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Danger Of Strong Electromagnetic Fields
blueworld writes "U.S. Department of Energy researchers have discovered a possible cause for reported illness around high voltage power lines. They found that rats' bodies produced high levels of ozone when exposed to strong electrical fields. Electrically grounded water produced the same result when exposed to the fields. Apparently, the water in our bodies may be responsible for the health risks of high voltage power lines."
Nothing like a little begging the question fallacy to get your day started. (Hint: there is no demonstrated evidence that being anywhere near a high power line is harmful at all. Witness the astounding lack of corpses of all varieties along the millions of miles of high power lines crossing the United States.)
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Still, the study identifies another potential health risk. So, what are some ways that we can reduce the potential damage? Some sort of sheilding on power lines? Are there any materials that can cheaply stop this type of radiation and it's effects?
A diet high in anti-oxidants is one easy way to at least limit the damage... (Free radicals caused by the decomposition of 03 as it attacks are responsible for much of the damage. Anti-oxidants can help prevent this).
From the article:
So, perhaps you should read a bit closer.
Dihydrogen Monoxide: It really is the invisible killer.
The jump to link this observed creation of ozone with the popularly held belief that power lines adversely affect health is erroneous.
In the original study which created the popular myth that power lines cause illness, the authors correctly found a correlation between living in the proximity of power lines and leukemia rates but never found causation. After much debate it was revealed years later that traffic density has an even greater correlation with the observed leukemia rates and provides a well understood and now obvious causation -- pollution. It just happens that power lines exist in areas of greater traffic density. Unfortunately, the general public was never copied on the second corrected paper and to this day believe that power lines have adverse health effects, when they instead should be worried about pollution from traffic.
Although the article states that the creation of ozone around power lines could be a health risk, the quantity of ozone created for various transmission structures is never quantified and nor compared with ambient urban polution. Thus at worst it is yet another vehicle for the propagation of a scientific urban legend or at best a warning to shut of indoor air ionizers whose output of ozone can lead to concentrations in excess those present of ambient pollution levels.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
Let's all gather rats and put them under high voltage power lines and that pesky hole in the ozone layer will soon be but a memory!
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
There is very little interaction between chemical processes and power lines that are 20 meters away. That's because of Planck's constant: 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/s. When you multiply normal events by a number that has a decimal point and 34 zeroes, the result is tiny.
Notice this paragraph in the article: "Goheen also cautioned that the rats had to be placed much closer to the electrical device than would be the case for most people and their ion air generators."
Someone who was able to show that there was, in fact, a strong interaction would immediately win a Nobel Prize, because he or she would have discovered a new kind of interaction between electromagnetic energy and chemical processes.
Because there is a specific health risk. The risk near a power line is NOT an URBAN LEGEND
I speak from doing a bunch of research on this problem, after finding out that Electromagnetic radiation was one of the seven possible causes for the cancer that I survived.
The electromagnetic field (EMF) is not harmful IN AND OF ITSELF. In conjunction with how the body works, some people are subject to some of it's effects. To whit: An EMF field will cause already existing cancer cells to grow faster than normal. Of itself, this is not fatal, as you have to have the cells in the body to start with.
Some schools think that the body causes cancer cells to grow all the time. The body's immune system then kills off the bad cells while leaving the good ones alone. In the presence of an EMF field, the body has to work harder, and once it loses the battle, the cancer will grow out of control.
As I found out, the transition out of such a field to the hospital for a week made me feel better, and when I re-entered the field for a while, I felt worse. The best decision that we apparently made for that time was to permanently remove me from the field, though we didn't know it was even there at the time (in hindsite, we recognized the source of the EMF)
Screw this! I'm getting away from my monitor until my ozone depletes.
Anyone know where I can get some clouroflourocarbons for lunch?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Yes, is it the water's fault. Not the radiation, no, the water.
So, if I cut my jugular vein, why do I die? Is it because of the knifet? No, it is because my heart pumps the blood out of me. The heart is to blame.
Hm?
Oooh... Anti-oxidants...
I believe I still have a copy of the article at home (I'm at work now). I had to make a special trip to the UCF library to read and copy the article when I first saw a reference to it. I'll look for it this evening.
The danger level is achieving 1 Telsa in the body. Now power lines may not reach that level (the EMF strength is reduced as the square of the distance after all), but things like electrical power meter boxes DO reach that kind of strength for a radius of 2-3 feet, and I was sleeping in such a field (there were 16 boxes on the other side of the wall. Based upon measurements of a single box in our house by the electric company, those boxes may have been producing as much as 25 Telsa at the point of my head, and less down the length of my body. That's thru a stone wall from the other side too.)
