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Mobile Phone Transmitter Causes Brain Tumours?
Peter writes "Seven staff in the one building have been diagnosed with brain tumours, and everything seems to be pointing to the mobile phone towers located on the roof. The building is owned by RMIT University and an investigation is taking place. Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor of the building. Medical experts contacted by The Age Newspaper said no definitive link had been proved between mobile phone tower radiation and cancer."
I believe that an SAR (specific absorption rate) of 10 Watts per kilogram is the safety limit set by the NRPB. I guess they need to do tests as to whether the people experienced this from the towers. Cell phones have a SAR of about 0.2 on average. As always, Wikipedia provides a great reference to this subject.
My work here is dung.
Most likely is that the affected people were doing something together out of hours (after all, people who work together, often also play together). It's quite possible (after all, the IT in RMIT stands for Institute of Technology), that they were all building a home made breeder reactor
In short, the only danger mobile towers hold, is when the fuckwit in the SUV doesn't see me on my bicycle, because he's too busy chatting to drive. (seriously, every time I've felt threatened, its been someone chatting on a cell phone)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Better add another couple of layers just to be sure.
Save the DOS prompt: It's an endangered species!
Anyone worried about radio waves causing cancer can try to make that theory work. There is a huge barrier, however, in the form of a very very small number: Planck's Constant. Planck's constant = 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/S. It's that 10**-34 that makes it difficult for low-energy electromagetism like wireless transmissions to interact with chemical reactions. Thirty-four zeros is a LOT of zeros after the decimal point.
Off topic: I've linked to the Encyclopedia Britannica above because the article about Planck's constant is very short. The article in Wikipedia is long. I've frequently seen the Encyclopedia Britannica be misleading because of the severe limitation placed on size of the articles due to paper costs. Wikipedia does not have that problem.
I suppose you're going to tell me that it's a bad idea to stick my head in a running microwave oven, too, eh?
This guy's the limit!
That of course means a hell of a lot of other rooftop towers are going to be coming down across the nation in pretty short order.
A-Bomb
Sometimes I'm wrong, but at least where I live, most commercial buildings have a metal base under the roof (steel, tin, aluminum, etc). And, generally, codes require the metal base be grounded--which makes roofs great for transmitting towers (they need a well grounded base).
But if it *is* built like this, it is absolutely impossible that any radiation of any kind managed to get through that roof to the people below. Unless you want to prove Faraday wrong. I know I don't.
Hmm. I'd say 7 incidents in one building is probably very high; even so, that depends entirely on the relative frequency of the specific kind of tumor.
Also, did any of these people work in hazardous areas? A university can have all sorts of nasty stuff around.
It would seem to me that these incidents could be related to the cell phone tower; or it could be a very sad coincidence. You can't just freeze everything at one single point in time and go ah-ha!
There are too many other factors that aren't considered.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
Certainly a link, but where's the evidence that it's a link to the mobile phone transmitters?
It could equally be down to insufficient ventilation allowing natural Radon to accumulate in the air inside the building.
Any chance they were doing research on something that might cause brain tumours? Or maybe they were doing research on the effect of mobile phone transmitters, that would be quite ironic.
Australian Medical Association president Mukesh Haikerwal said there was no proof of a connection but "if you get clusters of disease it's sensible to investigate."
Ya think? Maybe this represents your proof! I like to call this the "Keystone Cops Method" of scientific inquiry.
Dr John Gall, from private health company Southern Medical Services, which has been called in to assess the sick, said last night three of those affected had tumours showing symptoms consistent with radiation.
Indeed, Watson, the killer had a limp... note the dragging of the shoe print to one side and the lightness of the impression on the other...
Given they were working under a tower which is broadcasting radiation, this should probably come as no shock. What I wonder is -- why isn't there shielding protecting the floors below from the radiation from the tower? Answer: then everyone's cell phones would stop working.
I've often thought the chances of contracting cancer from your cell phone was exaggerated, unless you had the damned thing glued to your ear 24/7. This is totally different; those towers are pumping out huge amounts of radiation, to try and make sure you can get a strong signal at great distances. It's not like living inside a nuclear reactor, but its close enough to be a bad idea.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
No it isn't. The fact that they were all working in the same building only points to a correlative factor between the building and the incidence of cancer. Could be something in the ventilation system. Could be rat poison in the coffee machine on the top floor. There is absolutely nothing about this situation that definitively links cancer to mobile phone tower radiation.
steampunk web design
Radon in the air wouldn't cause brain tumors. Lung cancer, yes, but not brain tumors.
They didn't just say 'link'.
Read the related article (from the same website) for a more complete picture.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Surely, someone here on Slashdot has one to spare for these poor people!
Okay - there's 7 people suffering similar symptoms. Perhaps it is the tower to blame. Or perhaps not. There's no conclusive evidence yet that mobile phones do cause cancer. It seems odd that they'd only cause brain tumours as opposed to any other, and that this particular mast is the only one that seems to be having such an extreme effect when all the thousands of others in the world seem relatively harmless. It's worth investigating, but it's also worth checking everything else.
Perhaps it is from EMP from all the wires/power/machines that run up the wall *to* the tower, not the tower itself.
... so the tower puts out a pulse that's too small to affect genetic replication (say 10% of the threshold), but there are other EMP signitures or emmisions in the area that compound (say 5 sources at 10%), followed by personal cell phones and computers and lights...
Would it be possible for multiple low frequency signals to interact to form a sine wave of a much higher intensity?
so you could 99.999% of the time have these signals never amount to much until the proverbial "EM Seventh Wave" comes in and makes those brain cells start dividing wrong. It only takes one cell to seed a tumor.
meh
It's more likely it's something in the water.
Doesn't radon tend to accumulate in the basement/bottom floors of a building? These guys were on the top floor of the building.
This guy's the limit!
Or maybe they all get lunch from the same Chinese place a few times a week. Or maybe there's something in the water cooler. Or maybe it's just a clustering phenomenon unrelated to all those things. I'm definitely not discounting the possibility, but remember, "correlation does not imply causation".
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
it's the new Motorola THINKR (tm) implant. It resides in the brain, and is self-assembling. It has TV, DVD, GPS, Java, 12-megapixel camera that uses your eyeballs, and Itunes, of course.
--- sig moved for great justice.
Air conditioning is a wonderful thing.
How true. Good point. Thanks.
This guy's the limit!
Yes it's an unusual number of cases, but no, this is over a 5 year period. It's not like all the top floor workers got it a week after moving in.
Of the 7 brain tumors, 2 are malignant. Indicating that possibly different kinds of cancer are occuring. While the building could be to blame, it's probably not the towers sitting on top of it. More likely something else which they are exposed to inside of the building, hence why they shut down the building instead of lowering the tower's output. (They fail to mention that numerous other buildings have similar towers and exposure, but not the cancer rate.)
Ok, it's a long shot, but... the Radon went deep into their ears, and the tumors started at the point nearest the brain. Or maybe through their sinuses.
Ok, ok, good point, well made.
