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How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA
KentuckyFC writes "Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes, paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and 'frisk' people at distance. That's not to mention the great potential they have in medical imaging. Because terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionize electrons, it's easy to dismiss fears over their health effects. And yet the evidence is mixed: some studies have reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, have reported none. Now a team led by Los Alamos National Labs thinks it knows why. They say that although the forces that terahertz waves exert on double-stranded DNA are tiny, in certain circumstances resonant effects can unzip the DNA strands, tearing them apart. This creates bubbles in the strands that can significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. With terahertz scanners already appearing in airports and hospitals, the question that now urgently needs answering is what level of exposure is safe."
Who cares if we turn into an entire country of genetically deformed freaks, at least we'll be a country of SAFE and FREE genetically deformed freaks, right? Just as envisioned by our Founding Fathers. God Bless America.
Although store clerks were frequently exposed to the radiation from the machines, the radiation was more dangerous to children who placed their feet directly into the radiation. The exposure rate is thought to have been approximately 0.005 Gy to 0.058 Gy per second. If children tried on several pairs of shoes per visit it was posited that they could be exposed to as much as 0.1 Gy to 1.16 Gy. In fact, experiments indicated that radiation could exceed 1 microGy per hour as far as 10 feet away from the machine.
This device should be a warning (and I think it has been if you look at how cautious people are of new technologies like cell phones). Hopefully my sperm aren't being fried when I walk through a scanner in an airport--at least the parents of the 30s were using X-rays for their convenience and not the invasion of their privacy!
My work here is dung.
continuity of the state and its power structures is far more important than petty things like individual freedoms or human lives.
So if there's a hysterical OMGCancer panic amongst the scientific illiterate, is it ethical to take advantage of that to protect ourselves against the privacy abuses of these things at train stations and airports and on the street?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
If you follow the link provided about the airport scanners you find that they are passive devices meaning they don't emit terahertz waves they only recieve the waves coming off of everything around us.
There are some devices out there that using terahertz radiation to inspect packages much like x-ray today.
that besides my geiger muller counter, my gas spectroscopy meter, and my decibel meter, I have to carry a terahertz microwave detector with me all the time?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I was at LAX with my family several months ago and there was a huge line to go through the metal detectors. Tempers were up, to say the least.
Ahead of me there was a group of Arabs, kaffiyeh, long beard, the works. Behind them was a little white haired lady apparently on her way back to "Mizzurah" after seeing her grandkids in LA. Sweet as can be old lady, the kind that talks to much to strangers on the airplane. Single serving friend, you know.
Guess who gets stopped by the TSA.
Needless to say, everyone in line was a bit pissed that the TSA was giving extra screening to the old lady when they just waved the Arab guys through without a second glance. That's when the guy behind me yelled out, "What the fuck are you morons searching her for? The towelheads are the ones flying shit into buildings!"
Turns out we were all on the same flight to Chicago. Real American guy boarded last, about 15 minutes late. TSA had a word with him, I suppose. Maybe scanned him a few extra times to make sure his DNA was totally fucked up.
Resonant effects build up from very small amplitudes; the 'safe' level of exposure from a CW machine is none.
Whether you like it or not, your DNA will be modified by our scanners. Signed, The G-Man.
what could possibly go wrong!
reminds me of 'saturday morning watchmen'.
The times I've encountered the terahertz scanners at airports, they've always been optional (although they don't make it clear to you that it is). If directed to one, I've always simply asked if I must use it or if I had a choice of a "normal" metal detector. EVERY time they've allowed me to choose (and I travel a LOT). Most times they take a note of it or ask me to sign a sheet to indicate my declination - I assume so they can figure out if people object or not.
Asking the quesiton never hurts. It also sends the message that this intrusion isn't accepted by the public. Don't surrender to these things willingly.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
"This creates bubbles in the strands that can significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication." i.e. The birth of cancer cells. Terahertz waves are carcinogens.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You would deprive us of hundreds, if not thousands, of leaked nude photos of famous celebs just to save a little DNA?!?!? Are you insane, man????
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well, since every gram of tissue in your body is constantly emitting blackbody terahertz waves, I guess you're screwed, then.
Now where do I go to buy a camera that can virtually unzip people so that I can go do some research on it's side effects?
If we'd have gone with velcro.
