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Drowning in a Sea of Microwaves
luciensims writes "The Independent is running an article on another study of the long-term effects of mobile phones. Given how widespread mobile phone use has become, will we even have an adequate control group 50 years from now to gauge what the effects have been?"
I read somewhere that in the early 50's, Motorola would strap two way radios on the heads of live pigs and expose them to *much* more radiation than a typical cell phone would emit. No ill effects were reported.
Nerve cell damage in mammalian brain after exposure to microwaves from GSM mobile phones.
Salford LG, Brun AE, Eberhardt JL, Malmgren L, Persson BR.
Environ Health Perspect. 2003 Jun;111(7):881-3; discussion A408.
Department of Neurosurgery, Lund University, The Rausing Laboratory and Lund University Hospital, Lund, Sweden. Leif.Salford@neurokir.lu.se
The possible risks of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields for the human body is a growing concern for our society. We have previously shown that weak pulsed microwaves give rise to a significant leakage of albumin through the blood-brain barrier. In this study we investigated whether a pathologic leakage across the blood-brain barrier might be combined with damage to the neurons. Three groups each of eight rats were exposed for 2 hr to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) mobile phone electromagnetic fields of different strengths. We found highly significant (p 0.002) evidence for neuronal damage in the cortex, hippocampus, and basal ganglia in the brains of exposed rats.
PMID: 12782486 [PubMed - in process]
From PubMed
The more important question to answer is "how many have died or been injured while using a cell phone." The number of cancers will pale in comparision. Well Harvard studied it and came up with a new point of view that there is a risk to benefit to be considered that precludes all of the above.
To myself it it is all about improving the quality of life and the cell phone does not improve my life.
I can not quote sources, *but i seem to remember* that the Amish and Menonites (sp), were quite into cell phones.
They actually fit into the whole idealogy of technology that these two groups have, in that technology should be the slave of community. In this mode of thought it is a distinct advantage that cell phones are able to be turned off, they do not needlessly interupt personal life, as a 'normal' telephone does, and such like.
Okay, heres that source I was talking about
The best is the enemy of the good
Hasn't anyone taught you about the Inverse Square Law? When you double the distance between a radiation source and its target, the power over the same target area is reduced to 1/4 what it was. So, if you are 100 times farther away from the cell phone as the idiot using it, you receive 1/10,000 the signal dosage.
If there's enough power at that distance to fry your brain, the obnoxious twit using it will be dead in a couple days of an overdose. But, since he won't be dead in 2 days, or even a month, from the radio signal in his phone, you won't be dead either.
Get a sense of proportionality, dude!
I'm skeptical about this. First, there are microwaves everywhere, all the time. Microwaves are part of heat.
A physicist friend of mine and I did the numbers. There is so much energy available everywhere at room temperature that a little bit more has no effect, as the article says.
The chemical processes of the body are not fragile. We couldn't see any way that a little bit of outside energy could couple to a chemical process and make a difference.
Sorry; the Amish are not anti tech. They are strongly into community and social leveling. Phones were band by the bishops because of party lines (where more than one household shares a line) cause private matters to become public. So the use and even ownership of cell phones seems to still be in question. Amish use all forms of tech (but, often can not own it. Borrowing a chain saw is ok, owning one is not.
(I can speak with a little authority on this my wife live form many years next to a number of Amish (and constrictive ones at that) They often borrow power tools in my father in law's shop, They saw lumber for him in there lumber mill (well I think some English (that's us non-Amish) person owns the mill)
Charles Puffer
(Yes my spelling sucks)
As you will surely know the electro-magnetic waves used for cell phone communication are just the same a radioactive waves used in nuclear power plants
Firstly, wrong. Only gamma rays are electromagnetic. Alpha and beta rays are highly energetic helium nuclei and electrons, respectively.
Secondly, visible light is electromagnetic rays. Think about how much of that you absorb in an average day. Augghhhh, the light!! The horrible light! Won't someone think of the children?
Thank you for the troll. Please move along.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Wifi transmits in the 100 mW range (I think... also depends on flavor of 802.11). This makes sense because you only need to transmit maybe 30 meters where cell phones may need to transmit up to 1 km.
I don't think that your kids heads will start bleeding. I think it might be more dangerous if you let them go outside in the sun without sunscreen.
As the technology keeps advancing, distances between a cell and base station will shrink, and the power requirements for transmission will decrease.
