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BBC Rules That Wi-Fi Radiation Findings Were Wrong
Stony Stevenson writes "A Panorama programme claiming that Wi-Fi creates three times as much radiation as mobile phone masts was 'misleading', an official BBC complaints ruling has found. The team involved in the research came under fire from the school where the 'investigations' were held for scaremongering, but now the BBC has come out with an official ruling. 'The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William, compared with three scientists and a number of other speakers (one of whom was introduced as a former cancer specialist) who seconded his concerns.'"
So this article in tandem with this one, has given me hope. For I have a dream that one day all of our children will be able to sit down at the radioactive table of brotherhood. They will be able to enjoy the pleasures of uranium chip flavored ice cream and sleep on beds made of the finest plutonium. I welcome the day when all of our children will have the opportunity to be exposed to the now safer than ever blessing of radiation. I have a dream that one day the alarmist fear mongering about radiation poisoning and nuclear fallout will be over and out children can reap the benefits.
I got a catholic block.
The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William
Peter Griffin: We'll move to England, huh? Worst they got there is, you know, drive-by... arguments...
[Meanwhile, in England]
Englishman: I say, Jeremy, isn't that Reginald B. Stifworth, the young upstart chap who's been touting the merits of a united European commonwealth?
Jeremy: Why yes, I daresay it is.
Englishman: Oh, let's get him.
[They drive up]
Englishman: Oh Reginald... I disagree.
[drives off]
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I am sick and tired of hearing voodoo science scaremongers. So here we go.
As far as possible interactions with the human body go, the 900 MHz to 1900 MHz spectrum is roughly the same. Both WiFi and cell phones use bursts of transmissions with approximately the same spectral characteristics. So we can simplify the problem and focus only on intensity.
A cell phone that is far from the nearest tower can transmit up to one watt. A typical home router transmits 100 mW (one tenth of a cell phone). A very powerful cell tower transmits 1000 W. However, signal intensity per surface unit decreases as the square of the distance. So if you are 100 meters (300 feet, one-half furlong for our US friends) from a 1-kW cell tower, you get the same exposure as if you are one metter (0.005 furlong, 3 ft) from a wifi router. And of course, all of this is dwarfed by the intensity of signal you get a few centimeters away from a 1-W cell phone.
So test cell phones. If they don't fry your brain, forget about wifi routers and towers, their effect is negligeable next to a cell phone's signal flux. And cell phones were innocented by several studies.
Attention journalists: When you cover technology, either learn the basics of what you're talking about or go back to freelancing for people rags.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Who in the UK can be surprised by this?
It's been obvious that the BBC's standards have been gradually eroding for about 20 years. It probably hasn't reached bottom yet. Biased tabloid journalism, and product placement to get round the no advertising rules, are the daily norm, not the exception nowadays.
Focus groups lead to mediocrity and bias. A similar thing is happening to the UK in many other areas too. If you have an IQ over 95 you're a statistical outlier, and are no longer catered to by corportations, government or the media in the UK.
What is it with the climate change trolls on tech boards lately? I've been seeing a comment, totally off topic, trying to make the case that human-caused climate change (global warming) is bas science, will be proven wrong, makes no sense, and so forth. Is this some sort of bizarre astroturfing campaign, some joke that I missed, or what?
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
If the BBC shows a rerun of Sesame Street that claims that 1 + 1 = 2, do they have to give equal time to mathematicians who claim that it isn't? (Where would they find them?)
If the program was wrong, it wasn't wrong because they had the wrong number of scientists on each side.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I've noticed a slow decline in panorama's technological and socio-political programs (pretty much everything). Dispatches, and that program on unreported news on More4 (the name of which escapes me) are farbetter and less "pimped". It's not just mistakes I have a problem with, it's the tabloid attitude the show's taken to; frighteningly reminiscent of Fox News.
I love my BBC but when I have to step back and become objective, not because of the topic, but because of the way information is inappropriately portrayed, I'm a little sad inside.
Matt
According to the BBC complaints ruling "two viewers complained". Assuming that one of them was Prof. Repacholi, I must be the other. But then again, I'm probably Spartacus as well.
Since this report was published Panorama was broadcast as usual on Monday night. There was no trailing "we got the wifi program badly wrong" apology, so I've complained again about that - we'll see what happens.