I record my sleeptalking
out to be one of the biggest spies for the soviet union during the cold war.
dont mess with little old ladies.
If you read the story this conjecture is the results of a computer model ...NOT real measurements of actual damage to DNA - since no previous actual experiments have turned up any damage then I'd say the model is not quite right - at any rate its all theoretical and not proven with experiment
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22blocks+terahertz+waves%22
No results found for "blocks terahertz waves"
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
All the scanning and waiting in line for it and having luggage checked and so on is such a big time sink. I don't think I'd ask for another detector, because I'm just happy if I'm finally there instead of waiting in line and just want the whole process to be over as fast as possible.
The summary mentions that the terahertz waves "tear apart" strands of DNA. For those who might not remember their undergraduate biology, DNA strands are held together by hydrogen bonds - not covalent bonds. So the total amount of force to "tear apart" two strands is not as great as you might imagine. For that matter, strands have to be "torn apart" in order to be replicated for cell division.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I was amused by the summary's mundane description of the horrible side effects.
"We're sure it's perfectly safe, but in certain circumstances it might unzip your DNA."
That sounds like a bad thing...
Maybe they're using the DSL those turtles like slow much.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yes, that's what they want.
The elite don't go through the cattle corral. They just walk out on the tarmac from their special gate and get on their special plane that goes directly where they want to go. Specially.
You rubes are spending half your travel time just getting hassled. Time you might have spent getting rich and powerful if you'd had it available to you. Buses are the same way. Why do you think the schedule will have an hour between buses and two transfers that don't line up each way. Heaven forbid you have two goals for the trip.
Sweet they answered how to avoid it as well then. If it is because of resonance you treat it like any other resonance problem and vary the frequency a bit.
My business of smuggling illicit recreational chemicals has become so much easier after 9/11. All my people dress with long beards and try to look arab(takes some training). Alright so it's not fun when the man with the glove comes but they never get checked for drugs. I lost a few that were sent to Uzbekistan but hey, it's not supposed to be a safe business.
i thought all DNA was double stranded. Is there single or triple stranded DNA? If all DNA is double stranded, why mention strandedness at all?
i'm not trolling, i'm asking a question. Yesterday some jerks with more mod points than sense labeled me as a troll for asking questions.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
"Hasn't it always been the case that you have the option to decline to use "the machine" and be hand-searched instead?
Until this issue gets resolved, that's what I plan to do anyhow."
Ahoy, Matey! Now bend over....
Actually, when I decline, they've always walked me to the front of the line for the other detectors. It's saved me time in the end, strangely enough.
A few other times, when it was my turn, I simply walked to the standard detector myself, and had no issues.
(they have two normal lanes and one terahertz scanner lane at my departure airport, but I've run into them in many other places recently too)
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
They produce a 3-dimensional model of your body that is accurate down to the pores of your skin. They can also see a bit beyond the skin.
The publicly-released zoomed-out pictures of blue people only show one way of rendering the data that these machines gather. They could just as easily render a full-color image that looks like a photograph, with a fancy zoom feature that will give them intricate detail of any body part they choose to examine.
No problem at all. Just use 528 Hz afterwards. Google it!
Single-stranded DNA has its information-encoding side exposed and flops around kind of pathetically. Double-stranded DNA sticks the two information-encoding sides together so that they're hidden and inactive, and helps you wind up and store the DNA. However the double strand can "unzip" along a small part of its length to expose two single strands which can go to work.
You can get triple-stranded DNA, but it's not traditionally been thought of as important. Normally the groove for the third strand would be occupied by proteins involved in the function and maintainence of the DNA instead. However it now seems that forming a triple strand in some regions might be important in DNA's control mechanisms too.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If you line your clothes with something conductive, would it disperse the waves before reaching skin? What about your house? What about tinfoil? I know little about this stuff, but I'm genuinely concerned about being groped internally. Talk about spooky action from a distance.
Dorthy, I'll get you and your little dog too.
Walk thru this airport scanner before I board my broom. Ok.
Oh NO... I'm Melting...
Good point. Julia Child was CIA after all!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
"break chemical bonds or ionize electrons"
Don't know about breaking apart DNA, but I'm pretty sure they can't ionize electrons.