My thought was also that it may just be something in the building. There are thousands of other buildings with cell transmitters around the country and this has never been reported before. I think it would be very wise to check the building itself for some other source of radiation (or otherwise) that may have caused this to happen. I tend to lean away from the idea that it's linked to the tower.
* There are mobile phone radio masts on tens of thousands of buildings all over the world, for almost a decade.
* There has been no significant increase in the number of brain tumours since mobile phones became popular.
* Why would people in one building sudenly have a greater chance of getting brain tumours from a radio mast, while the chances of the many (possibly hundreds of) thousands of people in other buildings with radio masts on them getting cancer stay the same? There's an antenna on the roof of a building next to the one I work in, I can see the antenna from here througn the window. Why don't I and all my colleagues have cancer?
Unless there is a huge difference in the way this mast is installed and operated, or the structure of the building from other similar installations, there's no reason to suppose this cluster of cancers has anything to do with the radio mast. There could be thousands of other factors that could be the cause.
Or there might be no cause. How many buildings are there in the world? How many random instances of cancer are there? Statisticaly, you'd expect to see the occasional fluke cluster of cancers in one building from time to time. If the odds against such a cluster in any given building were a million to one, in a survey of 10 million buildings you'd expect to see roughly 10 such clusters just by pure chance. Even if the chances were 10 million to 1, there's still no reason to suppose finding one such cluster in the sample is at all suspicious.
Simon Hibbs
Heh - the aircon at my previous employer was known as the "sickness recycling system".
The radiation levels were normal when they tested. Does anyone know if cell tower equipment has higher power diagnostic modes? Are there any equipment malfunctions that could cause short bursts of high energy?
If that doesn't pan out, I would check out that old microwave oven in the break room and whatever is growing in the back of the fridge.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
It could be that brain tumors cause mobile phone transmitters.
"Anybody object to putting antennas on the roof right above you?"
"Duh, uhhh, nope, ok"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Problem is, that by over-exposing the subject to simulate prolonged exposure over time, they gave the subject (a monkey, in this case) brain damage through oxygen deprevation.
Massive exposure does not always cause the same effects as long-term exposure, is my point here. If you listen to soft music for a day or listen to 1000db of sound in a second, the effect is vastly different (and lethal, but thats not the point here).
I know that scientific studies thus far have been unable to show a plausible link between brain tumors and cell phones. However, I wonder if everyone calling nonsense here isn't just engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. Kind of like how people were resistant to the idea that sun exposure could lead to skin cancer. I'm no luddite, I sure hope this proves to be a false alarm. However, while a bit of skepticism is healthy, how can we be sure? Cell phones have only recently reached the masses in the Unites States.
I just looked up some statistics on brain tumors. The incidence rate is 14.1 per 100,000 people, or roughly 1 in 7,000. Unless 50,000 people worked in this building, this is quite the statistical anamoly. Makes you go hmm...
Now excuse me, my cell phone is ringing.
Cancer must be contagious!! Kill the lab rats--quickly!!
When a scientist says "no link", they mean no CAUSAL link, not correlative.
Come on. Any idiot knows that it takes at least 8 people to call it a link.
You've probably heard the interference your phone generates in your radio.
Do you still have a CRT Monitor, and not a flat panel? Here's a fun experiment. Take your cell phone, dial up a number on it and place a call. Now, hold it up to your CRT - the emag field from it skews the electron stream in distinct waves. You can probably correlate the frequency the phone operates on to the wavelength on the screen if you know your monitors vertical refresh.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Why just brain tumors? I thought the Cell Phone / Brain Tumor link was due to the cell phone being held next to the head? Why no stomach tumors? Why no big toe tumors? I smell a rat.
TT
People working on last floor are CEO or VP, so it's maybe cause by a chemical in cash that is carcinogen above a very high dose.
Given the average percentage of people developing brain tumors in some geographic area every year, as well as the standard deviation of said average, the probability of this many people in the same building being diagnosed can be computed. Many office buildings are equipped with cellular base stations nowadays because it's cheaper than putting up a tower. Unless they show the epidemiological statistics to prove this event unlikely to occur in even one building in a sample of cell-equipped office buildings, this is bullshit. Obviously, test away to be sure the tower is operating properly, but given that it is, it's giving off non-ionizing radiation. One more example of luddites looking to prove that we've unleashed another technology to destroy ourselves.
they want their paranoia back.
It's been 10 years that I've been living in front of a mobile phone transmitter. I had 8-watt cell phones. Since it was part of the paranoia, I had a scanner, like a year ago. Nothing wrong with my brain, kthxbye.
I'd call seven brain tumours in one building a heck of a link...
Actually, no. Enough people get cancer that you'll see groups of people with cancer from time to time. Doesn't mean that anything about the building caused the cancers. As Freeman Dyson points out, you can expect something with a one in a million chance to happen to you every year. See, miracles *do* happen!
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
No, correlation doesn't prove causation. It does imply it, however.
at this point. Also for thost who are worried about radiation from a cell phone, use a headset. You can get a cheap headset for under $20. Personally I'd prefer a bluetooth headset, but I'm cheap and use the one that Sony Ericsson included with my phone. Cell phone not next to my head means no brain tumor, its a no brainer to me.
So what happens when you leave a cell phone in your lap?
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Radon is usually linked to lung cancer, not brain cancer.
Not all of the people who were afflicted were working on the top floor of the building.
That doesn't make sense. Cell phone tower emissions may well "cause" cancer, but in the sense of a small increase in risk; and the increase has to be small because it has been hard to demonstrate experimentally.
If there is a common cause for these cases, it's more likely to be some kind of chemical pollutant or biological agent. Chemicals, fungi, and viruses can and do cause cancer at high rates. I'd rather look to the chemistry department or the biology labs than the cell phone tower for a cause.
Kinda lost interest once I read...
"...the 16th and 17th floors are home to offices of senior management..."
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Radon doesn't make sense because the tumors were clustered on only one floor. Even if the AC was recycling the gas through the building, you'd thing the tumors would have been more spread out.
Of course it's impossible to tell without knowing more about the sample set. There may be some other factor that would be an obvious cause, if the reporters had gone into enough detail.
Still, it's not impossible that you could get a soft tissue tumor from being in close proximity to a high power transmitter for a long period of time, so it shouldn't be ruled out.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Vinyl Chloride is one of the only environmental substances known to specifically cause brain cancer. Is it possible there is a source of contaimination in the building? Accidental or deliberate, perhaps? Small amounts of vinyl chloride can dissolve in water, and it is found in tiny amounts in tobacco smoke. These people may have been exposed years ago and are just now showing disease.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
You know what I don't understand?
You have to turn off cell phones because they will "interfere" with hospital equipment. Okay, I'll buy that for now.
But a HUGE hospital here in town (Austin, St. David's, BTW) has its roof LITTERED with giant mobile phone relay antennae. Others probably do as well, it's just that this one is right by the elevated freeway and they are easy to see.
Whaa?
Air conditioning would be used throughout the building. The tumors were in only those on the top floor. Radon is an unlikely cause in this case.