It's worth mentioning that the BBC is going through a sustained period of navel-gazing at the moment, ever since the Hutton Report. Among the items for consideration have been such earth-shattering topics such as the name of the Blue Peter cat http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/09/it_fair_knocks_your_socks.html and whether two pieces of film about an unelected German woman had been reversed between the programme and the trail http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7079070.stm. In among this, ensuring basic scientific accuracy in a flagship current-affairs program clearly isn't very important.
They where trying to build a chemical factory and some people where scared of it.
Both the MP and his civil servent had no idea if it was safe of not because they didn't know any science.
"Minister I have a classical eduction. I don't know any science."
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The target page tried to infect me with a virus.
Don't follow parent's links.
I just pooped your party.
Scaremongering? - You mean researchers are capable of this?
....
Lemme guess - there was an "overwhelming consensus" that WIFI was gonna cook all of our children's brains
That never happens - right?
Scientist and researchers never exaggerate or manipulate results in order to further a hidden agenda - right?
I'm so disillusioned right now
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
How am I supposed to get mutant powers from radioactive wifi if it's harmless! I'd rant more but I have to go swim in the Hudson River's toxic waste.
~Vexed and loving it!
It's just the world's last rational people mounting a vanguard action against enviro-collectivists. Don't trouble yourself about it.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Notice how they refer to it as 'radiation', because radiation is clearly a *bad thing*. It killed all those people in Hiroshima didn't it? Nasty.
Well, never mind that 1W of radiation coming out of your phone or Wifi router. There's maybe 100W coming out of your light bulbs (or less if you have Al Gore-compliant lightbulbs). And what's more, that radiation doesn't pass straight through you, a lot of it is intercepted by the body! I think we need a campaign to stop radiation in the 400nm to 700nm wavelength range from infecting our children! Ban it now! That, and Dihydrogen Monoxide...
Bad Science has lots of info on this and other science quackery.
I don't think there is any doubt that hand held analogue cell phones, when they used often, are associated with tumors. I don't know if this finding is also true for digital phones.
What's the mechanism that makes them dangerous? Why would digital phones be different from analog phones at similar frequencies?
Not a typewriter
I like to group them all together into one cathegory I refer to as "morons". It doesn't matter if you are dealing with neo-cons, green peace, ID promoters... It is all the same and it goes:
1)I think A
2)People with better qualifications say A is a bad idea
3)People with better qualifications have been wrong before
4)Therefore they are wrong now.
5)Thus A is a good idea.
6)People who don't want A are opposed to good ideas, so they must be evil.
7)It is all a conspiracy to tax/ruin our morals/benefit coorporations/steal your freedom/eat babies...
Really, from Homeopaths to Inteligent Designers, it is always the same. "Qualified people are sometimes wrong, so you should listen to my wacky idea instead." It is usually commbined with some conspiracy theory or general criticism of the scientific method interspersed with emotional or irrelevant arguments "Al gore is wasteful and just want to STEAL your tax dollars, hence GW isn't real." etc...
No it's a programme.
You get a program on a computer, a programme on TV.. english is funny like that.
No, there is NO statistically significant evidence suggesting a correlation between cell phones and tumors. There has been NO scientific study to suggest that, only idiotic scaremongering, which is what this article is about. Not only is there no empirical evidence, but there is no known basis for it in physics/biology/chemistry since microwaves are NON IONIZING RADIATION. That means that they have NO EFFECT on matter other than to heat it up if you bombard it with enough. It's no different than standing in front of a fireplace and absorbing the longer wavelength infra red spectrum.
"Wit" has two t's.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm sure that, in a not-so-distant future, it will be as dangerous to walk in the streets of a wireless city than it is to put yourself in the microwave for 30 minutes. There will be corpses all over the sidewalks, and homes will be built with a lead insulating layer to protect us from the OH-SO-DANGEROUS WI-FI radiations.
But oh, anyway, isn't lead toxic too? Think I heard about that...
In french, we call them "Peurologues", or "Fear-o-logists" in english...
It remains that three times negligible remains negligible.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" applies to all claims, including those that handily advance socialist causes.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Idiot. What makes you think scientists were behind this? Reporters were behind this. They have monetary reasons for scaremongering. What hidden agendas can you even think up that might prompt scientists to falsify results?
One sure sign of a crackpot is that he takes every chance he can get to insult and demean the scientific establishment. That shit won't fly here. It does not make you seem smart or wise in anyone's eyes. It just points out to all the smart folks here that you are an anti-intellectual dolt.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The analogue cell network had much greater separation between towers which required considerably higher power output from both the phone (several watts) and the tower.