What illiterate i***t tagged this as being offtopic? "Terahertz waves" = Electromagnetic (EM) radiation. The microwave debate goes hand-in-hand with this. It's the single best example, known to everyone, of how EM has an effect on matter, and how there are obvious dangers associated with EM that need to studied rather than ignored.
Wait a moment, folk! We are talking about temporary separation of already uncoiled DNA (meaning, that it's probably under the process of being expressed, anyway) under very specific conditions as predicted by a computer model.
This is not even an empirical observation: we don't know that any of this happens in a cell free in vitro system and how significant the effect is (if any), we don't know if it happens in a cell culture in vitro system and how significant the effect is (if any) and we certainly don't know that anything like this happens in vivo.
Even assuming that you can create these precise conditions by an airport scanner (which seems rather doubtful), you certainly would not, in any way, be facilitating mutation in any appreciable sense*. All that you would be doing, theoretically, is to subtly alter patterns of gene expression for the few seconds it would take to walk through the scanner (basically, a very subtle regulatory effect). While you certainly can facilitate the development of cancer through such a mechanism (in fact, I'd argue that dysregulation of gene expression** at some points is simply required for carcinogenesis --yes, it can be caused by mutating proteins but these mutated proteins are almost invariably going to have direct or indirect regulatory functions***), such a dysregulation of gene expression would have be the prolonged, normal state of affairs of a cell for a cancer to actually happen. For this to be happening (in a worse case scenario) for as much as a few mere seconds can hardly even be called a dysregulation in any meaningful sense and much, much less have any effect, whatsoever, on carcinogenesis.
If, on the other hand, some government agency is monitoring you 24/7 with these scanners, then you might have reason to worry****.
* I would speculate that there's an infinitesimal chance that DNA might be more susceptible to mutations from not being as protected as it would be when paired but you have to realize that active regions of DNA get unzipped like this all the time so this effect, if it might be real, would be a drop in the bucket and utterly swamped by the background.
** For purposes of this discussion, what I mean by dysregulation of gene expression is the production of various protein products at inappropriate times or in the wrong amounts (either too much or too little of a protein).
*** Whether the function is to induce cell division or stop cell division, or to induce cell death (apoptosis) or to evade cell death (and whether it is a direct or indirect effect on the preceding --such as mechanisms sensing DNA damage, loss of contact inhibition, etc.). While other factors which may not always be strictly regulatory do exist such as invasiveness, angiogenesis, telomerase function, etc (which often will also be regulatory by involving over or under expression); these factors need to happen together with a regulatory dysfunction for an actual cancer to happen because, basically, cancer happens when a lot of different sorts of things get screwed up at the same time.
**** About adjusting your medication dose, that is.
I have no idea who tagged what but see my post above. This study is not so obviously linked to the "microwave debate" and, in fact, implies no "obvious dangers".
GP is wrong (or at least, over-generalizing); but to be fair, I don't think you understood him.
He said "from a CW machine"; he must mean continuous wave. In other words, if you're being hit for a period of time with a wave of a single frequency, then it's possible that resonant effects at that frequency will be harmful even if the wave is very low-amplitude.
This is why marching formations break step on bridges.
I'm surprised that more people don't use general aviation. It seems to be the best loop hole in the TSA system. You don't have to own the plane or have a license. Planes can be rented and friends/family can be pilots. Anyone smart enough to be on slashdot should be smart enough to pass the test or know someone.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
I'd also like to point out that the title of the post is sensationalistic and very highly misleading. Reading such a post, I would surmise that I'm about to read an article regarding the breaking of DNA strands which, though we have repair mechanisms to deal with such eventualities (which can have some curious effects in some non coding regions of our DNA, by the way), is a rather serious effect. I would not suspect from such a title that the article is talking about temporary strand separation of small stretches of DNA. You might just as well write the headline How not being cryogenically frozen tears apart DNA!!!!! because, as long as you have DNA replication, and RNA transcription (to express protein and for other functions) occurring, you are "tearing apart DNA" in the sense of this article.
After reading the original work and several of the references contained within, I am not convinced of the validity of the results. The real problem here is that the model used in this research is based on an overly simplified model (Peyrard-Bishop-Dauxois) for double-stranded DNA. There are many gross approximations in this model, with a few being: only hydrogen-bonds are accounted for between base pairs using a simple one-dimensional potential energy surface, there are no explicit base-pair stacking interactions in the model at all, and more problematic...there is NO solvent (water) in the model. There is no way this model can be numerically accurate enough to warrant any concern about the use of THz radiation. At best, this study will spur other researchers to use more sophisticated models to investigate the interaction of THz radiation and DNA.