I recall reading that when autopsies are performed about 1/3 of the time brain tumours are found. These are generally benign and caused no problem. They are found because people went looking for them.
The same issue surrounds the thyroid cancers associated with the Chernobyl disaster. Again - the tumours appear to be natural and generally cause no problems.
This of course does not change the fact that anyone so diagnosed will be scared to death (bad pun) and wonder when the next shoe is going to drop. So while I feel for the patients I have to beleive this is blown out of porportion.
Anyone notice when you speak on a cell phone for a lenghty amount of time, the side of your face gets all hot.. is this from the radio waves passing through our brain? I imagine these towers are making fried eggs with our brain..
www.brido.com : not your average blog..
Cancers due to ionizing radiation exposure are known to follow a linear model. So in this case the equivalence of a high dose for a short period vs. a low dose for a long time is pretty likely.
As far as SAR equivalence, remember that with a cell phone you are holding the transmitter right up against your skull. Even though the tower might be emitting a lot more radiation, it is also a lot further away.
There was a small village in rural Germany. A broadcast tower for mobile phones was to be built there, and despite rabid protests from the locals, which were concerned about negative health impacts, the tower was built. Soon after its completion, more than the usual number of locals went to see their doctor, complaining about headaches, nausea, and various other little ailments which they linked to the tower.
The funny part? The tower hasn't even been operational.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
I was in the impression that the cell phone signals makes guys shoot blanks since most of us carry our phone in the pocket or waist. I get shell shocked when ever I'm next to a speaker and my cell goes off. I can hear the radio signal interference on the speaker really loud. Is anyone selling testicle shield in ebay?
The parent is on-topic! Man, I hope I get this one in Meta Mod...
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If someone would ask an engineer and not a doctor, this would have already been put to rest. RF is not magic, it doesn't go through walls or ceilings very well at all. And what kind of cell tower has the antenna pointing straight down? Are people really this retarded? Am I the only sane person left?
Um, no. Cells have a DNA repair proteins which can often fix damaged strands of DNA. When cells are exposed to a large dose of radiation, those repair mechanisms can be overwhelmed, and the errors won't be corrected. In this case, the cells can suffer much more damage than would occur if the exposure were spread out over more time.
This reminds me of going office-space hunting a few years ago, in a commercial building that had a big room full of Verizon Cellular transmission amplifiers, racks and all the rest, with the antenna on the roof, being proposed renting one of the office suites with a wall immediately adjacent to that gear, and feeling extremely queasy about what could possibly happen.
.... I didn't think so.
I mean, that stuff is no joke. Heavy industrial-strength droney vibration, and all the rest.
I would feel the same way about being near any AM or FM radio transmitters. These machines are electricity-guzzling beasts, and emit such an array of close-range EMF and all the rest.
Would YOU like the to be the one to spend years around that stuff to see if there is proof that it is harmful or not?
Z.
You're thinking of radioactivity, not RF energy.
Um no. A lot of radiation just disipates to nothing over time. Only when exposed to extreme amounts can your body not disipate the radiation as fast as your being exposed to it, overpowering your organs in particular the thyroid.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Yup. Correlation is not causation.
Also, as far as I know, no-one has shown a proven (or even plausible) mechanism that allows non-ionising microwave radiation at such low energies to produce cancer. If it is non-ionising, it has to operate by thermal effects, and the power output of phone masts is regulated such that thermal effects on humans and other animals is so low as to be unmeasurable. You are more likely to get skin-cancer from standing in front of an incandescent light bulb - which (horrors) is pumping out 100 Watts of (gasp!) radiation when it's on. [Granted, most of that is IR, but there will be some UV.]
If there was any harmful effects of EM radiation, I think it would have been well established by now from the 100 year history of broadcast radio, where the people working at the station are exposed to more than 10,000 times the energy that people are in a building with a cell tower.
This is just as stupid as the paranoia over high voltage trasmission power lines. They may be ugly, they may be dangerous if they fall down, but you're being exposed to thousonds of times more EM radiation from the wiring in your own home than from those lines, and it's never caused any trouble.
This is the FUD wagon coming around again, probably started by the terrestrial phone monopolies to scare people back to using land lines.
It acts in a cumulative effect, over a short period. But having a series of chest x-rays one year, and having another set 5 years later, and another set 5 years after that, doesn't mean that after the last set you're suddenly going to have radiation sickness and thyroid cancer.
Besides, I'm not sure where you're going with the comparison to hard radiation. Sure, we're talking electromagnetic radiation here, but cell phone towers don't pump out gamma radiation or x-rays...They pump out much lower frequency microwaves. I would be suspicious to see such a high incidence of cancer coming from microwave exposure, unless there is a problem with that tower.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The internet seems to agree with me. I'm not trying to be a jerk, rather I'm trying to help spread understanding. I hope this link benefits everybody here.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Bullshit. Radiation exposure has to be over a certain level before it accumulated. Think of it like a burn as radiation cooks you in a similar way to fire. Small amount of radiation warms your cells up a tiny bit. If you get burned, you will scar. So getting burned occasionally adds up to the scaring and damages you organs and brain and whatnot. Simply being warmed by a fire provides no damage whatsoever (assuming you get away from the fire occassionally) and certainly doesn't accumulate daily.
"Has been shown"? You are referring to the linear-no-threshold model, which is not agreed upon universally by any means. Radiation hormesis seems to have a decent amount of high statistical quality evidence backing it up, though the mechanism for a causal relationship is not fully understood.
Exposure seems to behave linearly over a certain range of dosage levels, true, but not necessarily for all dosage levels.
I've frequently seen Wikipedia be misleading because some 10 year old has seen fit to erase stuff written by Ph.D.'s, and replace it with his own misunderstanding ramblings on the subject matter. Britannica does not have that problem.
Explain that to the microwave!
Electromagnetism energy, at the "microwave frequency" is still energy. Even if it is not strong to pop-corn your brain in 2 minutes, it can still have some effects..
also -- remember "normal" does NOT mean "absent," but rather, within the spec expected from this tower at this distance. and that spec was provided by manufacturers who have almost no data on long-term pathology. so at the moment "normal" has little correlation (bad or good -- research could, theoretically, indicate we can take a lot more) with "safe" during extended exposure.
I've worked in the IT department at an Australian University, and it's the hot air radiating from academic kiddies fighting in the sandbox that cause the problems.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Why isn't there a RTFA/Clueless MOD?
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
I used to work on cellphone software, and outside our building we had a COW (Cell on Wheels) to get us good quality reception to local mobile operators. I had a nice view of it from my window, since it was right across the parking lot from me.
One day we had some tech dudes from an overseas MO, and being the geeks they were they fired up their phones in "test mode" to check out our COW.
The look on their faces when they realized how strong the output of the COW... priceless! They suggested we go out and twiddle the appropriate nob to turn it down some. We did.