Also with digital you can improve the SNR dramatically therefore reducing the power required.
These 2 factors are what led to digital networks requiring a lower power output from the phone combined with the greatly improved tower technology for ultra low power signal reception which used to require cooling with liquid nitrogen to get a low thermal background noise.
It should be noted that the towers for digital have to be closer together as they tend to use higher frequencies which require line of sight whereas the older 900MHz networks would go through things much better, this is one of the advantages of the 700MHz network that Google is bidding for.
Actually it depends how close you are to the antenna. Inverse square only applies for point charge/currents. For an infinite wire (which an attenna is approximately if you are close enough to it), the field strength actually goes as 1/r not 1/r^2. Still as you say wifi isn't that close to your head usually, and is about 1/10th the output anyways.
FREEDOM!!!!!!
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I'm not sure what your problem is, although I suspect you're probably just some dweeb who has a grudge against us for seducing your women with our oh-so-sexy accents. Anyway, as I was going to say, the UK has a mechanism for reporting programming like this, which frequently results in broadcasters having to make public apologies (see the global warming denialism show C4 showed earlier this year). The last time I checked North America wasn't so lucky.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Being an American the only news I ever hear from across the pond is from the BBC, is that all you folks have over there? I know the notion seems kind of silly, but why is that the only 'network' I hear about? From reading wikipedia the network sounds like PBS/NPR we have over here. Could someone please clarify my American ignorance?
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
I'm on windows w/ firefox, noscript, and avast!.
Avast! caught it before the page even loaded.
I just pooped your party.
I'm actually lying in bed, sucking down nyquil, and watching LOTR.
So, don't taze me, bro!
(Oh, global warming, imagination, figment of, one each...)
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Signal to Noise Ratio.
The better the SNR is on analogue, the better the sound, the easier it is to understand somebody. The old analogue phones freqently transmitted on maximum power all the time, for best quality(and cheaper construction cost).
On digital, the SNR only has to be sufficient to be able to reconstruct the signal*, so you have much more in the way of reducing transmission power when the SNR is good. Most modern digital phones, for example, transmit at a quarter or less of what the old analogue ones did.
*Most digital transmissions have lots of recovery possibilities.
I don't read AC A human right
Says you! I can see fire, I can't see cell phone waves. They must be dangerous, they work like magic!
I think that's a lot of the problem... people haven't figured out that cell phones and wireless transmissions AREN'T magic. Hell, I didn't even get into wave physics until my second year in college, and that was at an engineering school... what chance does a liberal arts major or high-school dropout have of understanding it?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Dear USA,
... It's not us it's our media, they all studied "Media" in college and don't know Science (or even common sense it seems) and don't seem to care if they get it wrong as long as it makes a good story ...
...
Educate your posters to \. Some people in the UK are stupid, just like some people in the US.
The perception from the outside of the US is that it is the majority of the US that are stupid (but I suspect that is just a perception) and I suspect that the perception of the UK from the outside is that the majority of us are stupid as well
But the point of this is our media is regulated, the BBC got it wrong (they are media people they don't know science), people complained, and someone checked, and they corrected it
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Dear poster, Please use proper sentence structure, punctuation, and number matching. Further, you may be interested that the US is pretty far down towards the bottom of the barrel as far as world standards of education go, leaving some areas of the nation with more than a 33% illiteracy rate. That's pretty pathetic.
When you get far enough away from the source, then it is inverse square. If you have a short antenna, then close to it, it is not inverse square, but if the antenna is a couple of inches from your head, then you have a strong field.
No, it doesn't.
The mechanism that makes cell phones harmful is that they inject comparatively high amounts of RF energy into cells, which damages the DNA.
Ionizing radiation damages DNA. Non-ionizing radiation (which is what cell phones and wifi networks use) can only damage cells by adding heat. Cell phones don't put out enough energy to raise the temperature by even 1o C.
It's possible that a yet-unknown mechanism exists for non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer. However, we've been dealing with energy in these frequencies for a long time, many of them in far more powerful amounts than cell phones (radar, microwave communication towers, etc.). Additionally, many of those sources are staffed by union workers, which are notorious for looking for any minor safety factor to justify a wage increase. If you want to prove a new mechanism in a mature area of physics, you're going to need very good proof.
Anecdotal evidence of "many brain tumors on that side of the head" is no replacement for a good scientific study; after all, 50% of brain tumors would happen on that side of the head, anyway. Actual studies on this matter have more than adaquately disproven. Studies in support of a link are often shown to have problems.
