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Study Links Cell Phones to DNA Damage
Amit Malhotra was one of several readers to point out a story running on numerous sites about a study linking cell phone use to DNA Damage. Of course, a recent gammaworld campaign has served to remind me that mutations are almost always beneficial, so there is nothign to fear.
There's not nearly enough information here.
I'd like to see them cone down the exact wavelengths that are purported to be problematic. It may be only a certain portion of that band that causes enough resonance in the DNA molecule to break the molecular bonds. The EM spectrum is large... and this could be a very wavelength-specific phenomenon.
For example, everyone knows that Ultraviolet radiation is harmful to humans... it causes sunburns, skin cancer, etc. However, clinical effects within the ultraviolet range of the EM spectrum (consisting of UVA, UVB, and UVC in order of increasing frequency) vary significantly. UVA will tan your skin, but isn't terribly harmful otherwise. UVB, and part of UVC will cause Ultraviolet Keratitis ("welder's eye" or "snow blindness"), and UVC is the worst for causing skin cancer (UVB causes cancer too, but UVC is worse).
We frankly need much more information... particularly a bit more specifcity about what wavelengths of Cell phone radiation cause DNA damage. A shift of only 20-30 nanometers in the UV range can make a big difference in clinical effects... who knows where the sweet spot is in the cell band?
I'm not throwing away my cellphone until I know more... a LOT more.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Gamma world!
Still: ... on animals and human volunteers."
Because of the lab set-up, the researchers said the study did not prove any health risks. But they added that "the genotoxic and phenotypic effects clearly require further studies
So the point remains, it has still not been proven dangerous.
DNA breaks all the time in cells (think thousands per day for each cell in the body) but since we are in fact using the double-stranded DNA (think RAID 0), it can be repaired rather easily. And even if it can't that still does not mean that you will get cancer and die a slow death.
Nothing to see here people, move along...
Conduct the radiation up to your head? Its radiation, from the word radiate! It goes out in all directions! Radiation (at least certain types) needs thick lead to block it. Other types are stopped by your skin. Now why in the world would radiation be conducted by a wire? It would either pass through the wire or be stopped by it.
;).
However, there might be a few other good reasons for not putting a radiation-emitting device in your pants
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
They can't make it through the atmosphere, at least, not to sea level That's not to say that there isn't plenty of radiation that does make it through the atmosphere (eg, visible light).
There are reasons why there aren't any ground based x-ray observatories -- they're all space based, such as Chandra and Yohkoh
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
ONLY ionizing radiation can cause dna breakage
Cell phones do NOT emit ionizing radiation, and therefore they can not cause dna breakage and cancer (byproduct of dna breakage). The article does mention SAR of non-ionizing radiation, but those levels are too low to even move molecules.
Non-ionizing radiation is also not cumulative.
This study is spreading FUD.
" In a separate announcement in Hong Kong, where consumers tend to spend more time talking on a mobile phone than in Europe, a German company called G-Hanz introduced a new type of mobile phone which it claimed had no harmful radiation, as a result of shorter bursts of the radio signal."
Non-ionizing radiation is not cumlative, and would not make a difference if the signal was sent in shorter bursts.
I wouldn't be suprised if this research company in Germany is tied to this G-Hanz company (also in Germany)
In other words, no news here, move along.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
>Of course people forget the whole inverse cubed relationship between power and distance
In case anyone's wondering about this...
Yes, your memory is fine, "inverse square" is what you've always heard. BUT...
The inverse square law is for radiation in empty space with nothing to absorb it. In a cluttered real-world environment cell-phone signals drop off iwth distance a lot faster than inverse square. There are models of this so complicated that they're named after their inventors, but inverse cube is an OK approximation for some purposes.
#1 reason I don't care about the results of this study:
Any damage done by microwave radiation is non-ionizing. Basically, instead of "flipping bits" in your DNA directly, microwave radiation causes heating, which can increase the probability of protein denaturing, transcription errors, etc. if singificant enough.