Neil
Lets get rid of those tumor causing towers, then we can get rid of all the drivers talking on their cell phones. Then we can get rid of the rest of that dangerous technology. Then we can all move to caves and kill our food with sticks and rocks, and cook our meals on the open fire.
On the other hand, within the medical community, smoking has been known to be bad on many levels going back hundreds of years.
The fundamental difference between the non-ionizing radiation/cancer link and what you are implying in your post is that the majority of the medical community, to date, do not believe there is a causal relationship between the two. It is hard to claim a corporate/government coverup when most researchers in the biophysical research community do not put much weight in the claim in the first place.
Interesting, didn't think that this would come to /. Well I go to Monash (another University in Melbourne) and looks like they're covering their bases - they sent a email in the afternoon the day this news broke out saying that all the towers and such at my uni are safe - blah blah. Looks like this will escalate into a media frenzy - typical.
FTFA:Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor of the building.
But you're right, it's likely not radon.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
This is prima facia evidence. Yes, there are other possibilities. But if you RTFA, the chances of them are evidently low.
To those saying that the causality implication is low, I'd say there's near empirical evidence to the contrary.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You'd think that given millions of people and hundreds of thousands of towers, there would be at least one case of a few people getting cancer. For the scientifically illiterate, you get more daily radiation from 15 minutes in the sun, or your watch, than those people would have received. Don't let that stop the enviro-freaks and scaremongers thought.
Actually... it's two mobile phone towers.
The fact is, the human brain is surprisingly tolerant of radiation exposure. Radiation oncologists take advantage of this characteristic to treat cancers that have metastasized to the brain. Whole-brain external beam radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation, many orders of magnitude more energetic than any cell phone tower, but the occurrence of de novo brain tumors after brain XRT is actually pretty rare.
6
Of the 7 brain tumors, 2 are malignant. Indicating that possibly different kinds of cancer are occuring.
I wouldn't go that far. What kind of cancer causing agent damages the exact same genes in all victims, resulting in the exact same type of tumor?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Some kind of statistical significance is needed, for a start. Considering the millions of office buildings in the world, what is the chance that in *one* of them you'll find something "VERY rare" happening? Random chance alone guarantees it.
Much more surprising would be if you couldn't find a group of seven people with brain cancer in any office building at all in the whole world. Demonstrating this is a trivial problem in statistics: assuming a person has a probability "p" of developing a brain cancer, what is the probability that seven out of a group of "n" people will all develop brain cancer in a given time period?
Yea...Offtopic. Sheesh.
It's tempting to attribute a causal relation to something that could just be coincidence. It's not really past the realm of possibility, so the chance that it is just chance has to be appreciated.
Brain cancer is one of those weird ones. The brain is soft tissue, with a lot of stuff going on in it...There are environmental factors that can lead to brain cancer (eg vinyl chloride), and it can even occur "spontaneously" as it were.
Microwave emissions seem unlikely to cause brain cancer, because it's non-ionizing radiation...Mean's it's less likely to screw with your electrons and cause weird chemical crap. On the other hand, it can cause dielectric heating, which could possibly lead to some scrambling. Seems we'd see a lot more cancer though, if it did cause cancer. Hard to say, however, due to the fact that cell phone popularity has risen so recently.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Placing an antenna directly over you would cause less exposion than if you were twohundred feet away. Most antennae are designed to emit their radiation parallel to the ground, and don't give off anything either above or below.
If seven people's tumours are pointing to the Towers above, would each person sitting at their desk have a pointy tumour uniquely angled to point at the tower from their station?
Spending Resources on Defense leaves Less to defend.
If you can do that and still be able to close the door, then yeah, that would be an incredibly bad idea.
Though it would make for a unusual and rather disturbing video.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Heh! In this case there is quite possibly a greater chance of a "casual" link than there is of a "causal" link. What I think you meant, though, was "causal":
casual - occuring by chance . causal - Of, involving, or constituting a causeIOW: You can't casually cause causal casualties! :)
My brother-in-law flys navy seahawks and has to land them on ships and carriers with huge radar arrays. The ship's crew is suppose to turn off the radar before they land since it interfers with brain function. As my brother-in-law puts it, "...your hair starts to stand on your arm and you being to get really angry for no reason. Then you call the radar tower and yell at them to turn off the radar array."
e x1.html
Here is a pretty interesting link to the WHO (World Health Organization) on electrical and magnetic fields and what they do to your body.
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/ind
...in the bell tower...
You have a bell tower? Didn't you know that those bells have a tendancy to fall through the ceiling, killing everyone below them! It's true, I've seen it happen in enough old westerns and in those disaster movies to know it's true! They also attract lightning bolts! And then there's all those nasty bats!
Untill they remove that tower, you better leave that church, taking your tithes with you, and encourage the other members to do the same! Explain to them about the bats in your belfry, I'm sure they'll understand.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
...all those asshats you see that act as if their phone is an extension of their ear will soon be coming to a cancer ward near you.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
I'm not worried. I have a rock that keeps cancer away.
English is easier said than done.
"correlation does not imply causation".
True but it sure is good for making some scary headlines.
No matter where you go, there you are.
If there were, comments should be auto-moded it when they're posted until proven otherwise.
If that were the case, you would expect to see brain tumors from anyone working in the top floor of a building that had a mobile phone tower on top. If that were the case, there would be overwhelming evidence all over the country. But there isn't. It's far far more likely that there is a chemical reason behind this cancer cluster. A cleaning agent or fumigant used at some point on the floor would be the first place I would look. I can't rule out the possiblity that the construction of the tower focuses the right frequency of radiation somewhere on that floor, but it wouldn't be anywhere near the top of my list of suspects.
While the medical profession plays "catch up", people die to make corporations money. That's wrong.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
There is a radio tower on the roof, just like there are radio towers on the roofs of thousands upon thousands of buildings all over the globe. Just because one building had a statistically anomalous number of brain tumors, doesn't implicate the radio tower, it implicates the location as a whole.
You can't just assume that because there is a cell tower and you so desperately want cell phones to cause cancer, doesn't mean that they do. The vast majority of the evidence (the fact that this is one isolated incident) suggests that the cause is elsewhere.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
It's a coincidence, not a link. We don't have nearly enough information to call it a link, let alone a causal link. For example, were the tumors all of the same variety? What's the family history of these folks regarding cancer? Are there other known cancer risks in the environment where these people work? For that matter is there any reason to think that cell phone radiation would selectively affect brain tissue differently than other tissue in the body? In the case of cell phones, proximity of the radiation source is thought to be a potential issue. In the case of a cell phone tower, these people were not holding it next to their heads. They would have been having whole body exposure, and if cell tower radiation was the cause one would expect an increase in all cancers (especially leukemias).
Almost one out of two people will develop cancer. When we realize that fact, then clusters of cancers seem less amazing. For some reason, people think that cancer is a rare disease, but cancer is extremely common. Of course "it" is a set of diseases, some of which are fairly common (prostate cancer, breast cancer, skin cancers, leukemia, lymphomas, etc.) and some which are rare. Brain tumors are not all that rare, including the tumor that public sentiment tends to think is linked to cell phones (acoustic neuroma).