If you check out the listed causes of Lymphoma, you will find that EMF fields are listed as one of the 7 possible causes, though further research is tending in another direction.
When one spends 6 months fighting cancer and taking chemo, you do check out the possible causes VERY carefully so as to avoid a repitition.
Yet another reason to replace all the water in my body with scotch!
/.!
Thank you
So soon people forget the Saccharin f
...
7 00.html
This finding immediately triggered the threat of the so-called "Delaney Clause," a congressionally mandated provision that requires the Food and Drug Administration to ban--literally "at the drop of a rat"--any synthetic food chemical shown to cause cancer when ingested by laboratory animals.
Saccharin's reputation was further tarnished, however, in 1981, when the National Toxicology Program, referring again to the Canadian rat study, elected to put saccharin in its "cancer causing" list-- formally declaring it an "anticipated human carcinogen."
There was no scientific basis for such a classification of saccharin as a human cancer hazard.
Taken from: http://www.acsh.org/press/editorials/saccharin051
The pseudo science of it was that the rats were give enough saccharin to make a 55 gallon drum of soda...
On topic, I have an ozone/ion air cleaner and it does a great job doing what I want it to do... keeping the house smelling clean.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
What bothered me most about this article was not its suggestion that EMFs may be in part responsible for certain cancers. What bothered me was learning this research team failed to publish the results of an experiment which yeilded exactly opposite results from what they expected. Wouldn't this negative result have been just as valuable to the scientific community, even though it was not what was anticipated?
It makes one wonder how often this happens? How much more would we know if negative results weren't suppressed?
No way. You have to have an RF field at 2.45GHz to shake water molecules. Microwave ovens do it, but you dont have much chance at 60 hertz.
Nowhere in the text did it say who did that study and whether it had review of any sort. They continued this silliness... First Dumb question: How large were the rats and how much space did they take up in cage with the ionized air? Ok, I know it wasn't that much space, but don't ignore the effect.
Second dumb question: they're writing a research paper about three rats? Did they mention controls?
Third dumb question: How do KiloVolts relate to Ozone production? Shouldn't current also be a part of this?
Ok, Now I have to ask the question I've been asking for a long time while reading so much research of this sort: Who reviews this stuff? Why do we let these jokers get away with publishing such irrelevant twaddle in the guise of honest research? I've seen better high school science fair projects. These folks ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
What about those machines where they put your head into a very strong magnetic field?
Apparently people feel very strange while exposed, and many describe feeling "in the presence of god".
Are these machines a health risk?
If ozone is the problem and it is generated by the electric field, then most of the studies done so far are irrelevant because they never measured electric field strengths. This will be rather difficult to study, as the lungs are most susceptible to ozone, and contributions to lung problems from smoking and air pollution will have to be subtracted. Smoking correlates with poverty level, and poverty level and the proximity of major roadways correlate well with each other and with the placement of high-voltage lines. It's going to be a huge statistical mess.
Note that I'm not worried enough to step away from the computer....
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Based upon an electric company measurement, a electric meter box will general a 1 telsa field thru a stone wall (on the other side of the wall of a cinder block wall).
A 1T field will cause a hammer to stick to it almost a meter away, and walking near it with metal-toed boots will make you feel lighter. It will also erase credit cards, etc. 2.5T is an absolutely massive magnetic field. You can generally only get it with superconducting magnets, because you need a completely throbbing amount of current in a toroid.
I highly think your numbers are really really wrong. By that argument, a compass would still point towards an electric meter box from well more than 10 feet away! (If it's just the static field from a net current, it'd be an absolutely huge distance away : 2 miles! The static field from a net current drops as 1/D, not 1/D^3).
It should also be noted that magnetic induction is vector, not scalar: it doesn't add simply. Likely if you had several in a room, you could get any combination of all of the fields, including zero.
I would believe 2.5 mT, not 2.5 T. Even that's still a huge field. 1 A, at 1 meter, will give you about 1 milligauss. At 1 foot, then, it'd be *3* milligauss, or so. Maybe 9 if it's a bunch of conductors. Say 10 milligauss.
You'd then have to have 1 million amperes of current to generate 1 T.
Check those numbers again.
