effort" also includes the time you have to fiddle with your router to turn it on when you need wifi during the night for whatever reason."
This has never been an issue for me for 10 year of doing this.
"That's partially canceled out by being able to use hands-free calling in your car, and placing the phone on the other side of the car. I suspect the inverse square law will cause you to get less radiation exposure than you holding the phone using your arms."
True. However, if we are comparing being in a car to not being in a car, then you would still have more exposure (eg putting on the other side of the room vs other side of the car. Plus, many cars are no bigger than arms length, and of you can put it further than that, toad noise becomes an issue.
"yet, when I place my phone inside the microwave it still gets wifi reception (yes, I tested it with 2.4ghz wifi only)."
Perhaps you should have it tested and get a new one if it's not conforming to safety specs. However, my guess is that since it isn't causing interference with you or your neighbors phone that it's really just a slight difference in the frequency the shielding is designed for.
"inverse square law applies here."
As it does for the microwave. Im frankly tired of everyone going "inverse square law" with nothing substantive. How about you crunch the numbers for someone 3 feet from a microwave at 5mW and someone 15 feet from a 1W router and tell me what you get... just because a concept is true does not mean you are correctly applying it in your argument.
"also, I suspect you can apply the "runs for maybe a few minutes per day" argument to wifi as well. if you're not torrenting on your wifi 24/7, it's probably not pumping 1W 24/7."
Well, routers are generally transmitting multiple times per second just for the beacon/name (yes, probably at 1W since TX rate is gwnerally separate from TX power). How many minutes per day does your household use on wireless internet vs the microwave? I'm guessing it's a close to a factor of 10 difference. How many minutes do you use either during your typical sleep hours? Even if you're TX is 5% of the time during 6 core sleeping hours, that's likely to approach the amount of time you use your microwave.
These comparisons are very sloppy. Different frequencies act differently, have different limits of exposure, and have different effects. First you need to establish which frequencies are comparable or fit the same category/type. Then you have to set exposure limits (acute and cumulative). Reducing one's RF exposure by 5mW (1W at 15 feet) while one sleeps could be significant in these respects depending on what those limits and baseline exposures are. The fact is, there is little known about the mechanisms and the limits. For example, why does glucose metabolism increase in the brain when exposed to cell RF and how does that increased glucose metabolism affect the rest of the biological system it's a part of? (Honest question. It's something that I found interesting but seems it's lacking research.)
My point was that it doesn't hurt to take basic steps like turning off wifi or using speaker phone. We can show that it measurably reduces exposure, but we don't know if it helps or makes a difference when it comes to outcomes.
Any evidence to support that?
I've run my wireless on a schedule for about 10 years. I've never had any problems, nor has the workflow been ridiculous. The wired network stays on, which is what I primary use for everything except the phone or occasional laptop use. What exactly do you envision needing the wifi for when waking up in the middle of the night?
That's part of the logic - if you're looking to reduce exposure then designing your network to be primarily wired is part of that, which is usually easy. Generally it provides better performance (eg gaming) or options (PoE cameras) anyways.
I'm talking about the logical inconsistency of scheduling wifi to avoid exposure. Your phone used without headset or speaker is a cm from your brain putting out up to 2W and your wifi access point conversely is 1/10th of a watt 30 meters away. You are getting up to 180 million times less exposure than up against your head.
Comparing speakerphone usage 15cm away isn't much better. It's up to 800,000 times the exposure vs your wifi.
If that is dangerous enough to schedule your phone logically needs to go straight in the trash.
You are underestimating how low energy your wifi is and how much the difference the distance makes.
Not in the US I guess? Also 30m is a massive house. In the US routers are 1W (although I believe many could reduce it per device with the newer tech, but many still have set limits; although this is also true of the 2W you mention for cell).
"You are underestimating how low energy your wifi is and how much the difference the distance makes."
My house is not 30m in any dimension. Probably about 5m router to bed, and that's one of the longest distance in the house. I don't think I am overestimating router power for my region. US limits are about 10x higher than Europe for wifi, while i believe Europe is about .4W higher for cell tx allowance.
You mention power and distance. What about time for cumulative exposure?
"15cm away"
I think this is underestimating speaker phone usage. Usually I keep it .75-1m away from me. 15cm is very close and not even worth using at that distance.
