Slashdot Mirror
Can Cell Phones Damage Our Eyes?
Roland Piquepaille writes "I'm sure you've read dozens of stories about how our cell phones could be dangerous to our health, causing brain tumors for example. But so far, there is not a definitive answer. But now, according to IsraCast, a team of Israeli researchers has discovered that the microwave radiation used by our cell phones could destroy our eyes by causing two kinds of damages to our visual system, including an irreversible one. If the researchers are right, and even if you only occasionally use your cell phone, the lenses in your eyes can suffer from microscopic damages that won't heal themselves over time. As this study has not been not done -- yet -- on humans, I guess the controversy can begin and that another scientific team will soon tell us that this study is not correct. In the mean time, read more for other details and references. And whether you think that cell phones can damage our eyes or not, feel free to post your comments below."
There are so many researches and studies in the last 20 years, to the point that I'm starting to ignore all but a few obvious ones (like how you could get AIDS).
In my opinion, anything you do will cause damage to your body, even reading Slashdot everyday is enough to damage my eyes to a certain degree in the next 5-10 years, this is not including hitting F5 every 2 seconds, god knows how much damage that will do!
So this frying cell phone theory is rather pointless to me. If I have to make a phone call, I would use it, because I might just get run over by a car while trying to use that public phone booth across the street, or maybe cause a minor but irrepairable damage to my knees because of the extra travelling?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
They should add warning labels...those work great on smokers. ;)
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
Microwave ovens use 2.45GHz; I say, that's close enough to 2.40GHz to reckon that you're cooking yourself alive. That's why I ran away from home and started my life in Montana, away from the scourges of technology.
I believe that the UW study was on the affects of cellular radiation on mice, and the results were equally disturbing. The exposed mice were invariably stricken with cancer while the unexposed mice remained at the norm.
But that study also showed that such effects were only engendered when the amount of radiation was both high and prolonged. The bovine lenses in this article were exposed to cellular radiation for 22 hours a day. If the exposure intensity is to be believed, then the transmitting antennas were placed right against the eyeball.
Neither of those situations is remotely near what normal cellular phone usage patterns resemble (unless you are a teenage girl, I suppose, but even then you aren't sticking the phone in your eye) (are you?).
So more study is necessary. The edge cases like the ones in the article and the UW study are very important to know, but the results of real-world testing ought to be examined as well. If we see a huge increase in the number of cancer and scratched lens cases in the coming years, there may be some validity to these studies.
I'll continue using my cellular phone, though. The convenience is just too great to pass up.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Can reading Roland Piquepaille's blog damage your eyes?
Should I be worried?
Yes! You should at least switch your home network to 802.11g, so that damages are done on different part of your body at night, similar to load balancing.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
And whether you think that cell phones can damage our eyes or not, feel free to post your comments below.
Whew, thanks. I don't think I can sit in silence any longer!
Personally the thought of holding a microwave transmitter next to my head freaks me out. My powerbook's wifi is as far as I'll go. At least that's only bathing my testicles in rich creamy radiofrequency energy, not my brain. Given a choice between lower earning potential at work, and my future kids being deformed and shriveled, I'll go with the special olympians.
one more excuse not to pick up the phone when my mom calls me.
.sig is on-topic!
--
She blinded me with science.
Even your
Unless you enjoy what he has to say, stop feeding money to this guy.
My cell phone probably caused less damage than four pints of Guinness and six shots of Vodka I've downed last Saturday. And I'm not even beginning to mention the harm caused by the food I ate this week.
It's like saying "obese people run a higher risk of having high blood pressure and heart disease" and not mentioning their usually sedentary lifestyle, that, you know, may in itself cause higher blood pressure and heart disease.
Same here - OMG cell phone will fry your blinkers, while at the same time disregarding that these very blinkers are used to look at the computer screen for hours on end, and they weren't designed for that. How do you tell exactly what damages one's eyes when there are so many variables at play?
I'm not saying cell phones are dangerous, or that they're safe. I don;t know. I have one so I hope they're safe.
But taking that attitude towards any potential bad news is just self reassuring stupidity.
Cell phones do vary widly in the amount of radiation they emit. They all emit quite a lot at the point of the antenna, and some emit far more than others.
The decay of the radiation is obviously cubic over distance, but where most are held, right next to the eyes and brain, the radiation is quite strong. At certain times such as call initialization it's very strong, strong enough to light batteryless LED accessories popular on some phones.
The notion that holding these close to our eyes and brains without worry of damage is pretty stupid, especially the sorts of damage which may take a decade or more to materialize in a serious manner, when cell phones have only been really popular for about a decade or less.
People should be concerned and not take for granted that new technologies are just automagically safe. Environmental effects of new technologies are increasing exponentially and we have absolutly no experience in human history to compare it with or assume it will be safe.
To do so is simply an unproven and rather stupid assumption.
Is it possible the study is right? Well, yes, we do know radiation causes biological changes, and depending on the frequency can do so at fairly low intensity levels, so it's at least certainly possible.
