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Electric Shavers Rot Your Brain
Damek writes "According to UW researchers, prolonged exposure to low-level magnetic fields, similar to those emitted by such common household devices as blow dryers, electric blankets and razors, can damage brain cell DNA. The damage appears to be cumulative, so you'd best get rid of your electric razors & blankets ASAP! The full study is available online now. No word yet for Cell Phone users' brains..."
The electric fields induced by headphones would be different by the 60-Hz waves they studied in this study, so the results of this stucy are not necessarily transferrable to your example. A separate study would have to be done to consider this, but I suspect the worst damage would be to your eardrums if you had excessive volume from the headphones.
Wouldn't this only be a problem if you use these devices every day directly in contact with your skull?
Well, you might be surprised as how easily magnetic waves can propagate through materials. How do you think 802.11 works through walls? Or cell phones? etc.... I guess you could think of it as being constantly bathed in electromagnetic radiation of all types and wavelengths.
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"Wouldn't this only be a problem if you use these devices every day directly in contact with your skull? I mean, is the range really that far reaching?"
Actually, the magnitude of a magnetic field drops away as the square of the distance from the source. So the answer to your question is, it depends on how strong the field is.
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are not that mitotically active in the adult brain anyway. The Glial cells continue to divide, etc... but the neurons themselves are largely established by childhood, and their numbers steadily go downhill over the course of your life.
That's not to say that neurons don't develop new connections and synapses... they do (otherwise learning could not take place)... they just don't divide much. The implication here is that since they don't divide, they are unlikely to become neoplastic, or pass on their damaged DNA.
Apart from the apoptosis angle, I'm not sure how much clinical relevance this research actually has.
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Here is what Robert Park (author of "Voodoo Science") has to say
http://www.aps.org/WN/
-and-
http://www.aps.org/WN/WN97/wn070497.cfm
In fact, he devotes a whole chapter in the aforementioned book regarding the complete lack of evidence regarding EMF as a health risk. I use the chapter and this topic of research when teaching stats and epidemiology classes as an example of bad science, misused statistics, and causation vs. correlation.
jeff
There's another factor to keep in mind--hair driers and electric razors have a 60hz signal going through with a fair amount of current. Therefore, there's an appreciable amount of power being put into the air. Cell phones, on the other hand, operate at much higher frequencies and at much much lower power levels.
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Because all magnetic fields are dipole fields at best, the field drops with the cube of distance, not the square of distance. So, it is even harder to get that field into your skull.
This is because there is no such thing as a "magnetic charge" like there is for electric charge.
(note to pedants: magnetic monopoles are too exotic to comment on, assuming they exist.)
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Well, you might be surprised as how easily magnetic waves can propagate through materials.
Don't you mean a magnetic field?
How do you think 802.11 works through walls? Or cell phones? etc....
Those are high-frequency electromagnetic (far field) problems. This article refers to low-frequency mahnetic fields. Magnetic fields have much reduced range, so to be in their area of effect you really would have to hold the thing up against your skull.
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The article abstract states that a field strenth of 0.01 mT (millitesla) applied over 24 hours caused a significant increease in DNA strand breaks.
The Earth has a magnetic field with a strength that varies between 20,000 nT and 70,000 nT (nanotesla, the unit usually used.) Converting nT to mT using my few undamaged brain cells gives a background field strength for the planetary magnetic field of 0.02-0.07 mT. The lower numbers are found near the equator and increase with latitude.
Using an electic shaver or hair dryer for five minutes a day would increase exposure by a factor o 0.0007, given the ranges for them found on several sites. You might be better off leaving the Earth's magnetic field altogether except for that nasty cosmic radiation it protects you from.
Magnetic field, gamma radiation, take your pick.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
It is not a static magnetic field. A 60 Hz magnetic field is also a 60 Hz electric field. The radiation field from a dipole drops of with the inverse of distance squared. The intensity drops off with the fourth power.
It has been a few years since I studied this material. Please let me know if I am in error.
It is not a static magnetic field. A 60 Hz magnetic field is also a 60 Hz electric field. The radiation field from a dipole drops of with the inverse of distance squared. The intensity drops off with the fourth power.
It has been a few years since I studied this material. Please let me know if I am in error.
I believe you are. It's quadripole fields that fall off with inverse fourth.