In one of my Criminology classes we talked about the use and misuse of statistics. The example was used that areas with a high stork population have a high human birthrate. Does that mean that storks bring babies?
Like the post above said:
Correlation is not causation.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Some cancers are caused by viral infections.
That said, poorly-shielded microwave (GHz) equipment may produce spurious lobes on their radiation pattern that could affect the wrong places.
And microwave radiation can also cause genetic damage leading to cancer.
Actually, it has been shown in the last 10 years that the cellular response to ionizing radiation deviates from the "linear quadratic" (a strange term indeed) model at very low doses. There is a dose threshold below which it is actually more damaging than previously predicted. The theory goes that at very small doses the cell's repair mechanisms aren't triggered. There's a fairly recent review article by the guys who discovered the phenomenon here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1498249 0&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum
Bear in mind that this is IONIZING radiation, so it is a totally different animal, but it is important to note that extrapolation/interpolation doesn't always give you the right answer. So personally, I would view cancer incidence data from low doses as very suspect at this point.
Smoking wasn't RPOVEN to cause cancer for hundreds of years either.
That doesnt mean it didn't.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
How they could get infected is a mystery but DNA tests should be done ASAP, on all of the staff.
That's an important missing detail. If it's a metal roof, that's going to be a lot better at protecting the top floor from all RF from the transmitter than a wood/shingle roof or a wood/asphalt roof.
Like a "+1 Read TFA In The First Place"?
It'd be good for filtering comments based on it, certainly.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
While correlation does not imply causation it also does not deny it... Non-ionizing fields are capable of inducing change in biological systems, every very low fields so it is not sufficient to rule these exposures out for that reason. Radiation thresholds for radio frequency fields are based on thermal effects but there are well-documented effects of sensitivity to low fields that cannot be explained that way - animal detection and use of weak static fields for instance.
Actually, not necessarily. It is also possible that they are on the far end of the statistical spectrum, when it comes to plotting data like this. e.g. if you take all the buildings with one of these towers, you might also find that there is one tower with 40 people (unusually high in a 100 person building) who drive a Mercedes... but that does not mean that driving a Mercedes is corelated to the presence of a tower.
No, correlation doesn't prove causation. It does imply it, however.
Only for people who have no real understading of those two terms.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
The insightful comments are actually all insightful today...is this Slashdot or did someone take my favorite work distraction away from me! :-/
I've worked with very high power microwave transmitters for over 10 years, and my family has a fairly high risk of cancer (good ol' genetics right there). If it was going to happen, it would have happened to me by now.
Protestors against mobile masts always rile me somewhat - they are the first to complain about one being setup in their local area. However, they are the first to by little Jimmy a mobile phone for his birthday and to walk around with the latest Nokia xx00 phone with multimedia video whistles and bells, and then they complain about the fact there is no reception near where they live.
I won't start on their failure to grasp the concept of an inverse square law.
How true, at my previous employments building, the AC filters were changed 3 or 4 times in a year because people kept getting allergies and severe flus
Eventually, after all efforts to "clean" the AC, they decided to replace it completely and they paid for flu shots for all the staff...
No sig for the moment.
...until I got a tumor on the same side of my head as I used my cell phone (luckily, non-malignant - did leave a really cool scar where they cut it out, though)...now I realize this is purely anecdotal, but it does make me more receptive to arguments that cell phones may be dangerous...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
So many people seem passionately convinced that our technology and the people who create and manage our technology are actively killing us that I really have to think that there is a big social or cultural driver for the belief. People just seem to assume that the cause of unexplained cancers are in the technological environment and they latch onto the first quasi-plausible source and blame that without considering, as in this case, that literally millions of other people are living and working in the same environment without encountering problems.
Years from now we may find that our contemporary fetish for blaming our technology for cancer was as valid and perhaps had the same sociological roots, as those in the past who blamed various ethnic minorities for plagues.
So why are people with brain tumors attracted to radio frequency sources? Do they show a preference for specific frequencies? Is it an innate attempt to self-treat?
I don't have stats for Australia, but incidence of brain tumor in US is very common: 1 in 3000 people per year. So the Pentagon, for example, with 23,000 employees, should expect to have about 5 or 6 cases per year in the same building without any linking factors.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
At my last job, the company I worked for built transmitters for cell towers. We were routinely running these things without their covers on, and microwave emissions leaked all over the building. There was a story that once the leakage alone from a dummy load they were running a demo unit into was jamming Sprint service for the entire conference hall the demo booth was in. Many of my coworkers were working with tower equipment since the very first Motorola demo. There was not any evidence whatsoever of an increased incidence of cancer. If everyone's fears were true, one of my coworkers would've been a hideously deformed mutant instead of an active, healthy (but completely grey-haired) old guy.
The article said the tumors were "consistent with radiation" as the cause. People will continue to be stupid and not realize the difference between electromagnetic radiation (better turn off your light bulbs... There's RADIATION coming from them!) and nuclear radiation. Yes, I know gamma rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, but they have extremely high energy and can cause ionization, while microwaves cannot cause ionization until their field strength exceeds the breakdown threshold of the dielectric they're in - by the time that happened to someone they'd be thoroughly cooked by thermal heating.
It's an old building, there's probably traces of asbestos or some other nasty construction material that's been banned for decades.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It is certainly reasonable to check out clusters of cases when the pop up, but it is important to keep in mind the natural human bias toward overestimating the statistical significance of clusters. For example, when asked to write a series of random numbers, people almost always have fewer clusters than chance would predict. Another classic example is the birthday problem, where most people wildly underestimate how big a group you need before you are likely to have two people with the same birthday.
To consider the probability of a suspicious cluster arising by chance, you can't just figure the likelihood of a cluster arising in that particular building--you have to think in terms of the probability of a cluster randomly arising in some building that is in the vicinity of something that might plausibly be blamed.
Not but a handful of towers are on buildings. Fewer still are close to where humans habitate. The radiation patterns in the freqs used by GSM diminish rapidly as a function of distance. If you're 100m away from the antenna, you're far less exposed than say, 10m away.
And yes, your search of the phrase turned up the Wikipedia version reveals my mispelling. The intent, however, was clear. Arguing the form is obfuscative. And droll.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Obviously there are good facts from both sides and we can talk for hours. But much more interesting to me is what would everyone do if it is true that cellphones or cellphone technology causes cancer or negative effects on humans? Say, I was kind of getting used to my cell phone being my the one and only. Without land line for good 4 years. oh crap whats that apple shaped thing growing on my head :)
Correlation doesn't imply a causal link. For the media, it does imply a casual link, however. Usually far too casual.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Approx 1 in 1500 people are diagnosed with a brain tumour every year, and according to the article the tumours were discovered over the past 7 years. The building is big: 17 storeys. If the building contains 1000 people, then you would expect 4-5 brain tumours every 7 years *on average*.
There must be many hundreds of similar buildings in Australia, so it's hardly surprising to find one with slightly more tumours than average. Human instinct is notoriously poor at judging probability, and the media exploits this to hype-up their stories.