Not a typewriter
You are kidding right? If the quality of media content is the only direct indicator of general population IQ, I wonder what to say about people on the Fox News home country...
;-)
PS: Please don't try to flip-flop on me now
That is because in your case you chose to not to consider the anecdotal evidence, which is abundant. Of course the telecommunications industry is not likely to fund a comprehensive statistical study, or any study that shows that cell phones are dangerous if used almost constantly. I can hear you, you don't have to shout.
Correct, however if you are close enough to an antenna that the relationship is 1/r then the antenna length (or aperture) usually becomes non-negligible. On a wifi router with a 5" antenna it isn't a big deal, but on a cell tower with 6' to 8' antennas the antenna size means that the peak power density is lower then you would otherwise expect as the power is distributed over the antenna length.
--- There are two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it
It was decided during the development of typography, pre-internet, by typesetters, editors, and designers.
Double spaces between sentences are for monospaced fonts, like typewriters or courier font families. Variable-width fonts like the one you're probably using to read this don't need two spaces, largely because the eye groups words more easily. E.g.: typesetting in books uses singe spaces between sentences. Old newspapers are more variable.
Maybe you're confusing Usenet with the Internet, or email (txt=monosp) with the web (usually varable-width).
All part of the rules of font usage and interacting with the design of your expressive tools. Literacy now extends into minor forms of publishing and email daily for most of us, such as this thread, so we have to learn them to break them. FWIW.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I'm shocked. Just shocked. No one saw this at the time.
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
A ruling is an opinion, its not fact or necessarily backed by science.
Why not try common sense and don't follow a link to snipurl.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
The brilliance of the enviro-collectivists is that they can't possibly get *all* of their measures approved, but they can probably get some of them. So, in 50 years, or 100 (though few around now will be around in 100..) when things are not nearly as dire as the scaremongering predictions deemed, they can point to the staggering array of freedom-reducing half-measures as the only reason it wasn't much, much worse, and so we should implement new, stronger measures, shouldn't we?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Only trust links from domains you can trust.
Point proven, I think.
I whole-heartedly agree with you. However, I think there's sometimes a bias among otherwise smart people to only realize this thinking process is going on in certain situations and not others. For most "controversial" ideas where something could in theory be settled by the proper application of logic and science (although perhaps fully convincing data doesn't yet exist), the argumentative "believer" partisans operate like this on both sides of the argument. The Global Warming thing is a perfect example. Somewhere in between Gore and Bush lies the scientific truth behind the cause of the warming, but it seems everyone has already decided to "believe" one way or the other to the extreme anyways. Same thing with all of the other touchy political subjects, like abortion, guns, the death penalty, euthanasia, social welfare programs, tax/debt/spending issues, just about everything to do with the current USMiddle East situation, etc...
I think education is at the root of it all. If we (a) guaranteed a good education through age 18-ish to everyone in the US (we don't, most of them get shitty educations) and (b) ensured that the core focus of that education was not memorizing facts to pass a test, but instead learning how to reason, apply logic, and learn new things independently, we might see some improvement after a few generations.
11*43+456^2
"learning how to reason, apply logic, and learn new things independently"
You don't learn to do that by sitting in a classroom.
Bah. I'm working towards quickening the Idiocracy of the future. I only wish I could live long enough to see the day US currency has a picture of a WWE wrestler with a mullet and has colorful phrases like "that's what I'm talkin' bout" and "haulin' ass, gettin' PAID!". http://farm1.static.flickr.com/157/363916236_e250c458b3.jpg for reference.
If you talk to someone about global warming, intelligent design, horrible management practices, whatever, you'll find that someone with credentials has written articles, books, etc., that pass the most horrific crud as fact. When journalists site this crud, their own credibility eventually suffers, but there will be a faithful following notwithstanding. Unfortunately, figuring out what is good and what is bad requires passing the Turing Test, which is hard work. You can't just go with the majority opinion. Aristotle said that the Sun goes around the Earth, and basically everyone said that was true for 1,500 years. Can everyone be wrong?
-- Stephen.
Saying loudly, firmly and often that studies don't exist doesn't make it so. Just because they don't make the front page and because you haven't read them doesn't make them not exist.