Is it a large risk? Very unlikely. If there wasa substantial risk of damage, we'd seen epidemological alarms spring up already. If there is a risk, it's small.
Do we need to actually care in practice? No.
Why? Because we always, at every turn, balance risks with benefits. Probably the single most dangerous activity we all do is move in automobile traffic. There are many, many well-known health risks - from accidents to the exposure of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals to hearing loss - but we decide that the very substantial benefits outweigh the risks.
Arguably, mobile communications are not quite as beneficial as car transportation - though I could certainly see a case for disputing that - but then the risk downsides are also very very much smaller, this study or not.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
but not so far as to be out of reach of slashdot?
i hate pansy republicans
Here is an exhaustive list of radiation exposures.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
The one where he posts a link to some article - any article, it doesn't really matter what - on his ad-laden page, then e-mails his Slashdot editor business partners, who then add a link to his page full'o'links in a bogus "story" on their page, and then they all sit back and count the cash rolling in...
Who can argue with magnanimity like that?
Anyway, I'm begging here: Can't we please have a Roland Piquepaille section so we can filter this stuff out? I'm not saying anything negative. I'm sure he's a wonderful guy and has a tremendous singing voice. I just don't want to read his blog.
Look, it's for your own good here guys. Do you honestly believe slashdot would still exist if we hadn't been able to un-check Jon Katz's section?
Do it for the team, guys!
-Peter
WE didn't. This is earth.
But I can see how you would make that mistake, being a B-ark descendant.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Hello. You are representative of a subset of Slashdot users I would like to address this post to.
In addition, they did this experiment on lenses taken from dead cows. Of course they're not going to heal, they're from dead animals!
Let me start by saying that the article itself says the lenses were incubated in an organ culture. But that's somewhat beside the point. The point is this: You assumed that the study contained an incredibly obvious oversight. When you made that assumption, you clearly failed to ask yourself... "Are they really that stupid?"
Unfortunately, sometimes the answer to that question is "Yep". But in general, when some eager beaver such as yourself gets carried away with how supremely stupid someone (presumably) much more qualified than their humble self did, they can overlook simple things (such as the actual article).
At any rate, your offhand invocation of the "1/3 of all studies" line is complete fluff, and makes your relevant biases crystal clear. May your positive moderators burn in metamod hell.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
You are speculating, and speculating intelligently, but there is no need for speculation. It is possible to calculate the expected effect of microwave radiation on surrounding material.
Suppose you wanted to fry something on purpose. How much microwave energy would you need? The amount of energy in each photon is related to Planck's constant, which is a very small number: 6.62606891 x 10**-34 joule-seconds, with an uncertainty of 89 parts per billion.
The energy of each photon is equal to Planck's constant times the frequency of the radiation. The frequency of cell phone communications is centered around 850, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz, or millions of cycles per second, in the case of GSM phones, which are the most common. 1,000 MegaHertz is 10**9 cycles per second, or Hertz.
The frequency of red laser light, or red LED lights, is about 4 x 10**14 Hertz. So, each unit of electromagnetic cellular phone radio energy is somewhere near 1/400,000th of the energy of one photon of red laser light.
Heat is electromagnetic energy, too. The numbers are such that the energy of cell phone radiation after it spreads as it travels toward your head is small compared to the energy of the heat in the room and your body.
The result is that there is no manner presently known to physics in which the energy of the phone radiation could interact sufficiently to make a difference in the chemistry of your body. Cell phone radiation cannot affect the chemistry of your body by heating the tissue, for example. Microwave ovens achieve heating using at least 600 watts focused in one direction.
There are many, many very well-educated people in the world who would love to discover a new way that electromagnetic energy interacts with matter. Such a discovery would make any physicist or chemist instantly famous, and almost certainly earn him or her a Nobel Prize. The motivation to make such a discovery is enormous for people working in those fields. The fact that no such discovery of a new kind of interaction has been made is indicative that at least it is not easy.
Over the years I've read several articles by people who claim to have discovered biological damage by cellular phone radiation. For example, there was a previous Slashdot story in which such damage was claimed. All the articles I've seen are examples of fraud, not physics or chemistry. Generally what the "researchers" are doing is applying enough concentrated energy that they get local heating.
Generally the fraud in these reports is not in the reports themselves, which just detail the laboratory measurements. The fraud is in knowing that people will generalize information in the report to cell phone use, and not warning them of the incorrectness of such an conclusion. It's fraud, done for the temporary fame.
There are many people who know more about this than I. Someone else may want give a more complete or better explanation. For example, someone may want to show how to calculate the amount of local heating caused by cell phone radiation. I did that once with a physicist friend, and the amount of heating was insignificant. Walking from the shade into the sun will heat your body much more. Standing in the sun absorbing the high-energy ultraviolet radiation is truly damaging; severe exposure can cause sores and even eventually skin cancer. The photons of ultraviolet light are more than a million times more energetic than cell phone radiation, and the sun emits far, far more energy than a cell phone.