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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."
where subjects were exposed either to 884 MHz GSM radiation or placebo.
Did they give them one of those plastic phones filled with Pez candies?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Well to an extent I did. I've been out in the middle of nowhere to the extent that you couldn't get a cell phone signal if your life depended on it (and sometimes it does!) and there is an odd sense of quiet.
I know it sounds nuts but on a windy night even with the trees moving it still seems more quiet but in an almost impossible to define way. Like there is something that you can't put your finger on NOT there.
I always thought it might be either radio singles or high pitch EM radiation from all the fun toys I have around it (yes, including a Wireless Router). So I'm not complaining, and I can sleep fine, but at the same time this study doesn't shock me at all.
These are just a few of the questions that pop up in any thorough analysis of this experiment.
Whoever applied that tag needs to die. I hate you. Can't get it out of my HEAD.
I wonder if this will have an effect on any of my sweaters. Oh, SLEEP, I thought it said SHEEP.
But what about us CDMA users?
I don't think we sleep well because we're mostly on Verizon...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
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.
No, it means more than "exposed to nothing"; it means "exposed to nothing, but the subject can't tell".
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?
I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Big W and standing inline at the check out.
A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.
On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again although I probably shouldn't because I'd ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IV's in both arms.
I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Pal nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.
I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story, particularly a guy who was behind her.
Horrified, she asked if I'd ended up in the hospital in that condition because I had been poisoned. I told her no; it was because I'd been sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me.
I thought one guy was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard as he staggered out the door.
Stupid b*tch...why else would I buy dog food??
You "have occasionally slept with my phone under my pillow to use as an alarm" and "did NOT sleep as well."
I've noticed I don't sleep as well when I have a small brick under my pillow. Especially if I think it might ring.
The exposure refers to the standard way in which cell phone exposure is defined:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_radiation_and_health
Basically, you compute the average over small cubes of tissue, and the maximum of all those averages is 1.4mW/g.
i sleep with my head in the microwave oven
a microwave oven emits less radiation density then the amounts used in this study
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
- If you don't normally use an alarm clock but a specific need for one to wake up for a specific event, you were possibly preoccupied with the next day's event.
- You may have had an uncomfortably strange lump under your pillow.
- Were you at home, or on the road or in a hotel? Most people sleep "differently" when not in their own bed.
- Does your phone emit an ultrasonic whine?
- You might subconsciously be worried about the RF you believe you are exposing yourself to.
- If you had a hand beneath the pillow while you slept, it might have made contact with the unfamiliar texture of the phone.
There are a lot of very plausible reasons that don't involve a two-second-handshake-pulse-every-9-minutes, emitting a maximum of 600mW of RF energy near your head.You could try your own experiment -- have someone randomly set your phone to either "airplane mode" or "regular mode" while you continue to use it as an alarm clock. In the morning they'd have to restore your phone to regular mode so you wouldn't know which way you slept with it. They would record their settings while you recorded your sleep patterns. After a month or so, correlate the two and figure out if RF made any difference in your sleep.
John
That number is the "Specific Absorption Rate." Google it, and you'll get the very basic idea (wiki article is kinda useless). Cell phone handsets are regulated to 1.6W/kg in the US, 2W/kg in the EU. Anyway, a quick check of Nokia models shows a maximum exposure typically under .5W/kg, with variations per model (8800, .5; N-Gage, .35).
.97W/kg ;)
The iPhone, however, is a screaming
SIG: HUP
First of all, this is NOT a double-blind, placebo controlled study. Sure they used a placebo, but if it was double-blind they sure as heck would have mentioned it in the abstract. That means that the results are based more on the opinions of the people carrying out the study, since they would have known weather or not the subjects were receiving treatment or placebo. Second, unless you are equipped with sensitive antanai and receiving curcuitry, your body is quite incabaple of being affected by light with a wavelength bigger than a volkswagen beetle. (devide the speed of light by the frequency to see how large these waves really are) There is a reason radio telescopes are frikin huge. As for a microwave effect... wrong frequency, buddy. no... just.. no. also, It's not as exposing you to radio frequency is actually "adding" anything to your environment. We are being constantly struck by radio waves of every frequency, that is why an untuned radio plays static. The only difference in adding a transmittion is that the waves are made into something recognizable and put closer and brighter, but there are times when natural background radiation is even brighter than your cell phone's (aka bad reception).