In any case, the question of whether or not EM radiation ionizes tissue is a bugaboo designed to misdirect people's attention. The first two places I heard this obvious fact touted was within literature promoted by the Telecoms themselves, and before them, the U.S. Airforce which was trying to quash lawsuits with regard to their radar operations and people getting sick. The point is that there are recognized mechanisms through which brain chemistry and cellular behavior is affected by low power, nom-ionizing EM. For example. . .
60 htz wall socket power in conjunction with the Earth's magnetic field resonates with the Lithium ion, exciting it and causing it to move on a vector. This is based on the principle of cyclotronic resonance. Your blood stream has a natural lithium content and it plays a role in the balancing of your brain activities. When artificially excited, lithium ions cross the blood brain barrier more readily and brain chemistry is altered. Many anti-depressant drugs use lithium as their active ingredient, the logic being that increasing the amount of lithium in the blood raises the number of blood brain barrier crossing instances under normal conditions. When specifically energized, however, the natural quantity can have a medicinal effect. That's one way in which the brain is directly affected by non-ionizing EM. There are other ways.
I read a series of studies which demonstrated that cancer cells in vitro divide and grow many times faster when exposed to certain wavelengths of low power EM as compared to control samples. Everybody has cells going cancerous in their bodies, but a healthy person's immune system is able to deal with this. It's when those cells get a foothold that problems occur. I had to buy a book to read about these studies. You never see this stuff on TV. --All we get are scare mongering stories on the BBC which are, I am certain, designed to be shot down strawman style just like that dumb 'fake moon landing' thing.
-FL
That's just a small cross section of the findings. I found one article that said, "Results from present studies on use of mobile phones for > or =10 years give a consistent pattern of increased risk for acoustic neuroma and glioma."(Occup Environ Med. 2007 Sep;64(9):626-32.) But that's just one study based on 10 cases of neuroma, and directly contradicted by another major study. (Am J Epidemiol. 2004 Feb 1;159(3):277-83). The balance of evidence suggests that cell phones are entirely safe to use.
I'm still not getting one though.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Somewhat ironically, the most balanced summary the public will ever get about this is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Written in layman terms, properly sourced, reviewed by god knows how many experts... Sure, it's not perfect but it is as close as you will come without a a university degree in the subject. It certainly beats any media outlet or politician.
Most of the immediate fatalitites in Hiroshima were caused by the intial blast and its direct effects, (building collapse, fire..)
From Wikipedia, (so must be true, eh?)
"directly killing an estimated 70,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000".
Although, also note:
"Since then, thousands more have died from injuries or illness attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs."
So yes, radiation from a nucler bomb is a bad thing, but in the real world you still have a greater chance of being killed by your car than by your mobile phone or wifi.
No it hasn't. Lithium in the body is normally under the "trace" level. Unless you're on meds.
In fact Lithium is highly toxic, and the therapeutic margin (doses at which it can be used in meds without causing the toxic effect) is pretty narrow.
That's why it is forbidden in product that will be consumed by humans.
Also I have some doubt about 30-to-60T and 60Hz being the correct parameters needed, and I have also serious doubt the 60Hz AC current found in houses generates a strong enough emission to have an impact on lithium. But I'll give you the benefit of doubt.
WTF ? Lithium - as a ion - is charged, whereas the blood-brain barrier is hydrophobic. Moving the ion around won't make it cross the barrier, it would just get stuck against it and refuse to move further (the size orders aren't the same : the lithium would have to cross a width several order of magnitude it's own radius. And path has defavorable properties on its whole length).
:
What you need is either
- changing the properties of the barrier (for an example see how electric fields are used to transfer transgenes inside bio-engineered cells. It's not used because it makes the genes move (like in a electrophoresis gel) but because it makes the properties of the cell surface change and it becomes transiently permeable to the gene. Similarly ultrasounds are used in needle-less injectors to make the skin permeable to the drug)
or
- special transporter (that what may be the case with lithium, because it mimics closely enough Sodium, and may sometimes be using the same channels).
In fact the "get stuck against the barrier instead of forcibily crossing it" effect is used in some medical NMR image techniques like tractography (imagery of nervous fibres inside the brain). To explain it in a simple way : you make the water vibrate along a specific direction, if there's room for the water to move, you'll get a signal, if the water encounters a barrier, you get none. Thus you can know if the fibres are oriented in the same direction (because water can move along them) or not (because water can't easily cross their borders). Do it for a lot of different directions and you can get a nice map of the overall fibers directions in the whole brain.