"I'm talking about the logical inconsistency of scheduling wifi to avoid exposure."
Not avoid, but reduce. The biggest point,since you brought up logic: baseline-5mW < baseline. There is a quantifiable reduction, at no cost (in my experience/situation, since I'm not using it at that time). Eliminating cell usage would require a cost (in my situation). So I accept that exposure with mitigating factors, like speaker phone and not sleeping with it next to my head. Likewise, I am a ham and except that exposure with mitigating factors (ground planes to limit RF back into the house, typically 1W but always QRP, and compared to cell phones it's about 1/2 the RF since isn't not full duplex), even though I don't use it very often.
Of course the whole exercise is somewhat like playing like the floor is lava and hopping from couch to chair as a kid nothing happens when you fall unless you break a lamp on the way down.
There is no evidence of injury by virtue of WiFi.
It's not. I just don't have a huge house.
"There is no evidence of injury by virtue of WiFi."
The research seems to be mixed when searching PubMed. At the very least, there are confirmed biological effects for microwave RF for which we don't understand the mechanisms or their implications (eg increased cellular glucose metabolism). To me, these unknowns warrant some caution, especially if I can make reductions in exposure without any reduction in utility.
You're moving the goalposts. "[not] being afraid of EM" =/= "100% dismiss the idea [of cell phones causing cancer]".
Now just think a little about the millions you don't see, without trying to make too much assumptions.
> Mobile phones emit radio frequency waves which, if absorbed by tissues, can cause heating and damage
then there is no need to do a study. Knowing transmitted power, frequency, distance, SAR, and thermal conductivity of human tissues we can calculate how big the change in temperature can be (should be way less than one degree, not enough to cause any damage).
Modulated E-M radiation has been demonstrated to produce profound biological effects that cannot be accounted for by heating. Each of an infinite variety of modulations has its own effect, most of them probably negligible. The ones that do have effect are the ones that are interesting.
Back in the 80s, I attended a talk in Hungary where an American biologist showed growing beetle larvae to 4x normal size under magnetic stimulation. No heating there. At the time somebody in the US was succeeding, over many decades, in suppressing almost all research into biological effects of E-M exposure. About the only person with a free hand was George Becker, author of The Body Electric, because he worked for the Veterans Administration on what they hoped would lead to limb regeneration.
Every controlled study of microwave exposure I have encountered used entirely unmodulated radiation at a single frequency, which is where we would expect the least effect.
> The studies used 2G and 3G frequencies and modulations still used in voice calls and texting in the United States
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/newsroom/releases/2018/februa...
"Being unsure (about the roundness of the earth, about the age of the world, about the origin of humans, about who built the pyramids, etc.) is better, anyway, than feeling sure of something false."
The burden of proof is still on the one claming the existence of something.
Knowing there is no much evidence, it is absolutely dishonest to make the claim. The honest statement is that nobody knows.
Playing the solipsism game does not make for a productive conversation.
For this effect to exist, something in the living cells need to rectify the high-frequency radio signal. I wonder what it is. There are no semiconductors or p-n junctions inside the cells. There are bug detectors that work by using this principle, and they are not triggered by living tissue.
It doesn't seem like the causality is something very mysterious either, we know electromagnetic fields have an effect on chemistry. It's the very nature of molecules to be affected by electromagnetism, so the idea that DNA can be damaged by electromagnetic fields isn't much of a stretch...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31297205/
What's the induced current in the sweat ducts, have you done the calculations by some chance? and closely situated small nerve fibers? and mast cells?
Can that amount of current cause human mast cells to degranulate? Could it have impact on nerve signalling and the downstream inflammatory cascade?
Has this been demonstrated in animal experiments? (guess in one try)
How many degrees is needed for, say, pressure urticaria to cause anaphylaxis? (Literally unsolved question, you might get a nobel for it)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331357481_Human_swe...
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/reveh-2020-00...
Each new version has a different modulation profile. Biological effects of E-M exposure at sub-heating levels depend utterly on modulation. Analog, gen 2, gen 3, gen 4, now gen 5, are all different and on a random collection of frequency bands. Gen 5 uses a band not used before.
There is no reason to think results from one modulation scheme and frequency band would match those from another.