I believe one of the reasons it is banned in aircrafts is you can hit so many base stations from air and create havoc on the infrastructure. Telecommunication companies don't like you messing with their hardware. Most of the cell phones are pretty low powered devices, max. 5W to my knowledge. 5W is nothing compared to what other in-flight equipment radiate. A 144-146MHz (in US 144-148MHz) amateur radio handheld can hit over 100 miles with 1W. As long as your receiver is sensitive enough and you are line-of-sight with the transmitter, you will hear it. It is common to bounce radio signals off the moon and receive them back (called EME - Earth moon Earth) and there are guys who do this with 5W hand held transmitters (and lots of pre-amps on the receiver side and huge antennas but I hope you get my point). In many countries (including UK), using amateur radio transmitters on aircrafts is banned. Not because it is dangerous - it isn't. It is because you can create havoc with the repeaters. This morning there was a nice lift and I could hear french stations calling on 145.5. Unfortunately I had a low power radio in the car so I couldn't get them hear me. I live in Cambridge, UK. France is quite a distance away.
Inverse square. one-over-distance-times-itself. 1/D^2
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It's not a phobia of technology, it's independance from technology. The majority of Amish agree that technology has benefits, but for their daily life and work it is better to not use it unless they can build it/understand it themselves.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
WiFi is just a very low-powered microwave
Yes. Microwaves operate at 700-1000W, while WiFi tops out at 250mW.
If you put your WiFi card on your lap for a while, you might notice some extra heat
That's from the electronics. RF chips are not 100% efficient.
If the signal was too strong (such as if you setup a strong amp), it could potentially boil you.. but it would have to be a really strong signal.
Say, around 800W should do the trick. 250mW will never boil you, period. That's like standing 4 feet from a 60W bulb.
It should be fine to have around with kids as long as they don't put it in their mouths.
Yeah, my netgear card is small enough to swallow.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
For both Time Division Multiple-Access systems, such as iDEN, TDMA (IS-136), and GSM, range is related to the speed of light and the risk of two phones transmitting on supposedly sequential time slots that end up overlapping because the two phones are sufficiently far enough away from the transmitter that they can't accurately avoid doing so. The maximum range is usually 9km or thereabouts, and receivers on base stations are usually sensitive enough that they do not need the handsets to be transmitting that amount of power. For Code Division Multiple-Access systems such as CDMA (IS-95), excess power is actually a massive cause of problems. The base station needs to receive everything at roughly the same "volume". Despite industry propaganda, most Code-Division phones end up having roughly the same range as Time-Division phones partially because of this, though as receiving technology improves, so may the range of phones using this technology.
You can get an idea of what's involved by looking at how much power is pumped into your battery to get it fully charged, and then consider how much the phone has to in addition to transmitting when you're making calls, such as receiving the signal, decoding the received signal and encoding the to-be-transmitted one, working the speaker, etc. My 9290 fully charges in about an hour from a 3-4W power supply, and is rated at 10 hours of talk time on that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Microwave and radio frequency radiation are not going to give you cancer. They are not of sufficient energy to be considered ionizing radiation. To actually break a chemical bond in a cell(a necessary step for formation of cancer at the cellular level) requires energy greater than what is contained in microwave or radio wavelengths. Ultraviolet radiation is where sufficient energy begins, with it being a minor threat. The worst is of course gamma radiation which carries the most energy of the spectrum.
At a cellular level, cancerous cells are developed when an electron-deficient material bonds with free electrons on nitrogen atoms in DNA. Then when the DNA replicates on cell division, a mutation is formed. If the immune system cannot detect and destroy the rogue cell, it may be able to replicate on its own, depending on how badly the DNA is damaged. This replication is what we call cancer.
Ionizing radiation creates positive ions and free radicals in the cells that can react as mentioned above. High energy radiation like x-rays and gamma rays can also penetrate past the skin and react with organs further in the body. (UV cannot, this is why skin cancer is about the only kind you can get from solar radiation) Organ cells reproduce quite more frequently as well, which makes them more susceptible to mutation. Radiation such as microwaves, radio waves, visible light, and the like will not break chemical bonds and hence cannot cause cellular mutations.
Microwaves DO have the ability to vibrate the bonds of polar molecules (such as water) causing them to heat up. This is how your microwave oven works...water in your food is heated which inductively heats your food. Excessive heat can cause proteins to denature (i.e. cook) but will not break them into ions or free radicals.
There's your lesson in cellular biology, chemistry, and eletromagnetic physics. Now quit worrying about your cell phone or microwave giving you cancer.
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... have been around for many decades, and are spewing *mega*watts of signals in the same general frequency range as cell phones for all that time.
This would have much, much more health effects for those living nearby than all the microwaves we're "drowning" in ever will. To the best of my knowledge, it's zip.
In the early 50's, Radio was just getting into VHF. Very little stuff used UHF except for some television. I don't think any of the tests were done on the 800, 900Mhz and gigahertz bands. Other than Radar, there just wasn't much in the Gigahertz bands. I don't think a VHF 160 MHZ or UHF 460 MHZ police radio has the same heating as a microwave PCS phone of the same power to organic tissue.
Do you know what frequency was tested? Was it HF (3-30 MHZ), VHF (30-300 MHZ) or any UHF? I don't think they had any reason to test microwave frequencies. That was strictly Radar and not communication equipment that anybody would carry with them.
The truth shall set you free!