So, many cell phones work at 800 Mhz or thereabouts which is in fact a direct harmonic of 2.4 Ghz.
No. You've got it exactly backwards. 2.4Ghz is a harmonic of 800Mhz, but 800Mhz is not a harmonic of 2.4Ghz, in the same way that 24 is an integer multiple of 8, but 8 is not an integer multiple of 24.
Harmonics are always higher frequency than the fundamental.
--MarkusQ
this was a very interesting story
test sig
Faulty and malfunctioning equipment could, in theory have significantly higher output power. That said, these faults would be obvious and would result in the tower owner's maintenance people being notified immediately and most likely would involve shutdown of the equipment within minutes.
Power amplifiers for cellular systems need to handle a certain average power, but the signal they transmit has peaks 7-9 dB higher in power than average (somewhere around 6-8 times the average power). Thus the transmitter must be sized to handle the peaks at least in the short term. Thus, an amp capable of 45 watts average can transmit 400 watts, BUT most amplifiers are not designed to handle the accompanying thermal load and power drain and would quickly overheat and shut down if run continuously at peak power for very long.
Even at 400W output power, you'd be completely safe more than 3-4 meters away in free space, and even less than that with a roof in between you and the transmitter.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This is partially false.
There are multiple types of radiation. There is ionizing radiation (usually from nuclear sources) which can definately cause cancer, and IS cumulative in its effects. It has the effect of essentially flipping bits in your DNA. Flip enough bits and bad things happen.
There is also non-ionizing radiation. All electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths longer than UV falls into this category. This includes visible light and microwaves. There has never been any proof that such radiation can cause cumulative damage unless it exceeds a certain power threshold. In the case of microwaves, tissue damage only occurs when the power level becomes high enough to begin causing thermal heating.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
When you have a radio repeater situation, as is the case with cell phones, it does not make sense to have the fixed repeater transmitter power level higher than the remote transmitter (cell phone). The cell phone power is rather low, otherwise you'd have a backpack to carry the battery. In ham radio repeater circles, a repeater with a high powered transmit is referred to as a repeater that's "All mouth". Here's some technical explaination of the radiation situation regarding cell towers. http://www.fcc.gov/oet/rfsafety/cellpcs.html/
I'm not a statistics expert, but I know that abberations in distributions of whatever effect are not impossible, or even improbably, given a sufficiently large study group. My wife has experience in disease clustering in her past administrative job at a university where there was a "cancer dorm". In the end, it was all BS, panic and hype. The actual distribution was not far off the norm. Remember that perception is often much more powerful than the truth in many people's minds.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"But some think the bursts used by GSM protocol create a low frequency envelope that may affect living tissues (that would behave like an AM receiver)."
Prove that, and win a Nobel Prize. Get your name on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and never have to work again.
The interaction of electromagnetic radiation and matter is very well understood. Find some new interaction, and you will be as famous as Einstein.
"On the other hand, the high occurence in this very building compared to the lack of such situation near the large majority of other antennas make me agree with the idea that there is another cause to this particular situation."
There is no reason to believe that it is due to the cell phone tower. My first guess would be that there is a leak in the air conditioning ducts and some poisonous chemical is leaking into the duct and poisoning the air on those floors.
I dont know about cancer, but a girl friend of mine lives in a house on the second floor opposite a school. There were always a lot of seagulls on the roof of this school, until they put a big GSM send/receive antenna there. Since this antenna is there, the seagulls stay away, so the radiation definately does something.
-- Cheers!
For the stubbornly ignorant, while the Sun IS a big source of radiation, it does NOT broadcast a microwave signal modulated into the 10 htz range where brain cells start acting funny. --Like dilating the pores in the blood-brain barrier so that any old foreign (and toxic?) particle can enter. If you spend a lot of time in a specific radiation zone where your blood-brain barrier is constantly not doing its job, then yeah, I can see how your brain might be at greater risk from toxins in the blood.
--Oh, and wrist watch manufacturers stopped using radioactive paint many decades ago.
I've heard the "Sun emits more ration in 15 minutes" argument so many times that it started sounding like another urban myth. --I always wonder why so few people stop to double-check such ideas. I did, and found it seriously wanting. I think perhaps people just want easy answers so that they can stop worrying that their favorite toys are making them sick and stupid.
Because, you know, pretending that a negative situation isn't there is so much more practical and effective than getting up and actually doing something about it.
-FL
There are a lot of buildings with cell tower antennas on the roof. Most of them have been added within the last 5 years or so, to existing buildings. The cell phone companies like using rooftop cell sites because they are elevated, easy to hide, don't require building an unattractive tower, and are relatively inexpensive to lease. Maybe the building you work in has a 5,000 watt cell transmitter antenna on the roof just a few feet above your head. If cell phone radiation increases the incidence of brain tumors, as is looking more and more likely, stories like this are just the first to come out of the pipeline but they will not be the last.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
Or there could be something wrong with the transmitter. It could have been dumping out Ghz frequencies at 200W because of some sort of malfunction (pure speculation).
Typically, an industry shattering health problem is suppressed by corporations. How many millions of people died while the cigarette companies (I smoke, BTW) sat on evidence that it was harmful, suppressing it when possible? Go watch Erin Brockovich for another example of corporate suppression of science to make a profit. (Warning: Her character is annoying and 30 minutes of deleted scenes was more than I could bear.)
And, furthremore, there have been some studies that have indicated some link.
Wisdom manifests itself at the ability to know right from wrong without having to resort to academic elitism. You don't need to have a controlled study to know shit stinks. The fact that the cell companies have pressured some of the scientists in these studies to change their findings sends a clear message to me that they have something to hide, just as the ciagrette companies did.
Rewind 200 years. You would be able to sit here with me and argue that cigarettes are safe, because there have been "no carefully controlled studies that show the link between the two". You would be wrong. A wise man, however, knows when to observe phenomenon, and when to draw conclusions that might not be based on the elite academic studies of peer-reviewed medical journals. A wise man can know the truth before it's out, simply based on a pattern recognition. I'd rather be wrong sometimes, than have to wait for an closely-controlled study to come out before I am allowed to believe anything. I think it bodes well for my survival, and no, I don't have a cell phone. I use my wife's when I need to. :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
He'll be a superb reporter yet!
Who ever stated that these were the exact same type of tumor?
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
"Well, we've had radio towers broadcasting for ages now, and there's no problem with them. So obviously EM doesn't cause cancer."
And. . .
"The Sun hits you with more EM radiation than a cell phone, so obviously people complaining about Cell Phone Em are over-reacting."
I've heard both of these arguments thoughtlessly repeated so often that they have become the same as any other meme or garden variety urban myth. I'd like to address them. First, radios. . .
FM radio signals function in the 88 to 108 MHz range, and AM in the 535-1605 kHz range.
