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Research Finds Effects of GSM Signals on Sleep
An anonymous reader writes "The effects of mobile phone radiation on sleep were studied in Sweden in a laboratory experiment where subjects were exposed either to 884 MHz GSM radiation or placebo.
The study finds that compared to placebo, in the radiation-exposed subjects there was a prolonged latency to reach the first cycle of deep sleep (stage 3). The amount of stage 4 sleep was also decreased. Moreover, participants that otherwise have no self-reported symptoms related to mobile phone use, appear to have more headaches during actual radiofrequency exposure as compared to sham exposure."
Actually you're "missing" background noise that you're otherwise used to hearing and don't notice.
For example, I live fairly close to a major highway and have for nearly the past 10 years. In the middle of that I spent a couple months living with my parents who are a mile or two from a highway that's not quite as busy (we're still in lower NY so "busy" is relative). The first morning I got up and tip-toed to the bathroom because it was SOOO quiet there.
My point: You were "missing" the noise of a zillion cars, airplanes, garbage trucks, air conditioners, trains, computer fans and hard drives, and what have you. The brain gets used to it and if that noise disappears you feel like something is missing or wrong. I highly doubt this has anything to do with RF waves in your case.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Uh, does that mean what I think it means? I weigh about 80 kilos, would they beam a 58 watt signal at my head? That seems awfully high...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
These are just a few of the questions that pop up in any thorough analysis of this experiment.
A "thorough analysis" of an experiment begins with actually reading the paper!
The original paper is linked to at the top of the page, in PDF format. You'll find your questions answered there. Basically, the study is carefully controlled.
If you have some ideological dislike of the results (as you seem to), perhaps you should try to repeat the experiment yourself and present your results. See, reproducing experimental result is another cornerstone of science.
In the abstract, it mentions that they were exposed to an average of 1.4 W/kg. That's several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything you'd encounter outside the laboratory, which is less than 1W total. Unless you have a kilowatt tower on your nightstand, you have nothing to worry about.
Wikipedia
FCC Page
1.4 W/kg is close to the FCC limit of 1.6 W/kg. The EU limit is 2.0 W/kg.
See that "Preview" button?
According to the full text, linked from TFA, the experiment was double-blinded, and "Participants were not able to differentiate RF exposure conditions from sham exposures more often than would have been expected by statistical chance alone."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Wow, how many of you people are going to miss the part where they say... ..."
"At the previous PIERS meeting in Cambridge, MASS, USA, 2006 we presented the design and methodology of an ongoing double-blind controlled laboratory study with the objective to estab- lish whether RF during mobile phone use had any direct effects on:
I don't discount that the absence of HFO is good, but that quieter than quiet feeling that you are describing is probably due to air pressure.
Also, there are probably less hard reflective objects bouncing noise around, and more humidity in the air.
Regarding the article, kinda, I always de-tune access points in homes - especially where kids are living - to an appropriate signal strength for the site. This is easily done with a laptop and quick site survey. You don't need to have 100% signal strength all the time. Better than 75% at the furthest edge of the house is fine.
My favorite AP is the venerable Linksys WRT with a custom firmware load, because you can tune the signal strength down (or up) as appropriate for the application. It comes stock set at 28mW; typical setting in homes is 7mW. I believe cell phone power is significantly lower.
Turning down the power on RF devices seems to me like common sense, as well as polite use of spectrum.
While I'm seldom one to flame, you're certainly made yourself look like a right fool to anyone who knows anything about designing a properly controlled and blinded study.
'Sham' treatment, 'mock' treatment, 'placebo' treatment are all synonyms widely used in the scientific literature to describe non-functional imitation treatments given in a blinded (or much better, double-blinded) study. It's called a 'sham' treatment because that's what it is--a fake. A knockoff. Looks the same, but doesn't do anything. The term isn't prejudicial or pejorative; it's only descriptive. Fire up PubMed and you'll find nearly forty thousand scientific papers that use the term 'sham' in their title or abstract. (For comparison, about a hundred thousand use the word 'placebo'.)
I have no comment on whether or not they've done their study correctly. A number of other posters here have identified a number of potential flaws and pitfalls in their methodology. I agree completely that they present insufficient amounts of their raw data. Nevertheless, concluding that they are biased based on the fact that they correctly use scientific jargon seems...careless. Idiot.
~Idarubicin
IIRC a mobile phone in the GSM spec has a theoretical maximum power of 5W. They usually operate in the milliwatt range. A BaseStation maxes 20W. Less for the 1800 Band. The cells usually operate at much lower power in urban areas so you can have more of them. On top of that you have the classic inverse square law for power. So realistically there is no way in hell you can get 1.4W per kg of weight unless you sit on several BTS-es powered to the max. In reality you get much much less.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
nor the test administrator can tell
Only if they said it was a double blind study. Otherwise, the administrator likely knew which were placebo patients. A placebo by it self does not imply ignorance of all parties involved.