What burden of proof does this line of reasoning impose? We are supposed to provide the absence of an effect every time a modulation scheme changes, or otherwise must assume just the latest scheme is somehow a novel deadly cocktail?
Assuming it is not a novel deadly cocktail makes exactly as much sense as assuming it is one. We are in a condition of total ignorance, and have done nothing to reduce that ignorance.
> All kinds of tumors have exploded in recent decades
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Cancer is what you die of if something else doesn't get you first.
For example, a growing variety of cancers turn out to be induced by HPV, human papilloma virus. (The cancers were mostly there already, but we don't know they are caused by HPV without a lot of work.) Any cancer caused by HPV is one you will not get without exposure, regardless of your age.
I always scroll websites until I fall asleep, and then my phone ends up somewhere in the bed, usually under my pillow
But there is quite a lot of research suggesting that doomscrolling in bed is psychologically harmful. Leave the phone in the other room, for sanity's sake.
Unless the lithium battery catches fire. That might be bad for you.
Nothing so reliably induces non-biologists to insist they are certain of facts no competent biologist would confidently speculate on as talk of microwave radiation.
Not really all that worried at all though - just saying
The radio waves used for cell phones are between about 800 and 2000 Mhz. Visible light which we all know is not a concern is 490 to 790...terahertz. You don't get to ionizing radiation until you get to roughly 2400 terahertz which is roughly 10 eV.
Was very frustrating learning all that physics just for dumbasses to claim your brain was getting fried so they could sell you a sticker with a metal screen for $40 that does nothing.
Details matter.
There are theories that radio waves can activate small nerve fibres that are located closely to the edge of your skin, where EMF can penetrate, even if only couple millimetres deep.
Those nerve fibres are often located near the mast cells, which form part of your innantr immune system, and have a two-way communication with your CNS via these fibers.
Constant inflammation driven by mast cells is a proven cause of autoimmune disease and increased risks of cancer, osteoporosis, many other chronic illness.
It’s not just ionisation that can do that. That’s only one mechanism. Induce enough inflammation and you could have risks of cancer go up, and not only locally, like skin cancer, but systemically as well, because the immune cells release mediators into the systemic circulation, and in rare cases even causes anaphylaxis, like with solar urticaria: https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/what-is-s...
Of course, there is no cellphone equipped with such a thing.
The point is neither one produces ionizing radiation.
There are other mechanisms by which non-ionizing radiation can induce cancers, such as the one I've described.
Link please, there are no proven mechanisms such as you describe I am aware of. Your only link points to sun exposure and UVB rays which are near ionizing and cause cancer through DNA damage based on photon energy.
Your example of a laser vs led is on point because its purely based on inverse-square, watt per kg and and thermal heating of tissue which is the only known mechanism which cellphone RF frequencies can cause tissue damage and only at orders of magnitude more power levels.
So anyway, the mechanism:
Any of these steps seem controversial to you? you can verify them independently easily. the only real question that remains is how big of an effect this will have on humans. Cars kill over a million EVERY year. Every 5 years we kill as many people as this pandemic. Nobody seems to particularly care.Maybe it will be a small effect, maybe it will kill millions per year, but it seems everyone has made up their minds either way, and unless people start dropping dead in the streets nobody will change their mind.
>Maybe claim #3. Plenty of papers on that
I can find one paper, mast cell degranulation has lots of causes, maybe just from thermal heating? Always worth looking into I wouldn't call it conclusive by any stretch.
I don't think anyone has made up their mind, only that jumping to conclusions isn't warranted base don our understanding of physics, sure we should keep studying but as yet there are no proven non-thermal effects or direct correlation or causation between low power microwave and cancer.
We do study such effects. It's called a highly lucrative field of dermatology. Luckily, however, humans had billions of years to evolve alongside the sunlight, but phototherapy of all sorts is quite popular, and skin photo-damage is discussed at probably every appointment?
Ok, about mast cells and degranulation, I'll be very frank with you: literally nobody in the entire world understands them fully. Yes. Nobody. Entire world. Not even the absolute best of the best. I mean it. Mast cels supposedly release 200+ mediators, 90%+ of which are not even characterized. Tons of receptors on them that nobody bothered to figure out what they do. There is even a newly recognized clinical entity MCAS/MCAD (mast cell activation disorder), in which physicians and patients are attempting educated guesswork with various treatments to see what sticks. The clinical presentation can be anything from itchy cheeks to having near-fatal anaphylaxis hourly, and everything in between. It doesn't even have a settled consensus on diagnostic criteria yet - ongoing disputes SINCE 1991 (as per wikipedia). Some sources claim 10-18% prevalence in various degrees of severity, fun stuff.