Cell Phone signals operate in the microwave bandwidth, 1800 - 1900MHz and 800 - 900 MHz. While this is different than radio, the BIG difference is that Cell Phone microwaves are modulated all the way down to only 10 hz. Why is this significant? Because 10 hz also happens to be the general frequency where the brain's electrical activity operates.
And therein lies the problem.
Brain cells respond both physically and chemically to frequencies in that range and they do so in a variety of strange ways. For instance, the blood-brain barrier becomes permeable when exposed to modulated EM in the 10 htz range. --Which means that foreign (and toxic?) particles can cross into the brain cells themselves from the blood vessels. --If you spend a lot of time in a specific radiation zone where your blood-brain barrier is constantly not doing its job, it is reasonable to assume that the brain might be at greater risk from toxins in the blood.
This is just one example. There are several others.
Similarly, there are other problems with low-frequency EM. --For instance the 60hz electrical signals traveling down power lines have their own issues.
In conjunction with the 10 gauss magnetic field of the Earth, 60hz causes cyclotronic resonance in Lithium atoms. So what? Well, Lithium, excited in this manner, moves on a vector and is able to cross the blood-brain barrier with much greater frequency than otherwise. Lithium, as some of you may know, has a medicinal affect on the brain, and is for this reason the main ingredient used in anti-depressant drugs.
That's not contested science. People are simply not told about it. --The fact of the matter is that the people in charge of our society have a great vested interest in keeping people dumbed down and numbed in the head, both of which are achieved by deliberately designed EM pollution.
As for the Sun. . .
Who says that the Sun doesn't affect brain function? Astrology works, (despite the fierce head-shaking of those who don't like the idea but who have never actually studied a real horoscope). --But rather than cry, "There is no magic!" perhaps it would be better to ask, "Okay. So, how does it work?"
I think there's a possible answer wrapped up in low-level EM emissions from space. . .
For instance, when solar wind from the sun hits other planetary bodies, you get these reflected fields of energy vibrating in the 1-3 hz range which bathe the Earth for periods of time. As the brain tends to fall in alignment with whatever dominating frequency exists in it's environment, perhaps such periods affect the way brains work and develop.
It is, of course, far more complicated than that, as different planets fall into different areas of the sky, and as the Earth and moon move around, you'll get all kinds of different fields in the 1-35 hz range where the brain functions. Indeed, the Sun itself is magnetically divided into 12 slices, rather like an orange. Perhaps as the Earth orbits, its inhabitants are affected?
I don't know if this is the answer, but considering such ideas seems to me a great deal more sensible than a lot of fierce head-shaking.
-FL
That is, "Just because all Cows are Animals, all Animals are NOT therefore Cows."
Or even more simply put. . .
Just because some Germans are idiots, doesn't automatically mean that Cell Phone EM has no affect.
Or even MORE simply put,
Stop acting like damn children. You're smarter than that, so act it.
-FL
The basic question here is not if cell phone radiation causes medical problems, but at what level of exposure. 1. Obviously, normal cellphone use does not affect most people. 2. Stick your head in a microwave long enough and your dead. 3. We don't know at what level of exposure that cellphones do cause damage and guess who doesn't want us to know? The cell phone companies are doing everything they can to block any government research into this. They cite the volume of their own research as a reason to prevent government funded cell phone radiation research. Note that 3 out of 4 cell phone company based research tests show there may not be problems, 3 out of 4 independent research studies show there may be problems. I can't imagine why there is a discrepancy, but if you request funding from the cell phone companies for research in what might be an unsafe direction, don't expect to get any funds. Academics need research funds to do the research. Don't expect to get industry funds if you start finding problems. Most research tests only a narrow hypothesis, not "do cell phones cause harm". Therefore, a lot of possible issues are not explored. It is a crime that we don't KNOW what the exact level of exposure is that will cause problems. It may be so high nobody who talks 10 hours a month has to worry about it, but how could we legally be using these products without knowing this? Why don't the cell phone companies want us to know? It is highly likely they have an idea and it must not be at a level that will preserve their profits. As far as the problem with the cell phone towers, there are a lot of complicating factors. For example, all types of wave radiation form something called standing waves wherever there are reflections. I could be sitting in my cubicle talking to you right next to me, and I might be getting 10 times the radiation exposure that you are because I happen to be in an area where a lot of reflections converge from all the different individual antennas in the larger cluster. If you are in a hotspot you will show problems while other people in the area are fine. The bottom line is when we find out in 40 years that, like the tobacco companies, the cell phone companies covered up and restrained research in the pursuit of profits, your grandchildren will be pissed. I use a cell phone, but why is there all this resistance to finding out the facts?
I wonder how many of the people afflicted drink diet soda...?
@ASP.NET's parent-teacher meeting: "Little Johnny.NET is very bright, but he doesn't play well with others."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
wish people would stop advancing their semi-scientific theories as fact to show how smart they are. It just shows how a little education, possibly very little, can hide ignorance in almost all areas.
Alright, smart ass. I'd love to know exactly under what criteria the peer reviewed paper of a well-published scientist is "semi-scientific." If you had a methodology critique, maybe I'd consider you to have backed up your own arrogance, but you haven't. I'll give you a chance, though:
Here is the paper by Dr. Lai that I referred to which you "have strong doubts about." The paper is a follow up published in Environment Health Perspectives in 2004 to test the iron-mediated mechanism hypothesized in an original paper published in 1997 in Bioelectromagnetics. Go ahead. Eviscerate it. Show us what you've got. Put a peer reviewed paper in one hand and shaky skepticism in the other hand, and I can easily tell you which one I'll go with.
Also...
The one you cite, if true (which I have strong doubts about) by your own description reported observing something other than cancer.
If you don't understand the connection between DNA strand breakage and cancer, please stop commenting on what you perceive to be the lack of scientific understanding of others. You're clearly out of your depth.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Congress just passed a law that makes it illegal to get brain tumors from cell phones. Problem solved.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
On the other hand, given my experience with journalists recently, the truth is probably that one person had a brain tumor, one person has an uncle who had a brain tumour many years ago, one had a bump on the head from walking into a closet door, another went on vacation in East Timor, and the building is temporarily being closed down because it's being renovated.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Aha! Finally! A use for these tumour toppers I bought from Andy Dick. These things come in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes.
Tumour toppers will be the next big fasion trend...
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
It's imortant to note that hormesis (protection against cancer provided by a pre-dose of radiation) has never been shown to last more than 24 hours. Also, Linear-no-threshold was accepted by the NCRP, according to the wikipedia article you linked to. In edition, radiation doses as small as 100 mR (1 mGy) were shown to increase cancer risk in Japanese bomb survivors. This is associated with a 0.00004 increase in cancer risk. Not sure about you, but if it goes down to zero or below after that point, not sure I care about the minute difference. For risks that I might be concerned about, it's real.
I love it - journalist interviews a bezillion people about the story but forgets to mention if they turned the damn cell site off.
Would be interesting to note if the cell site remaining in operation was more important than the health of the people in the building, eh?
I mean, if you just turn the thing off, and assuming the cell site is the cause of the problem, danger removed -- no reason to leave the building at all.
