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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.
to cell damage. Should've been obvious from the start.
I'm not a coward by any name.
They // lawyers // need a new cow.
The pharmaceuticals, fastfood, and cell phone companies have money. They are nice big cows waiting for the right amount of scaremongering to generate up public concern. The big lie works well here, keep repeating it, getting it into newspapers, internet chain letters, and voila!
So what if there are any possible beneifts, if there is a negative its a horror! Think of the children, the elderly, the dienfranchiesed. These huge evil corporations slowing killing us for a profit.
So, who files the class-action suit first?
* NO I did not RTFA - it died already.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It's interesting that they don't offer up an explanation for the cellular damage. Last time I checked, microwaves were non-ionizing. The worst you should experience from a cell phone might be a little heat. I'm skeptical, as usual. Remember the scare about power lines? About alar? Remember a couple years back when there was a study that showed that heated carbohydrates can produce a cancer-causing chemical (I forget the name)? Wine was bad for you, then it was good, then it was bad, and now it's good again. There's a new study every year that shows something from the modern world kills us. Well, last time I checked, living in a modern society generally means you're going to live 40 years or more beyond what someone in a primitive society could expect. So even if everything is bad for you, it's more than balanced out by the things that are good.
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.
(Additional reporting by Doug Young in Hong Kong)
Everyone seems to have an agenda in the news these days. Is there no such thing anymore as a news release not trying to sell something or push an agenda?
Bluetooth has a far lower transmission power.
IIRC GSM permits up to a 2W transmission (if you are far from a base station), bluetooth is nearer 1mW, so it should cause less damage.
Of course people forget the whole inverse cubed relationship between power and distance, so the same people that complain about the effects of base stations near their house expose themselves to thousands of times more radation by using cellphones themselves.
Here is yet another example of releasing findings by press release. This is amazingly irresponsible, since it looks like the study involved irradiating cells in a dish. Not applicable to human exposure at all ...
Here are my favorite quotes:
Because of the lab set-up, the researchers said the study did not prove any health risks.
and
"We don't want to create a panic, but it is good to take precautions," he said, adding that additional research could take another four or five years.
In other words, I need more funding to support my sketchy research that may or may not be applicable to human exposure - sheesh.
If CT was fired for every spelling mistake, he'd personally be responsible for approximately 85% of the unemployed statistics.
Forget the tin-foil hat stuff - the only two solutions are either shield the head or place the transmitter in a relatively remote location. Cell phone manufactueres need only create a phone in two pieces with the high power rf part seperate from the handset. You could place the rf unit only a short distance away (like the back window of your car or on top of the cube wall) and field strength drops dramatically. Link between the handset and the rf unit can be wired or something like bluetooth but will likely be manufacturer proprietary. Forget the science, just sell what people want, whether their wants are based on facts or not.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The study looked at frequencies in the 8xx MHz range (GSM bands), so it's not clear if it also extends to Bluetooth, which works at 2.45 GHz. Presumably the risk is that at the MHz range DNA tends to continuous shatter and rebuild itself, and occasionally mutations occur. It's not clear that this also happens at frequencies in the GHz range too, but it's notable that Bluetooth uses amplitudes orders of magnitude weaker than cell phones. That's because Bluetooth has a range of only a few meters, whereas cell phones have a range of several KM.
Note that if the GHz range is also risky, your home cordless phone is also going to be a risk. OTOH, I believe it's also the case that the signal it emits is a lot weaker than a cell phone.
I hate the word "natural" when used describing what something is made of... What does it mean exactly? Especially hair products that are "all natural". Does that mean they didn't refine the crap they put in it at all? They just dumped leaves and shit into the shampoo? Or did they have to extract certain chemicals, like you do with just about everything else. Where is the line between "natural" and not, in both marketspeak and some sort of sane opinion?
A lightning bolt is natural, and is pretty damn dangerous, as is arsenic, and bears.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
What this study did was what every good study does. It leaves the researchers at an impasse that can only be crossed with more funding.
This is a good example of an excellent study. The results are very important, millions could die horrible deaths and it effects just about every one on the planet. What's a few more million for an extended study when so much is at stake.
I don't have a sig
Any sort of shield would also do bad things to the radiation pattern, which would ruin your signal quality. And phones generally are able to throttle down their power when they are very close to the tower. So, a shield might just make the phone throw out MORE radio energy in order to overcome the loss associated with the shiled.
Well, they DID suggest using one of those earbuds or headset device.
Soooooooo, instad of holding the phones up to our heads, and giving ourselves a brain tumor, we are to leave the phone clipped to our belts or in our pockes, dangrously close to our reproductive organs. This will optimize the chances of a baby with other than the usual two eyes, ears, arms, legs, etc.
And do you know how long the typical teenage girl talks on her cell phone?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
The truth is that 100% of mutations caused by random bombardment from high-energy waves is bad.
To illustrate, try this little experiment. Take a CD walkman and hit it with a hammer until it becomes an mp3 player. Didnt work? Try it with another one. When it works, you've got yourself a successful random beneficial mutation.
That game was loads of fun. What a blast from the past to hear about GammaWorld again. I remember one of my characters was a psychic panther with body armor and mounted weapons. Wild stuff.
Note the icon for this story -- an analog land-line telephone (Western or ITT 500, ca. 1961). No risk because the part you stick up to your head is just a speaker and a microphone in a piece of hollow plastic, and even the desk unit is pretty simple.
Same holds true for more modern landline phones, such as 2500 and Trimline, and even the fancier digital landline sets you sometimes see in offices.
While I use cellular occasionally -- I keep the phone in a fanny pack, at great risk to my reproductive health -- I by and large stick to the land lines, not only for safety and convenience, but also for clarity.
You're a creationist aren't you? 99.9999% rounds to 100%, but is not exclusive of benificial change.
I bet you're a big hit at parties.
"Actually, by all conceivable economic measures, Park Place would cost considerably more than the dollar value listed on this so-called 'title deed', and let's not even go into a decidedly non-sentient metallic top hat's ability to purchase real estate..."
If the person talking on a cellphone is talking too loudly, then it's the fact that the person is talking too loudly that is annoying. The fact that the person just so happens to be talking on a cellphone while doing it is irrelevant.
I've occasionally been around people who simply talk too loudly to other people.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.