There's no water leakage produced by this method with water forcibly crossing the nervous cell membrane (for that you would need to change their surface properties, or change the amount of water channels on the surface like killing-white-cells do).
FYI, your confusing with mania & bipolar drugs, which may be based on lithium.
Depression drugs are mostly organic compounds that interfere the metabolism of monoamines (mostly serotonin in most recent product like fluoxetine/Prozac, or mostly dopamine and nor-adrenaline in other drugs).
No. Although, not all the details of the Lithium effect are known in details, :
the logic of lithium is putting in a substance that was never meant to be here in the first place and thus can interfere by several mean
- concurrence with sodium : it may replace it in some circumstance, but not be processed in the same way by all ionic pumps. Most of the toxicity also comes because of Lithium replacing Sodium.
OR MAYBE
- interfere with the expression of some genes.
OR EITHER
- interfere with the function of some enzymes.
There's almos
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
URL obscures shocksite redirect.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Maybe they're sitting near a mobile phone mast?
..
Oh, wait
Insert
Sorry, I may have snapped out a little bit too violently.
:
I'm just sometimes exasperated because of people who have read some random crackpot theory on the net, and thus refuse to use any other form of medicine than the corresponding snake-oil. And automatically buy the argument that "scientific establishment refuse to admit it because it's new, think of Galileo !" or other theories about "repressed scientific evidence !", etc. And then completely shut off and refuse to listen to your explanation about why the new "thoery" seems wrong, given the fact it contradicts a lot of previous observations and would completely fail to explain a lot of technology that are commonly used and to work, whereas the "establishment"'s theory models fit nicely the observed data and do give an explanation about how what we use di function. That's why those theory are currently used, because they "work", not because some wise bearded guy said them.
I don't refute your arguments about cyclotron. It's a well understood technology and used in several modern apparatuses (Fourier-Transform cyclotronic resonance mass spectrometers, to give an example).
The problem was the whole chapter about lithium
- The required medicinal level are several order of magnitude higher than the very low level that might be found in the brain (and those low level may more likely be due to pollution than to a minimal level required by body function). ( ppm vs. ~ 1 M )
- There's a big mix-up between bipolar disorders and depression. They are different class of sickness reacting to different type of drugs.
- A charged substance cannot go thru a much more thicker hydrophobic barrier just because it vibrating in that direction. Specially because that would it require to cross a long path of defavorable condition. ( pm radius vs. m thickness)
- Lithium mimics sodium - that is the commonly accepted explanation of its toxicity. It can thus traverse the blood-brain barrier using the same channels. There's no need of "pushing it in" to get it into the brain.
- An effective dose of lithium is close to a toxic one ( ~1M vs ~1M too). In an uncontrolled experiment if lithium manifests its psychiatric effet, you would expect some toxic effects too, none were reported by the study cited in your article.
- Psychiatric modelisation in animals is very complicated. Depression is a specially tricky one. Inferring medical effect of a substance based on animal behaviour is not something obvious. Thus the whole "the rats seemed to be calmer, thats what anti-depression drugs do, therefore we proved that lithium done it because it's a bipolar-drug. Thus the EM emission influenced lithium" is a HUGE jump on conclusion.
The problem with this cyclotron model is that it contradicts a lot of the current knowledge and evidence about lithium. There's a lot of stuff that currently works and is explained by current theories that the new one fails to explain.
Also the study cited jumped on conclusion by interpreting vague behavioural change in rats. For what matters the exact same effect could be obtained with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS - the same technique used to shut off brain region on the last article you cite) which is an entirely different beast. Or something completely different.
The source cited are all old : around 20 years. That's a long time for science. During this time, a lot of other data and theories may have come forward and could contradict the various proposed hypothesis. Our knowledge about Lithium has changed as had numerous other information we have now. Always take old scientific information with a grain of salt : the knowledge my have advance and some models proven to be wrong in the light of data obtained since then.
About the paper about effect of cell-phone-type radiation : at the end of the abstract the authors admit that the emission they used were different (stronger and longer) than actual cell phone. With only this paper we may not draw definite conclusion
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Oh well, if that did not appear to the readers, that their wifi signal disappears after a few walls, or 100ms of open space, while their cell phone works miles away from the towers then they are, hmmmmmm not thinking (/polite) ?
Have you wondered how your cheap wireless phone worked 100m from your house and your $$$ wifi signal disappears in the garden?
It's Friday afternoon at work and I'm bored.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You're thinking of "half-witted." The noun is "half-wit."
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it