Thus, the real story here is -- "Reporter writes silly sensationalist story while REAL Doctors and Engineers try to find the cause of the problem, long before they really know what it is."
+++OK ATH
correlation does not imply causation
Where the hell is that quote when a global warming thread comes around?
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
There are many numbers that I don't have so I will not try to make an argument (scientists will have great fun doing that for years, no doubt), but throwing out Planck's constant is not very meaningful unless you make a fairly accurate assessment of intensity and duration of power absorbed by these people and compare the power levels to other verifiable mutagenic sources of radiation.
I could just as well say, "Oh, the Sun doesn't cause skin cancer. It's 150 billion meters away and that's a LOT of zeroes!" Why your post gets a 5, I have no idea.
It could be a secondary effect - low fields affect neural signalling and perhaps other cellular processes which could in turn predispose to getting cancer. The energy can't directly break bonds but it could affect cellular stuctures in more subtle ways. The lower frequencies of modulation could possibly affect some neural signaling, for example. If a field can be biologically sensed, in principle it could have other effects. In pracice, if there is any effect it is almost undetectable.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
"Sunlight causes cancer..."
A Slashdot comment is not a rigorous discussion of all the issues. I was hoping readers would visit the EB article and calculate for themselves. Here is more explanation:
From the linked article in Encyclopedia Brittanica: "The energy E of each quantum, or each photon, equals Planck's constant h times the radiation frequency symbolized by the Greek letter nu, {nu}, or simply E = h{nu}."
The frequency of cell phones is around 2,400 MHz. The frequency of ultraviolet light is 100,000 times greater, if I remember correctly. (I don't have time to calculate it.) So, each photon of ultraviolet sunlight has enough energy to cause chemical changes in skin.
Not only is cell phone electromagnetic energy too small, it has a far greater wavelength, which means that it cannot be coupled into a small area, as can an ultraviolet photon. The most interaction that 2,400 MHz can do is generalized heating. There is not nearly enough energy to do much heating.
Radio and television operate at frequencies below microwave, while the visible spectrum operates at frequencies above microwave. Why would anyone assume that there is anything magical or mysterious about the microwave spectrum? It's only when you get into the upper portion of the ultraviolet spectrum and above (x-rays and gamma rays) where the effects of radiation become a problem.
This does not mean that microwaves can't or don't cause damage to living cells. If the energy of the microwaves are strong enough, they cause water molecules to become excited (friction causing heat). If you put something in a microwave oven or stand too close to a microwave transmitter, things can heat up. If they heat up enough, this can cause cellular damage (no pun intended). Prolonged exposure to heat could cause cancer... however, the victim would feel physical discomfort long before there would be long term effects.
Ergo, the radio transmitter is one of the least likely causes of this "outbreak".
> This is how they 'proved' that weed is damaging to the brain.
a rijuana.htm
> Problem is, that by over-exposing the subject to simulate
> prolonged exposure over time, they gave the subject (a monkey,
> in this case) brain damage through oxygen deprevation.
I know enough potheads with shaking hands and damanged intellects to 'prove' that to myself. If you gonna screw with your brain, expect consequences.
As for the current scientific consensus, it seems to be this:
http://www.marijuanaaddiction.info/brain-damage-m
Pope, the director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, added: "The safest thing to say at this point is that the jury is still out on the question of whether long-term marijuana use causes lasting impairment in brain function."
[...] These are two extremely diferent things
No they're not, they're basically the same.
It's to do with quantum mechanics, and it's not worth going into that now.
But the basic principle here is a wave-particle duality of matter, so both light, and say beta radiation, can be considered as particles and as waves.
With EM radiation, the particles are photons, and with beta-radiation they are electrons.
At low frequencies, EM-radiation shows wave-like characteristics, whilst at higher frequencies (and higher energy), it behaves much like particles.
X-rays or gamma rays are basically light at very high frequencies. And we know very well how harmfulthey can be.
The same goes for ultra-violet light, which is only just above the visual spectrum.
The question is, is the same kind of radiation harmful at lower frequencies, and relatively low power output?
But it would be wrong to assume that intensity or power would be the only deciding factor as to the harmful effects.
"Now, do you really think you can tell me how the rotation of various polar molecules in a biological sample will affect an organism from first principles, while considering all possible resonance effects?"
My understanding is that there isn't much chance of resonance, because below the surface of the skin, the energy of 2400 MHz is quickly broadened by the constant vibration of the molecules. Also, the energy of room temperature heat is much higher than the leakage from a cell phone tower. (We are considering a case in which the energy must go through skin and skull bone to cause brain cancer.)
The problem is the wavelength of the 2400 MHz energy. The formula for the wavelength of electromagnetic energy is:
Wavelength (in meters) = 3 x 10^8 (speed of light) / Frequency (in MHz)
The wavelength of 2400 MHz is about 12.5 centimeters, and each photon has an energy of about 10^-6 electron volts.
The huge mismatch between the size of the wave and the size of a molecule means that the effect of the electromagnetic energy is generalized heating. There are apparently no resonance effects. The heating is caused by friction of the molecules against each other.
I should have said "Frequency (in Hz) "
Sorry the harsh words, but this comment about the smallness of Planck's constant suppressing EM-interaction with chemical reactions is scientifically completely off: Planck's constant connects *gravity* with electromagnetism. It's smallness is an indicates that gravitational interaction can be neglected in chemical reactions. Wireless transmission is a purely electromagnetic effect and could - as such - very well mingle with chemistry. It is only the low energy of radio-waves which prevents them to become chemically active: Mobile phones operate around 10 GHz, which is about 0.1 meV. Visible light, which is chemically very active, is around 1 eV, that is a factor of 10e-7, not 10e-34!
You're not "sorry". You are using harsh words, and you know they are harsh.
You said "Planck's constant connects *gravity* with electromagnetism."
You and the Encyclopedia Britannica disagree. Planck's constant is used to calculate the energy.
You said, "And I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up the importance of the orientation of polar molecules to the functioning of various biological systems, many of which could lead to cancer and other effects when they malfunction."
That "exercise for the reader" would earn the reader a Nobel Prize.
You said, "... resonance effects will show up any time a molecular bond causes a dipole to return to its previous position..."
Molecular bonds are bound with an energy far greater than the energy supplied by electromagnetism, in the case we are considering. In addition, the energy of room temperature heat causes continuous motion. I don't see any way there can be resonance.
Reading again carefully, I have to admit that my harsh words were completely unjustified. Now I'm definitely sorry! I had just recently read and heard too much about high energy physics, where the smallness of the "Planck length" plays a big role. When you wrote about the smallness of the "Planck constant", I saw red and answered before reading carefully. Now, even though your words certainly were not wrong enough to justify harsh words, I still don't agree fully: Accusing the Planck length of making interaction between radio waves with chemistry is somewhat misleading: the Planck constant is of the same size for all kinds of electromagnetic radiation. It is actually their *energy* that differs greatly and makes some interact with chemistry (e.g. visible light) and others not (e.g. radio waves).