...this science show I watched recently....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/episodes/2007/306.shtml
Huray!
If people won't limit their flying for the climate, then let them do it for their DNA!
So can Superman see X-rays or Tera-waves? or both? He could see through walls, but couldn't see through certain heavy metals like lead. Are X-rays known to pass through bricks as easily as Terahertz radiation? My guess would be that his eyes would have to emit X-rays in order to see through things that way, but perhaps he could use freely available terahertz radiation to naturally see through the same materials. However, he could shoot beams of intense red light (the better to melt things) from his eyes which would suggest he could emit nanometer wavelengths from his eyes, so perhaps 1-100nm x-rays aren't as hard for his eyes to adjust to. Now, if he had the ability to emit terahertz radiation, then it would make him all the more dangerous to mess with. Mess with superman and he'll split your DNA.
Right. New York to LA is just fun in a Cessna 172. You realize those things don't have bathrooms?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Doesn't sunlight contain this radiation as well? I'd assume so since the sun emits radiation over a wide range of wavelengths and this is close to infrared. So what level is in sunlight?
oh god, somehow we got all the cell phone health nuts and the privacy rights nuts (not quite as crazy) both arguing at the same time... what has science done?
While they are busy going about their business of damaging our DNA, why not target specific DNA bases? In one fell swoop the government can defend the state against enemies foreign and domestic, and at the same time ensure that future generations of taxpayers and residents comply with government standards of genetic expression and behavior.
How long will it take before a specific ethnic group claims that their DNA is bombarded with higher doses of more damaging radiation?
On the upside, the tin-foil hat brigade may finally have cause to bring to market a line of clothing and accessories that seeks to protect people from the prying eyes of their government.
"Travel wear in this modern age of government suspicion and distrust contains the latest advancements in anti-invasive technology."
It could present some interesting cross-marketing opportunities, say a remake of Rage Against the Machine's "Killing [DNA] In The Name Of".
Uncle Sam can modify our DNA, take our genetic rights away and bombard our genes with harmful radiation. Generations from now when humans have been turned into the perfect willing slaves, they will still find a way to resist opression - it's the human way.
So We Use Terahertz"
i'm sorry, but for the sake of just beautifully rhyming government supported advertising jingles, we just can't stop using these waves
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Terahertz radiation is harmless, but a 1.8GHz cell phone causes brain cancer...
Idiots...
So if I understand you correctly, "replacing devices that may dangerously irradiate passengers" == "giving up on airport security"? Good to know.
Yes, I understand and am onboard with the idea that there's probably no real harm being done with the devices in use here. But the point is that we shouldn't assume they're not harmful until it's proven that they are - we should assume that they may be harmful unless it's been shown that they're not. It doesn't sound to me as if sufficient testing has been done.
As a side point, we should also admit that much of the what goes on in the name of airport security is no more than "security theater" - inconveniencing passengers by forcing them through a bunch of procedures that do little or nothing to actually improve security, but make it look like you're "doing something". I'm not sure if that's the case with the machines we're talking about here, but certainly some aspects of the screening process are a total waste of time - for example, limiting quantities of shampoo brought onboard, for example.
I'm sure the Secret Service has a sphere of detection around the the President, that monitors various kinds of emissions.
I'll leave the specifics of that up to your personal interpretation and research.
how there are obvious dangers associated with EM
No one is talking about sending 600 watts of continuous EM waves at airline passengers. My grandfather used to heat up hot dogs in front of the radar dish of his ship during WW2... microwave ovens aren't news for the even remotely educated, and the effect of high-powered EM waves are not being debated. Regular old sunlight is EM, and that makes you hot as well. Put your hand too close to a lightbulb and you'll get a nice burn from all of that "dangerous" EM.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Planes can be rented and friends/family can be pilots
Most definitely, and it usually makes for a much more pleasurable flight. It's usually far from cost-effective though. You have to rent the aircraft, pay for fuel, and then you might also be paying landing/parking fees on top of that if you're going to be staying overnight. Just going for the proverbial "$100 cheeseburger" at an airport an hour away actually costs closer to $300 nowadays. This is on top of your private ticket, which you'll probably spend upwards of $10,000 to get, including ground school, aircraft rental, etc.