It was double-blind. According to the full article, the change in sleep onset went from 0.27 hours (sham) to 0.37 hours (actual RF). And the duration dropped from 45.5 minutes (sham) to 37.2 minutes (actual RF). No idea why they changed units, but I was always taught to ignore effects smaller than 2:1 in small sample sizes. Most likely a candidate for the JIR.
Second, exactly how do microwaves heat water. If you have one MW photon for each million mollecules of water, the way I remember quantum physics is that they _don't_ get a millionth of it each.
Your ratios are roughly backwards. In a microwave, there's LOTS of photons that hit relatively fewer water molecules. You don't really get an H2O accelerated to huge velocity, you get a bunch of molecules getting a 'nudge'.
What if that one mollecule is a protein?
Not much happens. The frequency of the microwaves are tuned to heat the water. In other molecules, they may happen to boost an electron into a higher orbit, but that doesn't radically alter the chemistry of the atom in question.
mis-folding for example is known to be a serious problem. (See mad cow disease or CVD
In most eukaryotes (like ourselves), proteins are folded by other proteins. Their structure is not spontaneous. If it were, we could easily predict the structure of a protein from it's amino acid sequence, but that is definitely not the case. Hence, projects like Folding@home exist.
As such, proteins don't "mis-fold" on their own, or due to influence of energetic particles. Much like when bending metal, it doesn't spontaneously bend in some funky way. It's inside a machine that is holding it, and forcing it into a particular shape. In the case of mad cow and CVD, the prion itself folds the proteins to make more prions.
Is everyone dead sure that it can't break some of the weaker bonds?
Yes. That's why it's called non-ionizing radiation. If these low-energy waves could actually break molecules, then walking outside during daylight would be fatal. You get hit by lots and lots of visible light, which has more energy than microwaves. It's not until you reach UV light that damage can occur. Hence, UV and higher is call "ionizing radiation".
Besides, virtually all of the molecules that we are made of are among the strongest chemical bonds there are.
I also recally one study where early adopters of cell phones did get slightly more often brain cancer.
A cursory search reveals no such study. Of course, it was only a cursory search. Since it's non-ionizing radiation I really didn't bother to look very hard.
The big question to ask if you're starting to think there may be something to cell phones causing cancer is, "Where are the bodies?". Cell phones have been very common for quite a long time now. If there was a correlation to cancer, there'd be a lot of dead people.
But that's one effect which, if true, can't be explained by the "but it's only a little warmth" hypothesis. _Something_ happened in there which we thought was only possible via ionizing radiation
No, cancer can be caused by many things other than radiation. There's a long list of chemicals that can cause cancer without any radiation involved.
In reality, Life causes cancer. If nothing else kills you, cancer will. It's due to how our cells replicate*. Eventually they damage their own DNA, leading to several ill effects, including cancer.
Well, there's also this little known effect, like that EM fields induce currents in conductors. The brain works based on electrical impulses. Can it cause induction?
Well, I'm only a microbiologist, so I'm not the best expert to ask about brain effects. However, the brain works using a hybrid electrical and chemical communication system, so the chemical components should be able to mitigate any 'burst' of electricity in one neuron. There's only so much neurotransmitter available to send the signal on to the next neuron, and only so many receptors for it on the next neuron. Plus, it would take many photons to induce enough current to trigger a synapse.
But then there's the matter of how would the energy _get_ to the brain to begin with? It has to pass through a good quantity of flesh and bone first, which should reduce the power of the energy beam.
The unit was reported incorrectly. It's 1.4W/kg SAR, which is a body tissue density normalized unit of power over mass. The government sets 1.6 W/kg SAR as the maximum allowed for cellular phones. They used an amount of power commensurate with modern cellular phones.
You are absolutely correct, the electromagnetic flux generated by an antenna decreases as the square of the distance. If you are, say, one inch away from an antenna and receive flux F, you will receive only one tenth of that flux if you move 3.16 inches away (because 3.16 squared is ten). Using a corded headset with your cell phone will allow you to move your cell phone antenna far enough that the flux intercepted by your brain decreased a hundredfold or more. So that's a good solution if you want to achieve your ten-fold flux reduction.
What about Bluetooth headsets? Well, there are many models. Class 1 headsets radiate 100 mW of power, while class 2 are limited to 2.5 mW. Even a class 1 headset (100 mW) radiates about an order of magnitude less than cell phones. So having a class 1 Bluetooth headset is still exposing your head to roughly 5-10 times less RF than putting a cell phone onto your ear. Use a class 2 if you want even less exposure.
As for routers, their power is typicaly 100 mW, so unless you put one in your pillow, the flux is negligeable when compared to cell phones.
BTW, old cell phones used to radiates 2-3 watts. Nowadays, digital cell phones rarely radiate more than 600 mW. And that's when you're far away from the tower. If you have a good signal, the cell phone will adjust its power and emit only a fraction of this to save its battery.
One esteemed responder in a previous conversation (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=379287&cid=21573611) said he believed you shouldn't keep your cell phone on your lap because 'nads don't react well with RF. There is no evidence of this, but I pass it along for what it's worth.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/