Dipole fields fall off with the inverse cube, as I recall. Inverse square for the individual poles, pluse an extra inverse first-power for the separation between the poles. (Quadripole fields get an extra inverse first-power for the separation for their component dipoles in the other dimension.)
Let's assume for now that the leakage from the motor is mostly a dipole field. (CAN'T be a monopole. B-) ) For a DC field, or the "near field" of an AC field, the dipole field dominates - and it falls off inverse cube. Get two inches from the shaver and the field is 1/8th what it was at one inch. Four inches makes it 1/64th, and so on. Falls off REALLY fast with distance.
As you get farther out the changing magnetic field creates a changing electric field that in turn supports the changing magnetic field (as long as they're both propagating at lightspeed). Then you have an electromagnetic wave, detached from its launcher. This falls off with inverse square.
Under a quarter wavelength the near-field is so dominant you can pretty much ignore the far-field. Over a wavelenghth or so away the situation is reversed (unless your driving element is large compared to a quarter wavelength).
So what's the wavelength of 60 HZ? About three thousand miles.
I don't think we need to worry about the far field. B-)
So figure inverse cube falloff - or faster if the motor's magnetic leakage has more than two poles.
(This is why you need to get REALLY CLOSE to a magnet to erase your credit cards.)
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ok... its important to remember our history... Lai and Singh are the same two MORONS who made similar claims about magnetic fields almost ten years ago:
http://www.electric-words.com/cell/research/laisin gh/memory1.html
and NOBODY was able to duplicate their results. Although the two made $10,000 a pop being 'expert witnesses' for people who brough lawsuits against Motorola et. al. claiming their cell phones gave them tumors. It looks like they must have ran out of money.
This is the WORST kind of junk science imaginable.
It was a University of Washington study. The website is just reporting the results.
I used to work with MRI, and with a 1.5 Tesla magnet the effect of distance was quite important (people have been killed by objects pulled into the magneet).
anyway, we were told the force varied with the CUBE root of distance. according to this source, the drop-off depends on the nature of the source:
http://www.emfs.info/source_distance.asp
as for a deleterious effect on humans, i won't believe it until i see solid proof, preferably with some mechanism explained. distance is a good place to start -- if someone tells you a microwave oven is dangerous, ask them if they are threatened by their neighbor's? how about someone down the street? how about someone else using an electric razor? etc., etc. -- there is a lot to explore.
I did not know that different stages of sleep repaired differents areas of the body. But I do find this information very interesting being that I suffer from sleep deprivation and insomnia. Also, some days I feel as though I'm not very cognitive after I've had a good eight hours of sleep (I'm only 27). At least, I thought they might be good hours. Maybe there is something with my sleep state that isn't helping my brain repair itself or something.
I suppose I could try sleeping pills for a week. I just hope it's the solution. If not, then caffeine my be my only best hope to counter my sluggish mind.
Sleeping pills don't work. Most sleeping pills use the same active ingredient as Benadryl (the name escapes me at the moment). Recall that Benadryl says "Makes you drowsy, do not operate heavy machinery"? They use the same shit in sleeping pills in order to make you drowsy and fall asleep. They just don't work, is all. :) Well, if you get sleepy from Benadryl, then you might try it.
Instead, google for sleeping disorders and read a few of the sites. :) I've done some fairly lengthy googling and found some pretty reputable sites about sleeping disorders (I have a few problems along those lines).
Frequent insomnia is usually a symptom of something else, like depression. So take some Valium instead. ;) It's also a symptom of that particular disorder where your circadian is off by two hours or so from the rest of the world. This is usually mistaken for insomnia.
If you do any of the following things, stop doing them 4-5 hours before you go to bed, and you'll see an immediate difference, if not a cure:
Recall that the monitor operating at any refresh setting is stimulating your brain whether you feel it or not. Don't eat within 4-5 hours of going to bed also, but don't go to bed with an empty stomach. Your body digesting will actually generate energy that'll prevent you from going to sleep, and if you're hungry your body signals that you need to eat instead of sleep. Also, try reading within the last half hour or so before going to bed under a dim light, 25 watts or so.
The other two things I find that work are hard work throughout the day (or exercise if you live a sedentary lifestyle, which I don't anymore) and drinking milk within an hour of going to bed. THere's a hormone linked to sleep, I forget what it's called, but drinking milk and exercise both stimulate production of that hormone. That's why the old mom's cure of warm milk actually works, except that it doesn't matter if it's warm milk or cold milk.
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