This is mainstream allergy specialty we are talking about. Peanuts, eggs, pollen, that type of mundane stuff. So just to set your expectations right: nothing around peanut allergy is conclusive to physics's standard of five sigma.
Absolutely nothing. Maybe aside from the fact peanuts contain peanuts, and some people tend to be allergic to them. Nobody seems to dispute that. That's where we stand with mast cells.
EMF and mast cells? Now that's really pushing the envelope. That sort of research isn't going to get you anything but a tinfoil hat. Nobody does it. No money or fame in it. Why do it?
The theory about EMF and mast cells (and more recently, associated small nerve fibers) is fairly old though, at least 20 years now, seems like credible people, and plausible enough mechanism. Is it jumping to conclusions? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10859662/
Not conclusive enough? Tons of studies on mast cells and EMF/radiation. Here's 1st page hit on google (pubmed search sucks): https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41129
N.B.: the SAR in that study is on the same order of magnitude as your iphone.
Demyelination if found in humans could mean dx of multiple sclerosis, a devastating illness...and ADHD-like hyperactive behaviour? Wonderful.
Still not sufficiently conclusive? You might want to travel, examine brain slices with your own eyes, and report back in this thread. The study seems fresh, slides might still be in storage.
The only absolutely conclusive anything might ever come up in the next 50-100 years (if you live that long), just like we found out our way with thalidomide, leaded gas, BPA, perfluorinates, and many other toxins, poisons, viruses and other such cooties we've survived for billions of years right up until this very moment.
Could be safe. Could be multiple sclerosis. NBD.
I said artificial light as in visible, not near-ionizing UV which has well understood mechanisms that lead to cancer.
There are multi tens of watt transmitters all around us for hours per day that nobody seems to worry about, yet everyone seems worried about milliwatt transmitters of much lower photon energy.
We have evolved to sunlight and yet we still get cancer from it and its due to the photon energy, shouldn't we be looking at artificial terahertz radiation at much higher power levels with more vigor than gigahertz?
>EMF and mast cells? Now that's really pushing the envelope. That sort of research isn't going to get you anything but a tinfoil hat. Nobody does it. No money or fame in it. Why do it?
If anyone publishes a paper that implies cellphone radiation causes health issues it gets quite a bit of attention, not really buying that there is no motivation, there are countless books and websites making money off these papers lately.
>N.B.: the SAR in that study is on the same order of magnitude as your iphone.
No its 4 W/kg whole body for 5 hours per day for 12 weeks unmodulated continuous 835Mhz, FFC regulates to 1.6 W/kg over the gram getting the most power (basically the gram of flesh where antenna is closest to your head).
>Demyelination if found in humans could mean dx of multiple sclerosis, a devastating illness...and ADHD-like hyperactive behaviour? Wonderful.
From the paper: "The rota rod test was done to determine the impact of chronic RF-EMF exposure on behavioural changes. This test is widely used to evaluate motor dysfunctions, especially coordination and balance. There was no significant difference between the control and RM-EMF groups"
and "The observations of autophagosome formation and down-regulation of pro-apoptotic factor Bax suggested a lack of neuronal damage."
They then go on to pick some slides of what might be myelin damage hopefully they didn't cherry pick them. Should be easy to reproduce the results.
The mice seemed to move more in the study so thus where called "hyperactive" hopefully there wasn't a buzzing noise from the transmitter or some other environmental factor agitating the RF group. Again this stuff should be easily reproducible in further studies.
>Could be safe. Could be multiple sclerosis. NBD.
Could cure MS, could give you superpowers as others have cited in this post have suggested, could be a teapot orbiting the sun we don't know about. We should keep looking but lets be level headed about it.
Great. Can you provide a reference to this premise at all? There are theories doesn't mean there are verifiable observations to support them. You based your entire argument on this, and eventually connected to a WebMD reference to a condition caused by exposure to solar energy...
...which is orders and orders of more magnitude greater energy than microwave transmitters used in cell phone...
