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Testing Cell Phone Radiation on Humans
Palm Addict writes "News.com reports that Finland's radiation watchdog is to study the effects of mobile phones on human proteins by direct tests on people's skin. From the article: 'A pilot study, to be conducted next week, will expose a small area of skin on volunteers' arms to cell phone radiation for the duration of a long phone call, or for one hour, research professor Dariusz Leszczynski said on Friday.'"
Why not test it on living human cells separated from living humans? That way no one would catch cancer as a result of this research, and it may even be easier to study (at least some of) the effects.
1's and 0's should be free.
Testing arm skin isn't all that practical, who keeps a cell phone there?
They should find out how the radiation affects the two bodily areas my phone is usually found, which coincidentally are the two areas I'm most worried about irradiating.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It's non-ionizing radiation.... people have been putting these things by their heads for hours on a daily basis... show me one potential case of burn via cell signal.
Considering the findings recently that soft drinks in the UK contain cancer causing Benzene - I haven't heard of the drinks being pulled off of the shelves yet.
...the scary part is, if they do cause ill effects...we're giving mobile communications devices to children younger and younger.
What if cell phones are lnked to cancer? Are they going to expose the cells to triple the duration? Too much of anything can be dangerous. The electromagnetic fields that we live in daily are possibly harmful - will they stop microwave communications?
First, if you try to measure RF field levels you get hit by a terrifying array of hard-to-control variables. Everything on your lab bench is either reflecting or absorbing the output of the phone. Each reflection will either add to or subtract from the signal at your field strength meter.
Second, if phones still do automatic power control, then all the field strength tells you is whether the base station told that particular phone "speak up!" at that particular time.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
It's just like all other things, we'll play it off no matter what the study says. But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone.
Does she still drink any caffenated in varying does? I used to get migranes due to caffeine withdrawal. No more irregular doses of caffeine; no more problem.
I'm suspicious of the aspartame controversy. I haven't seen a single credible source back the theory, but there are sure a lot of people who want to sell you books on diet, vitamins, and herbs that love to rail against it. It has poor science written all over it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
2.4 Ghz of energy
What the hell is "2.4 GHz of energy"? That makes no sense. 2.4 GHz is merely the frequency, not the intensity. The unit you're looking for is "watts". Your crappy little bluetooth transmitter is very low wattage, but your cellphone transmits at a much higher wattage because it has to talk to towers that are friggin kilometers away.
Cellphones transmit in the microwave band, which is known to definitely heat biological tissue. It is known and not disputed that using a cellphone causes a minor amount of heating in your cells (e.g. in your brain while talking); what's in question is whether or not this has long-term harmful effects. The higher the wattage, the more the heating effect (and other effects on human tissues).
It's just like all other things, we'll play it off no matter what the study says. But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone. You are exposing yourself to all kinds of risks you have no idea about. Because the media and the FDA were bought and sold a long time ago.
Well, you could believe the well-documented report prepared by the EU's Scientific Committee on food, which references numerous independent studies and finds no link between aspartame and migranes, epilepsy, or genotoxicity and carcinogenicity.
Or you could believe the (generally poorly-documented) reports scattered around the Internet.
Remember, the placebo effect can be very powerful - without double-blind placebo-controlled tests, it is difficult to determine if a substance really does have an effect.
At the end of the day, I'm going to keep talking on my cell-phone, I'm going to keep driving (but not while talking on the phone), and I'm going to continue drinking aspartame beverages. All of these activities carry a risk, but we cannot live our lives fearing some phantom risk that may never materialize.