GA is a wonderful alternative to commercial flights, but well out of the financial reach of most people, even when you have 2-4 people sharing the costs.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Finally, the technology to sterilize an entire continent full of people: space-based terahertz beam satellites. Without destroying buildings and other valuable stuff!
-kgj
This scan brought to you by Stan Lee
to start wrapping my gonads in tinfoil...
With terahertz scanners already appearing in airports and hospitals...
In other related news, several major airlines are installing extra arm-rests on every seat, for that added bit of comfort for your new mutant arm.
Freedom isn't free, you damned America-hating, terrorist-loving hippie! If you don't like it, GET OUT OF MY COUNTRY! [/conservolibertarian]
Why are these things being used in public if they haven't been tested?
Not that a name proves anything, but in this particular case it really does not help either with the case for a non-harmful EM radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teratology#Teratogenic_agents
http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/2114
Hi,
I was hired by a PhD in physics to implement a Terahertz radiation scanning system for use in an industrial site. I don't believe the claims of the article (which may or may not reflect the study). For one thing, Terahertz radiation is not nearly as useful in medicine as the article makes it out to be. The reason being that Terahertz radiation cannot penetrate WATER. While my job was mainly to implement the software routines that guided data acquisition, I spent a lot of quality time with our Terahertz radiation machine. Terahertz radiation cannot penetrate the human body, which can be proven by placing one's hand between the device's emitter and detector. The detector will receive zero information from the emitter (both the detector and emitter operate at an extremely low power, btw).
I know this because the water problem was a major theoretical problem for our group. Many of the experiments consisted of material samples that were wet to some degree. It was eventually decided that while some water was OK, the amount in the sample had to be quite small. Orders of magnitude smaller than the amount of water in your hand for example.
My supervisor has been researching terahertz radiation for the past ten years. He says that researchers expecting to use terahertz radiation in the field of medicine are barking up the wrong tree. He also says that Terahertz radiation is safe. I guess if I get skin cancer on my hand, he was wrong. But I doubt that will happen.
True, but TSA doesn't give a damn if you are a spy, only if you are packing heat, or too much shampoo.
you're just another idiot trying to knock liberty. It's not ivory tower dwelling libertarians developing this zapping shit.
Regardless, this has to be STOPPED.
How about no exposure?
right, we know that it takes a lot of power to generate _instant_ results, but does that mean that low effect over time = no result at all? how do you know this? where did you conjure this knowledge from? how do you know this even applies to the "known" part of the em spectrum like the ghz range?
your naiveness is striking.
Hmm, I do find this interesting... perhaps this kind of effect can be how some saunas attribute "health benefits" to the "natural oscillations" emitted by rooms covered in different colored rocks?
I pretty much dismissed it before, but it's interesting if there might be some way for your environment to affect those kinds of operations inside of your cells.
It sounds like this is probably far safer and more controllable then X-Rays or Gamma Rays for the treatment of Cancer.
A big part of the idea with radiation treatments for cancer is to break the DNA of the cells such that they do not die instantly leaving a big hole, but instead are just prevented from successful reproduction. So as these cancer cells try to reproduce they die off instead. This happens slowly over time so that normal cells from healthy surrounding tissue can migrate over and fill in the treated cells as they die off.
These THz waves could target just the DNA, killing those cells in a region and unlike X-Rays may have a lower chance of creating a new cancer from the radiation itself or damaging surrounding tissues.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
As a physician, I agree with you. Even sunlight can disrupt some of the bonds in your skin's DNA. And unless you are genetically susceptible due to lack of an enzyme (eg xeroderma pigmentosum , you should be fine if you lead a normal life. However there is a positive correlation between excessive sunlight exposure (and thus DNA damage), pale skin, and skin cancer. No biological system is perfect - that's why disease and aging exist. So if you play roulette with your enzymes, you will eventually cause a problem that they won't be able to fix, and end up with disease. The "repair mechanisms" are NOT flawless or foolproof. That's also why we have genetic mutation and evolution. Not being "foolproof" has a plus side, too. But if you end up with melanoma, you won't be too happy.