Thing is - Isolated cells in a culture don't really have a way to transport away excess heat. Meanwhile, in reality, we have our blood constantly flowing through our tissues to provide temperature regulation. It's only when power levels get too high for our body to compensate for the heating (microwave ovens, high-power microwave transmitters) that damage occurs.
I used to work at a company that built RF power amplifiers for cellular base stations. We were routinely around field strengths significantly higher than that around a cell phone. Some of my coworkers there had been in the RFPA business since the first cellular telephone call was made. If RF exposure of the levels experienced from modern cell phones caused DNA damage, many of my coworkes would have been dead instead of grey-haired old men. Most of them (including myself) have suffered far more tissue damage from soldering irons than from RF.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The link between power lines and cancer remains uncertain. Poor people (who tend to have various other environmental reasons for getting cancer) live under power lines, rich people don't.
With the exception of the tobacco studies, virtually all cancer studies that consider environmental factors find only very weak connections. Weaker than the relation between car color and chance of death in an accident for example. Few of these studies (and power lines is case in point) have any proposal for a mechanism. I can do a few studies and maybe find a weak link between whale migration and Dow Jones, but without a proposed mechanism I'd still be a crank. Yet these cancer studies almost without fail make the news. Why? Because people are scared of cancer.
Many US states have laws prohibiting or requiring all sorts of things based on superstition, exagerated hearsay or outright bribery. That some US states prohibit in-laws from marrying says nothing about whether there's any scientific reason for it (Try this: If Andy and Carol can marry, can Andy's sister Beth marry Carol's brother Dave? Some places they can, others they can't, and all because of something allegedly said by a King and written in a dusty old book)
Microwaves have something like 100,000 times the power of a radio wave and can do alot more damage as a result.
Visible light has even more power than microwaves. By this logic, sitting under a 60 watt light bulb can cause more damage than using a cell phone.
Actually, the link between power lines and cancer is still tenuous at best. See this page for some details.
The author of that page says, "Overall, most scientists consider that the evidence that power line fields cause or contribute to cancer is weak to nonexistent." It seems that the sorts of fields setup by power lines don't seem to cause cancer in animals or adults. Chilhood lukemia looks like the only possible connection, and that evidence is still considered "weak" by the AMA.
I'm not sure if states have laws based on the idea that power lines cause cancer, but it would not surprise me. It would be far from the first time that legislators went off half cocked over bad or inconclusive science. This hardly proves the validity of the viewpoint.
Now I agree that GHz microwaves are a considerably different situation, but the issue of power lines should serve as a cautionary example that things (esp. in medicine) are not often as clear as a single study would suggest. We should wait for a scientific consensus to form before taking this too seriously, assuming the supposed risk isn't quite acute.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
The wavelength of cell phones frequencies are of the order of magnitude of 10-30 cm in vacuum. In any other material, they are lower (by reasonable factors, depending on the material, e.g. 3). Now I am not saying there cannot possibly be any bad effect, but I would be highly surprised if these waves brought DNA (very small, microns or so?) into resonance.
Optical frequencies are orders of magnitude away from cell phone frequencies, UV even more.
Z (didn't read TFA)
Not entirely. Wired phones feedback part of the signal from the microphone to the earpiece. This audio feedback is a side-effect of simple analog phone design, but it also serves to help you know the line is live, and help you regulate your volume because you can hear yourself well, and so you assume the other person can hear you.
Cellphones don't provide this feedback. Thus one of the clues you get on a wireline phone is missing. Some people seem to need this clue to help them regulate their volume and some people don't.
Another way that cellphones differ is in audio quality. In general, if you can't hear someone well, you increase the volume at which you speak - this is something we learn when we're very young. Poor cellphone codecs and poor signal strength contribute to the feeling that the other person can't hear you very well, so subconciously you speak louder. Again, different people are affected by this differently, but the effect is pretty common.
So cellphones really are different from wired phones, although not everyone is affected by those differences in the same way.