...also a cell phone transmitter maxes out at 1 watt to the antenna and solar energy at the earth's surface is 1000 watts per meter...
...oh yeah, and SOLAR FLUX UNCLUDES UV RADIATION WHICH IS IONIZING RADIATION!
Provide a peer reviewed reference to your proposed mechanism that actually connects it to damage in DNA that leads to cancer in the context of cell phones please.
It also doesn't matter, as the same occurs with infrared: google "heat urticaria". def not ionizing? You can use this link www.google.com to confirm, and also this one maybe: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
maybe also google "cold urticaria"? is negative (inverse?) infrared ionizing? Pressure urticaria is also cool, no radiation required at all.
Given the subject matter at hand is quite involved and requires fairly up to date expertise in neurology, allergy and immunology, oncology and dermatology to be able to evaluate mechanisms at hand, I have prepared for you a decent list of peer reviewed materials to begin your preparation:
Once you have covered the basics in the above peer reviewed literature, most of which is even approved for training, you will then have no difficulty at all accepting the following: Clinical implications of the interplay between EMF and mast cells is an ongoing area of research. There is like less than 90 papers published on this specific topic, which is miniscule. However, you should not review those papers until after you completed with basics.Looking forward to your contributions.
I'm also aware of the number of papers out there proposing harm but in the broader picture they don't pan out as reproducible or actually demonstrating sufficient evidence to show harm. That's what the OP is talking about. Despite all the hypothetical mechanisms brain cancers did not increase between the time we had no cell phones to when they became ubiquitous in society.
Here's the contribution I've been responding with all over this thread:
"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of the head and neck region."
https://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/emerging/d...
The EU routinely surveys the literature to review the research on RFR and EMF exposure and time and time again does not turn up any statistically significant proof of harm. It covers way more than 90 studies; the citation section alone is 55 pages of the 288 in this systematic review.
This is why I get so frustrated about people asserting a cause without providing real data the effects are real or insisting effects exist as a response to data like the OP that suggest there's no interaction.
Provide this thread some explanation regard why the OP is is wrong and cancer cells are going up and then connect that to your assertion of a mechanism similar to solar uticara. If you can't do the first part of that and discredit the observational data your mechanism is just a data-less hypothesis and is just sewing fear uncertainty and doubt for no reason.
My comment stated the mechanism can be chronic inflammation, which among MANY OTHER THINGS, can also lead to DNA damage.
MANY. OTHER. THINGS.
There is a study in this thread where rats irradiated with 835 mhz (commonly used in Wi-Fi, cellular, wireless phone etc), at SAR 4 (iPhone is at 2) produced demyelination in rats.
Is multiple sclerosis better than cancer?
Finding the link of the study is an exercise left to reader. It’s somewhere here in one of my comments.
Evaluating these studies would require at least the ISBNs I’ve linked, which can take over a decade.
Looking forward to updates from you in 2032.
Molecular chemistry where e.g. protein clusters copy DNA, is very intricate, and introducing electromagnetic resonances in such processes could be potentially disruptive. It's not just your receiver that picks up energy from radio waves, molecules can too (even without losing electrons).
In fact, someone cannot prove mobile phones are safe once and for all unless they tested the entire set of frequencies used in future phone models too.
Edit: Furthermore, the Gibb's free energy of any molecular process determines the reversibility of the process at a given temperature. Any molecular process with Gibb's free energy that is lower than the thermal mean energy is going to be essentially a reversible equilibrium process, and stimulating it with radiation will only shift the equilibrium very slightly I believe. I think it's for this reason that we don't see radio catalysed reactions in chemistry, unlike photocatalysed reactions.
The only other subjects that induce such confident statements of fact from the profoundly ignorant are economics and politics.
Microwaves absorbed in tissue induce electrical currents carried by ions in solution. Just about everything that happens in your body involves ions moving in solution, one way or another. Details matter.
That will be surprising to those of us who, you know, exist.
Try to use microwaves to move ions from one side of a container of salt solution to the other and then get back to me on the ability of microwaves to control ion movement. Hint: you basically can't without obscene levels of radiation. The thermal "pressure" due to the diffusion of ions is enormous.
