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How Bad Can Wi-fi Be?
An anonymous reader writes "Sunday night in the UK, the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested wireless networking might be damaging our health. Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation', along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations. They rounded-up a handful of worried scientists, but ignored the majority of those who believe wifi is perfectly harmless. Some quotes from the BBC News website companion piece: 'The radiation Wi-Fi emits is similar to that from mobile phone masts ... children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults'. What's the science here? Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation? The wifi signal is in the same part of the EM spectrum as cellphones but it's not 'similar' to mobile phone masts, is it? Isn't a phone mast several hundred/thousand times stronger? Wasn't safety considered when they drew up the 802.11 specs?"
Think of the children!!!
Seriously, it's sad that supposed "news" programs air things like this just to get ratings. What's even sadder is that lots of people believe them, so tech-savvy people like us now have to spend time explaining to Aunt Jane that the big evil wifi will not give her cat cancer.
this was all over the news and may cause wifi to be stopped in schools - so any feedback is useful
All day we're around Microwaves, XRays, High voltage lines, lights, televisions and Radio signals. There are TONS, of course... but how much more is actually from outside the atmosphere?
The only thing that's frying our kid's brains are their ideas. I'm not overlooking child safety, but there are WAY more harmful waves out there than WiFi.
In the meantime, their children are outside getting burnt without sunscreen.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Typical wifi - 100mW. 2g Cell tower - 20-100W. In cities they are using micro cells, which typically have about 3W power. There are experiments which show cell phones are a little dangerous, and there are scientist, who tried for years to show there is big danger, but found none and converted to "no harm" camp. So YMMV.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Mobile phone towers are many, many times more total output. Yes, both transmit in the microwave spectrum, but the 'notch' in the microwave spectrum that resonates water (and thereby heats your food, cooks your brain) is extremely tight (2.45 Ghz). If you're above it or below it, the water molecules in your body (or food) simply won't vibrate/resonate and there's no heating. And yeah, people use 'radiation' all the time to invoke the panic of ionizing nuclear radiation (bad) with electromagnetic radiation (mostly harmless). (Meanwhile these same people go suntan in the name of health, basking in the glow of an unshielded fusion reactor. Yay humanity.) ...People who live by the sword get shot by those who dont.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Frankly the BBC was irresponsible in showing this episode of Panorama. I'm against censorship, but informational programs produced by a tax-payer funded media outlet should not be spouting such paranoid, biased crap as Panorama did last night.
This is arguably the worst case of the BBC scrambling for ratings I've ever witnessed. Never before have I seen them stoop so low to try and raise viewing figures. I was sat watching it waiting for the part where they offer the opposing view of the situation to allow people to make their own minds up, unfortunately however, that never came - it was one sided anti-wifi propaganda all the way through, from start to finish.
About the only attempt at offering an opposing view was the brief mention that the WHO states that there is no known risk of wifi at this time, this brief mentioning was followed by a couple of minutes of slagging off the credibility of the WHO.
I'm no expert when it comes to wifi, radiation and so forth and I'm not claiming that wifi is 100% safe - it may well pose risks. The problem with the program however seemed to be that it's entire argument is based on the premise that there is some other danger to human health from radiation other than the heating effect, and from what I've read elsewhere, there is absolutely no evidence that there is any effect other than the heating effect. I'm sure those with better scientific knowledge may be able to correct me on this if I'm wrong, but if it's true as has been reported by other news outlets (and in fact even by the BBC themselves online) then the majority of the program was fundamentally flawed in it's arguments.
What bothers me most is that we've gone from one lazy teacher looking for an excuse to get time off work claiming that wifi gives him headaches to a national wifi scandal. The worst part is that most reports that refer to the teacher in question who sparked this row ignore the fact that in scientific tests the teacher could neither a) tell whether wifi was on or off and b) now claims he gets these headaches wherever he is, even when not around wifi!
If Wifi does indeed pose a threat then I agree we need to do something, but thus far this seems equivalent to the whole terrorism/think of the children/drugs/computer games make people kill FUD.
I see lots of complaints of this. People who are extra sensitive to electronics and such. I would like to submit these people to a double blind study so that we can prove (or disprove) the effects are real, and not people who just have something else wrong with them that makes them feel more tired, or have headaches, or unable to concentrate, or whatever other symptoms they have. It seems to me like there's a lot of anecdotal evidence, but that there isn't any real studies being done.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
admitting in the brief write-up that there isn't any science behind this?