I am not shouting. I am merely speaking in a voice loud enough to be heard.
Apparently Tim Rifat, the world's leading expert in psychic spying (who knew there WAS such an expert. Where do you take certification tests for THAT honor?) reported in 1998 that the 884 MHz frequency is being used for govt mind control. Of course the sneaky bastards can also alter your sleep patterns! It's all a part of their plan to turn us all into zombies!
... Off to make my tinfoil hat.
I think he responds faster if you call him "Captain", rather than "Capitan"
</obvious>
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Why is this tagged psuedoscience?
/other/ conditions that would, well, cause them to have trouble sleeping.
/preliminary/ results show that those who SAID they could detect symptoms of RF exposure had increased headaches during exposure than those that did NOT say they could detect the symptoms of RF exposure. However, it does not give a statistical analysis.
Here's a layman's synopsis:
1. 36 women and 35 men were selected for a study, and were checked by physicians to make sure that they didn't have any
2. They were then classified into two groups. One, that said they could "detect" the effects of RF radiation, and another that said they could not.
3. The group as a whole was divided into two groups, both to be strapped into the "RF Machine", however, the machine would only be on for the "RF" group, not the placebo group.
4. The study reveals a statistically significant reduction in the time that it takes for one to reach deep sleep (1/3 of an hour for those exposed, 1/4 hour for those not exposed), and that Stage 4 sleep time is also reduced (37.2 min vs 45.5 mins respectively).
5. The study also says that
Remember, this is labelled a "provocation study" that is "We're trying to narrow this down, now pick us apart." It even says that in the Discussion!
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
Actually, "exposed to nothing, but neither the subject nor the test administrator can tell"
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
How else am I supposed to mow my hedges? It's a time honored technique handed down from grandpaw lefty and refined by uncle stumpy.
What could go wrong?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
</obvious>
Just don't call him "Catpain". I hear he hates that almost as much as I do.
But then again, I could be wrong.
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?
I don't know whether it can or not, but I'd like to see that addressed just for once. You know, instead of the "it can't be anything but heating" handwaving. I'd like just once that someone addresses that point, even if to bury it finally, you know?
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. One mollecule absorbs the whole photon, then bounces into the surrounding ones and spreads the energy around. I.e., for a really really tiny fraction of a second, you have a really high energy mollecule there, not just a bunch of slightly faster ones.
What if that one mollecule is a protein? What if it has a resonance on exactly that frequency or close enough?
What if it bounces into a protein? No, seriously, mis-folding for example is known to be a serious problem. (See mad cow disease or CVD for, admittedly, uncommonly extreme examples of what it can do.) Can it break other bonds or mollecules there? It only takes one protein matching something to fire a signal for example.
I'm curious, you know? Has anyone calculated the energies involved? Is everyone dead sure that it can't break some of the weaker bonds? We don't even really understand how all proteins are folded. (Or we'd give up on that whole branch and on Folding@Home and go do something else.)
No, I'm not one of the tinfoil hat gang, and I never attributed headaches to RF, but I like my science more exact nevertheless. If you're going to claim that it can be _nothing_ else, then I'll take that literally. I'd expect a thorough debunking of literally everything else conceivable there. Ionization is only one aspect of the problem.
I also recally one study where early adopters of cell phones did get slightly more often brain cancer. Ok, so those emitted a heck of a lot more power than cellphones nowadays, and it wasn't that horribly many people even then, so I'm not putting on the tinfoil hat any time soon. 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. What _is_ the explanation for that? I don't think anyone knows for sure yet.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
The original was an internal email at Starbucks corporate:
"The effects of CAFFEINE on sleep were studied in Sweden in a laboratory experiment where subjects were exposed either to A GRANDE CAFFE LATTE or HERBAL TEA. The study finds that compared to HERBAL TEA, in the CAFFEINE-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 CAFFE LATTE use, appear to have more headaches AFTER actual CAFFFEINE exposure as compared to HERBAL TEA exposure."
Just because it doesn't burn, doesn't mean it has no effect. Why does the Blood Brain Barrier become permeable when exposed to standard cell phone EM? Not because it's being over-heated, surely. Apparently there is another mechanic at play. Look up "cyclotronic resonance". Cells respond by nature to electricity in micro quantities. Nobody likes to acknowledge this, but that doesn't make it false. Robert O. Becker wrote a book about this.
-FL
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/