For a sense of scale, the thermal velocity of water molecules at room temperature is about 500m/s. The drift velocity(average movement of charge carriers, i.e. coherent current) of typical electric currents is on the order of 1mm/s.
On top of rectification and resonance, the signal would need to be carried in a place where its current has a persistent effect, and the nature of the signal itself, the modulation, would need to be such as to drive some cellular-scale electrochemical process. It is not possible to predict what that would be for the signal in question, if indeed there are any.
We appear to have got lucky with previous generations, but that tells us nothing about the next.
Now, 6B ions is hardly any, in the grand scheme of things, but they are in a very small space, and another 6B are moving in the next channel over. The only places we know of (well, that I know of) where these nanoamp currents are important is in organizing healing, and in embryo development. Old people have a hard enough time mustering healing activity without anything disrupting the process. I don't know what other processes might involve such currents.
Again, we don't know whether 5G modulation will affect healing in old people, but it is certainly physically possible that it can. It will be very hard to measure, but that doesn't mean the physiological effect must be small.
If there is an effect, will we notice? Is anybody monitoring healing rates in old people, at the population level, today? How do you even measure that?
If you can build a protein that can tune to e.g. 3GHz (or whatever frequency a phone uses), thus behave differently at that frequency, then basically that proves that radio waves can theoretically alter the reactions in the molecular soup that is a cell. All I'm saying is that I'm not so sure that this can't be done.
The reason why we can make things interact with radio waves at all is essentially because electrical conductors provide coherent modes for low energy photons to couple to. Without conductors and their free electron cloud we would have a very hard time building anything to receive or transmit radio in any way that isn't thermal.
It is true that there is some degree of conductivity in cells but without a non-thermal way of coupling between current and molecular processes I don't see how radio waves could affect cells in a non-thermal manner
Edit: I guess nerves have a non-thermal coupling mechanism from low frequency currents to molecular mechanisms, so it must be possible. But the machinery for that has been highly evolved for that specific task, I'm not sure if it follows that such machinery would appear commonly in cell processes.
And for the non-thermal effect discussion, have you considered voltage-gated ion-channels in cell-membranes?
We aren't your Google-scholar and you're just promoting FUD by asking into the ether "but couldn't X cause Y". Me typing this message COULD cause a butterfly effect that leads to an earthquake. In any "does X cause Y" scenario you have two answer what the probability is that X causes Y and what's the impact of X does cause Y.
In RFR exposure terms it's what is the probability that RF below ionizing levels cause damage to DNA to promote cancer. The vast majority of the research says no and theoretical mechanisms for harm of RF below ionizing levels has never been proven to anything close to a statistical significance or in ways that are reproducible. Even if you did you'd have to assume impact. The OP study is basically assuming there's some impact and studying the population broadly and observed none.
Low probably, low impact, low or no risk.
Please present evidence that presents a high risk argument that is backed by some research showing an increase of the probability and/or impact or rfr exposure to DNA damage.
Until you do that, you're gish galloping. Please respond to our arguments (or consider if we're right) instead of declaring new ones with no references.
So when you write: "...and theoretical mechanisms for harm of RF below ionizing levels has never been proven to anything close to a statistical significance or in ways that are reproducible" ...I lose that patience with people not even interested in looking.
Look up Yakymenko et al. 2015 "Oxidative mechanisms of biological activity of low-intensity radiofrequency radiation". Full-text link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative...
Excerpt: "...among 100 currently available peer-reviewed studies dealing with oxidative effects of low-intensity RFR, in general, 93 confirmed that RFR induces oxidative effects in biological systems. A wide pathogenic potential of the induced ROS and their involvement in cell signaling pathways explains a range of biological/health effects of low-intensity RFR, which include both cancer and non-cancer pathologies."
Yes, the word "cancer" is in there along with "low-intensity RFR". The pathway is free-radical promotion in cells by RF and subsequent damage to proteins, DNA etc.
Keep believing the "ionizing only" line if you want. You're allowed to have an opinion. But then its just you against the peer-reviewed & published data.
"While the evidence may support the notion that RFR can increase markers of oxidative activity in tissue, it does not establish that this increase is biologically important and can actually lead to specific diseases. It also does not establish that cell phone use causes any harm by this mechanism."
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/about-that-cell-phone-and-c...
