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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..."
Personally I'm not concerned, my tinfoil hat doubles as a Faraday cage.
Trolling is a art,
I'd say that apoptosis is better characterized as "natural cell death". It's a natural and essential part of the cell's life cycle, and certainly isn't as alarming as the article's tone suggests.
In fact, we have a word for cells that don't undergo apoptosis: Cancer.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
How does staring at a monitor for 10-14 hours a day affect your brain? Not good is my guess.
So not only am I more manly for using a straight razor...I'm also less likely to have brain rot!
Now if I could just find some more tissues before pass out from bloodloss....
The anti-salmon
..when she told me not to sit to close to the TV
I used to work for a guy who buzzed the stubble off his face like twice a day. He was a real hustler and he thought he got more sales if he was all bay smooth I guess. But he was dumber than a bag of hammers. I guess now i know why.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
What about living directly under a ~40kV power line?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Excuse me, but yes, I do shave my whole head everday with an electric razor... and I haven't noticed any... uh, what were we talking about?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
These are rats exposed to 60Hz AC EMF at 0.1 to 0.5mT for two hours (continuous). Also studied were rats exposed to 60Hz AC EMF at 0.1mT for 24 hours (continuous).
So I suppose, as an analog ....
Go lie down in an MRI for a couple days straight. If you don't go deaf from the noise (they're loud), then you might see similar results. Oh, and don't wear deodorant ... it contains aluminium which will cause it to be dragged through your arm... ouch.
Not that I'm saying there may well be something in this ... but how many of us even use the shaver/hairdryer for 2 continuous hours in a sitting? It may well be (and is likely) that the effects are not cumulative, but are actually acute trauma scenarios. For instance, you can assert that dropping a grain of dust on your foot 5 times a day for 10 years would make for the same mass as, say, dropping a car on said foot. However, the problem then comes in saying, "therefore, the two are analogous - we will see the same damage from the dust as we would with the car".
It just does not follow.
I agree that the news release seems pretty sensationalized, though. If you read carefully, you'll note that in the study they subjected the rats to a 60Hz field for 24 hours continuously, not a few minutes at a time:
I don't consider this enough evidence to support their conclusion that the damage is cumulative, since to prove that they'd need to expose the rates to 24 hours of radiation a few minutes at a time, with long breaks in between, in a manner that would more closely mimic the use of the electronic devices they refer to.A loose analogy would be that I can hold my breath for ten seconds 30 times over the course of a day without any danger, but if I tried to do it all at once the results would probably be pretty harmful.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
In related news, DARPA funds research to eliminate the North and South pole.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Personally, I'd expect to catch fire before getting brain damage if exposed to a hair dryer for 48 hours straight...
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.)
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
....if this affects the DNA in, oh I don't know, the "nether" regions of the human body. I mean, I do plan on having kids someday, provided I ever hook up with a woman (ANY WOMAN). Please respond immediately as my razor finished recharging and I'm kind o in the middle of something.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
I find this whole study to be flawed. I mean, really, when are rats gonna use electric razors or blow dryers in the "real world"? C'mon!
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
If you are attempting to shave by rubbing your face on your Mac, you're probably still drunk.
In fact, he devotes a whole chapter in the aforementioned book regarding the complete lack of evidence regarding EMF as a health risk.
Right. But, um, wouldn't this study - by definition - be evidence regarding EMF as a health risk?
nlh
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
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.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
First off, I'm an RF Engineer. 2nd, I know an RF Engineer who specializes in RF and EM biohazzard. Don't just take my word on it concerning the following information - please go ahead and double check it with what information you can find.
This supposed damage from low-level EM fields has been a concern and a wife's tale for quite some time. Cellphones that are close to people's heads and electric blankets have often been the center of the discussions.
But think about the MRI machines, where there are absolutely huge magnetic fields concentrated around someone's skull, where the brain tissue is housed. Does getting an MRI cause huge amounts of brain damage? Don't you think we would have found such correlations prior to now if there were some?
I've heard stories of people coming out of MRI machines "seeing stars" briefly - that would make some sense because the brain works via electromagnetic impulses, which are effected by strong magnetic fields. I haven't heard of permanent damage resulting from exposure.
Hair dryers and personal Shavers? Come on. No.
Electric blankets are a bit more diffult to dismiss, since they do create an EM field covering a person's body, and at 60 Hz. Cellphones far from cell stations transmit more power, and right next to a person's head.
However: the only thing that has been shown to conclusively disrupt DNA is ionizing radiation such as that of radioactive materials or ultraviolet light. (As can be shown of instances of skin cancer in the case of UV, and cancer from radiation - even though it's also used as a treatment for cancer - for the very same reasons). Those are things to be concerned about.
RF energy such as that in cellphones has been found to be safe except for the heating created by the RF energy, the very principles behind the microwave oven. [Which concentrates 1,000 watts into a metal cage with a small amount of food in it - a very different scenario than a very low power cellphone next to a quite large meaty object in open air.]
There are areas where people work where CRT monitors do not function due to the magnetic fields in the vicinity. I.E. we're talking more than 1 gauss [yes, 1,000 mili gauss] of magnetic field. Hint: THEY LIVE, and they're working in that environment every day. [Think about broadcasting stations, or power stations, etc, etc.]
This will eventually be shown to be mostly bunk.
Well of course light duty magnetic fields can directly effect the health of your body or all these would would be of little practical use at all.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Hair driers do not transmit electrical energy through the air.
Then your hairdryer is insufficiently overclocked, sir.
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.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Um, I don't know where your jaw is, but mine is attached to my skull.
TANSTAAFL
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.
Governor Schwarzenegger, is that you?
It was a University of Washington study. The website is just reporting the results.