/. against ANY suggestion that wifi or cell phone signals MAY cause some adverse health effects is sloppy, anti-science thinking.
/. != FUD.
/. is FUD. /. is only anti-FUD in regards to its pet causes.
Maybe they read the article, which points out various scientists who argue that there IS evidence about it.
I've got to say, the ridiculously emotional backlash I see on
I personally don't believe cell phone signals or wifi signals are strong enough to cause health problems. But I'm certainly not going to be arrogant enough to proclaim that there absolutely are no health problems and we shouldn't even look at the problem.
I thought
Please, half of
Does this remind anyone of the current climate science "debate" where every single reputable phD feels strongly that humans are impacting the environment yet the shrillest and loudest of an incredibly small dissenting crowd (that happens to have powerful motives) are picked to broadcast their ignorance to the masses via the media?
Oh well. We might as well fold on this too, just like we'll fold on global warming and "democracy", let alone human rights. How can this not fail? It is in the conservative powers perceived best interest to make open communication and a free competative marketplace of ideas go away. It can only take power from the government. It will never empower the leaders.
I thought /. != FUD.
You thought wrong. Particularly when it comes to anything with the potential for political ramifications, \. = FUD.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I get that. Or at least, used to. Could always tell when a TV or a monitor was switched on. However I also think it's due to high frequency noise response, and relatively better auditory ranges than anything else.
Well I don't think programs that only exist to scare you are worthwhile. I've never seen a Panorama program that wasn't a scare-fest. When you watch one on a topic you know nothing about the scientists seem well informed and the threats seem genuine. It's only when you watch a Panorama program on a topic you're remotely familiar with that you realize what nonsense it is.
One of them was about the dangers of black holes. They'll boil the oceans, suck the life right off the planet, there's a super massive one at the center of our galaxy, they feed and then they stay silent, drifting through space until WHAM. Lots of sound bytes of scientists saying "it's only a matter of time", "you can't see them, but we know they're there", "we have no idea how many there are", etc. In only 5 billion years our galaxy will collide with another one, and we might drift right into that galaxy's super massive black hole, etc, etc.
It's that sort of programming, and if they convince laypeople that more money needs to be spent on researching this than is really necessary it only does damage.
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You want a scientific reason why WiFi is harmless? How bout the fact that more radiation is emitted from a 60W light bulb than a 100mW AP.
That Scientific enough? It's not just that there is no science to back up harmful WiFi Theories, It's that their is evidence to the contrary.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
There's a whole range of microwave frequencies that are absorbed by water molecules. We picked ~2.4 GHz for home appliances because it offers a good balance of penetration vs. absorption and because it's relatively cheap to produce and to shield. But water absorbs radiation at other wavelengths as well; IIRC 900 nm and 1200 nm are absorption peaks, and there's a whole range of other wavelengths with varying degrees of absorption. We did choose 2.4 GHz for WiFi just because it's unlicensed, but we didn't choose the "most dangerous" frequency with respect to absorption, just one that happens to coincide with home appliances.
What is not known is: how much absorption of that radiation is bad for the kids?
That's not as unknown as you might think. Since we're talking about non-ionizing radiation here, "absorption" is the same as "heating", and "How much heating is bad for kids?" is a question we've studied for hundreds of years, at least informally. People ascribe magically properties to "radiation" even though we know from actual testing that the absorption of non-ionzing radition results either in heating or the re-transmission of long-band EM radition. Heating is something we've regularly experienced as humans, long before we discovered radio, and 2.4 GHz is too low a freqency for you to be emitting long-band EM radiation.
Y'know, I dislike people like you. Science is NOT a religion, whatever you might make of it. Entire fields have been fundamentally wrong about their area of study before, and will be again. Given that the modern anthropogenic global warming schema is being driven mainly by political funding it is highly possible such is the case here, especially since it's such a young science. Of course, getting the religious fanatics to admit this is next to impossible, and rather disconcerting. Especially given the amount of ostracization that anyone who begins to speak out about the matter experiences.
FYI, I know perfectly well how science operates. I was not making any personal judgement on whether global warming is real, caused by human activity, or by the flying spaghetti monster.
I was attacking the position (hopefully with a little humour) that global warming is all FUD. That position seems untenable; that a large majority of the world's scientists would all conspire to promote falsehood. They may be entirely wrong, but the majority are in broad agreement.
Given that the consequences of not acting on this information may be disastrous, the precautionary principle suggests that we listen to them. Taken to its logical extreme, you would be advocating never acting on any scientific advice, as it *might* be wrong.