They used the word cancer but didn't provide any real data that linked the proposed mechanism to cancer. Please stop believing fear mongerers and demand not just a hypothesis but actual data that a mechanism causes harm.
Oh, and not all oxidative stress in the body is bad. There are oxidative compounds that benefit human health and too much antioxidant can produce adverse effects.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5551541/
Our bodies even produce their own antioxidants:
"Your body's cells naturally produce some powerful antioxidants, such as alpha lipoic acid and glutathione."
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding....
Oxidarive stress and free radicals are turning into buzzwords that ignore how our bodies balance that and just stating something causes oxidative stress in vitro or ex vivo doesn't say whether our antioxidant system can handle that and in the end negate any potential harm. This is why in vivo studies are done and the OP is a massive in vivo experiment that's been naturally happening since cell phones were first deployed.
I'm also going to highlight that I'm trying to pursuade you that we know the risks, they're low (basically zero), and you don't have to be worried about them. To contrast you're proposing unproven mechanisms for an uncertain risk that contradicts the observations do the original post while repeating arguments used by snake oil salesman that sell Faraday cages for people's wifi routers.
Stop being afraid, the world is way less scary when it comes to RFR exposure than these fear mongerers want you to belive.
So a sci. discussion melted down to an unsolicited pop-psych consultation.
Your argumentation is flawed. Have a nice day.
I was surprised, as they didn't mention this before the scan. After, I asked about it, and they told me most people don't feel anything, but some do like me, and for a few it's so painful they have to stop the scan.
They told me it was my peripheral nervous system interacting with the radio emissions, not a physical (non-signal) effect as it felt like. From that conversation I learned there was about 10kW transmitted through my body during the scan.
MRIs have been studied for dangerous effects, of course, and all the evidence shows them to be extremely safe... provided there is no metal in the body which can heat up or be displaced by the field, and not counting risks from the contrast agents which are sometimes injected, which some people are more susceptible to than others.
I was never convinced by dismissive arguments that non-ionising radiation "can't" have any biological effect other than localised heating, or that the thermal background spectrum means infrared and below can't have an effect. (I know the physics pretty well; it's not lack of understanding.)
But after those sensations caused directly by the emissions, I'd experienced a biological, non-thermal effect from radio in the microwave-or-below frequency range directly and clearly. That was really interesting.
The body clearly does a lot of things based on countless subtle signalling pathways. Pretty much anything any pathway can sense could have an effect, even if it's not a conventional chemical reaction. One of the more interesting technological ideas around this is the use of high coherence terahertz signals that resonate with DNA molecular dynamics.
THz radiation is a different story too as it has about enough energy such that it could influence irreversible processes.
5+ Ghz frequencies are often used in precision radar and I worked with people who worked on them in the Navy. A few had stories of getting "zapped" by them if they were left on against safety guidelines. The feeling is like having popcorn pop under your skin because the waves are quickly absorbed by the water in the dead layer of your skin. No one in the entirety of military radar had ever got cancer from one of these radars but sometimes they get a fun wake up call to get back down the radar mast to slap whoever left the dish spinning.
There is NO mechanism you're actually providing because you are saying molecules can be "damaged" without actually describing what that even means. DNA is ionic bonds only so enlighten me how they are ever "damaged" because we're aren't in the territory of covenant or hydrogen bonds that can be affected by stuff like heat.
You can KILL cells with high frequency RF but cancer doesn't come about when a cell dies but when the DNA is DAMAGED through and IONIZING event.
"they can't prove its safe... unless they test the entire set of frequencies used in future phone models too"
Your premise is bad. We can't prove anything is 100% safe ever. We instead try to assess risk which is probability of the adverse event multiplied by its impact and reduced by mitigations if available.
And we've done that TIME AND TIME AGAIN for the tin-foil-hat crowd that doesn't understand basic physics:
"Overall, the epidemiological studies on RF EMF exposure do not show an increased risk of brain tumours. Furthermore, they do not indicate an increased risk for other cancers of the head and neck region."
http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/emerging/do...
Please at least Google for the research before declaring it doesn't exist. You're using the same logic as anti-vax/anti-gmo/anti-science in general; just declare no/not enough research had been done and gish gallop arguments to promote fear, uncertainty and doubt when in reality scientists HAVE been at work making sure the risks are low and you're just denying their efforts.