Some have noted the incongruous ionizer ad on the page with the article. Others made statements regarding their own (apparently harmless) ionizer, or other relevant facts that seem to refute a basic point in the article. Well, they don't.
There is an optimum level of hyperoxides in the mammilian system. Too much and you get toxic damage and cell death. Too little and you get infections. This is the chemical portion of your immune system. You have an endocrine process for keeping it at the proper level. Your cells produce superoxide dismutase to rid themselves of excess hyperoxides (primarily hydrogen peroxide, H2O2). Things that suppress superoxide dismutase riase the amount of superoxides in your body and help fight infections. Up to a point.
Now, are anti-oxidants good for you? Only if you don't take too much, otherwise you weaken your immune system. Are hyperoxides (ozone, H202) good for you? Only up to a point, otherwise you fry your cells with oxidative stress. Then again, in some cases this isn't a bad thing. Cancer, which is cell reproduction and metabolism run wild, lives on anaerobic processes. Excess oxygen, particularly as hyperoxides, can kill it.
All of this is based on the work of Otto Warburg. He won the Nobel in medicine twice for this stuff. Its usefullness as well as its theoretical implications (which bear directly on the lack of understanding as to why this experiment would be significant if it holds up) are pretty much ignored these days, and that's a damn shame.
We're mostly equally ignorant of the finer implications of water in biological systems, ushc as the role of polymerized water at cell membranes. Two of the most important factors in life and we're terribly ignorant about both, making work such as this article fairly impossible for us to understand.
Not to be too down on the slashdotters in particular, it's pretty obvious if the researchers knew of Warburg's work, they were ignoring it. The government usually does. They'd prefer people not be too aware that air or water treated by exposure to UV rays can prevent or cure some illnesses. Up to a point. But up to that point, that's some other medicines people wouldn't have to buy.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I hope nobody is reading this and going "wow, strong electrical currents aren't good for the body". I know there have been studies and reports before on people living under powerlines and such and the ill effects it has on the body.
We tend to forget that the body is a collection of systems and messing with any of these systems can have a positive or negative effect. It's an mechanical system so applying too much pressure in the wrong area can break that part (stress the muscles, tear ligaments, break at a joint, etc). It's a chemical system and dumping too much (or having too little) of chemicals (drugs, minerals, etc) can wreak havoc on that system. It has an electrical system and only stands to reason that exposing it to large amounts of electromagnetic ratiation (or even direct electrical stimuli) will have some sort of effect on us. I think as people we tend to forget just how complex the body is.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
The article cites the danger level as 1 U T where the u is a fancy symbolic one - probably your micro telsa.
Move off planet, then . 1 uT is 1E-6 tesla which is 0.01 gauss.
The Earth's magnetic field is 0.5 gauss. That's 50 uT. A bar magnet is a couple of gauss.
For crying out loud, I'd bet that a human's brain generates a few uT!
For some people this is a health problem.
If this were true, cancer patients would be wearing mu-metal clothing. It isn't. It's a crock. If they're claiming 1 uT is a problem, they're out of their minds.
There is no way that a magnetic field of 1 uT could possibly do anything. Look. Ordinary magnetic fields are weak. Really weak. Really really weak. They're down by a factor of 1/c from electric fields. Now, if you lived in a static electric field for a few years, I'd believe there might be a concern. Especially as you'd be sparking everywhere you go. But a 1 uT field probably couldn't move a microscopic amount of iron lying on a table. There's no way it could do anything to you.
Microwave Fallicy #1:
Water vibrations heat the food.
This is true as much as saying that Jews were killed in WWII. It is not wrong, but it is faaaar from complete.
Fact is any molecule with polarity (including H2O) will be subject to molecular vibration. The nature of the vibration is the molecule moving in alignment with the magnetic feild. In essence, I make a wave in a pool, and the water molecules move as I directed. This makes the molecules rub together, creating friction.
2.4 Ghz has nothing to do with the ressonance frequency of water, which is what you claim by claiming that water molecules heat the food. I can melt metal in a microwave, and the metal has no water in it. But it is made of molecules that have polalrity. It takes several hours, but you can get it to 1000C where most everything melts.
Fallicy #2:
You can't put metal in a microwave.
This is an over simplification again. A lot of those disposible pasta cups come with metal rings and you nuke that too. The rule comes about because shape is vially important. Between two points, (like on a fork) you can get an arc to form, which would create a fire if in the presense of a flammable material. So the general rule is don't put it in because it s too hard to explain the science to a layman.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.