Now with a new technology it's hard to put the brakes on and say "stop! we need 20 years of testing!". Even regular ultrasound machines - which operate in the MHz range - have not been tested conclusively. We assume that they're safe, in theory. Often the benefits of using them FAR outweigh the risk - especially since they've been around for a while and no cases of harm have been reported or linked to the machines. But it's logical to try and limit exposure to what's absolutely necessary, so we don't repeat what we were doing with "harmless" x-ray machines and coincidentally were killing all our radiologists with leukemia...
Unleashing a "scanner" to be used on the general population, without their consent, possibly even covertly, and without any followup or documentation to ensure that there is really zero risk is a large gamble on the part of the government. Only if "frequent travelers" start developing strange tumors at significantly increased statistical rates will we know there's a problem. I'd hate to be one of those travelers, and I'd hate to be the owner of the company that makes these machines, if it ever happens. I hope it doesn't, but we simply don't know.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
After some initial buzz, this theory will be found highly debatable, the DNA damaged in some tests will be discovered to have been the result of poor testing, the damage will be considered within the normal range of every day life beneath a solar object like our Sun, and generally the whole issue will be relegated to the FUD desk and there forgotten except by the reactionary fringe which seems incapable of doing its homework.
All while the real issue remains tidily ignored. And why? Because wave forms are the key to everything, so the black hats are going to do their utmost to retain control over the control, as it were.
(Side note; I recently worked out how those giant megalithic blocks of stone might have been moved using, as is claimed, simply sound. It's so blindingly obvious that I actually smacked my forehead when I realized the basic principal behind it. --You know how when your cell phone is set to 'vibrate' rather than ring, and it sort of slides across the table? Same thing. Just broadcast a sound on the same resonant frequency as the big object you want to move, set it vibrating and then just push. Big blocks of stone remain heavy, but I imagine once you remove friction from the equation, building one of the thousands of megaliths dotting the planet becomes a somewhat more reasonable task.)
Anyway, the real issue, in case anybody cares, has little to do with the high frequency carrier signal itself in a cell phone handset, (other than that it makes the whole game possible), but rather the modulated frequencies in the 10Hz to around 500Hz range where cells start doing peculiar things when exposed. --Odd things like opening and closing cell-wall permeability to particles in the blood, (this is of particular moment with regard to the Blood Brain Barrier). Keeping in mind that this occurs well below the power levels at which ionization is observed.
But so what? Cell phones move data in the kilobytes per second range, well above the 10 - 500 Hz where cells start doing the funky chicken when excited. Thing is, and here's the rub, with every model of cell phone right from their introduction onto the market, the technology has found some fundamental excuse for broadcasting modulated pulses within that exact range. For example, GSM phones use a system called, Time Division Multiple Access or TDMA for short.
It is described thusly. . .
This puts the common GSM cell phone directly in the 10 - 500 Hz range with several regular signals which nerve cells, and brain cells specifically respond to. Each of the other cell phone systems finds a similar excuse to pulse in this range.
And, I suspect, the same will be true of the newer systems, but as per usual, this will not be explored in favor of alarmist and for the most part, (as far as I have been able to determine after reading this stuff for years), misleading stories about cancer. --While it is probably not a good idea for one's blood brain barrier to open up when toxins are coursing through the blood, I
your naiveness is striking.
And what exactly is your educational background? I'm not going to pretend to be anything but a mechanical engineer, but your post seems to indicate a weak science background.
But to answer your question:
but does that mean that low effect over time = no result at all?
Your microwave cooks food by pumping in hundreds of watts worth of photons which are absorbed by the food. The food cannot emit the same number of photons at the same pace, so it heats up. Proteins and other materials change when heated beyond a certain temperature... and so you have cooked food. If you pump in fewer photons... like say a few miliwatts, the food is able to emit that and doesn't heat up... so no, you won't have the same effect.
Why, how do you think a microwave works? And how does this apply to very small wattages?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I got a crazy idea.
What if the government WASN'T in control of security at airports, and indeed, was no more in control of air travel than it is of, say, skateboard travel?
What if different airlines and airports could compete on the basis of various kinds of safety measures, price, speed thru the process, and so forth?
In short, what if we had the amazing diversity that results from a FREE MARKET, with millions of people making individual choices, rather than a one-size-fits-all centrally-planned government-run society?
Yeah, I know. Crazy talk.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
You realize that if you kill cancer cells they don't go away right? They don't magically disappear. They are handled just like any other dead cells in your body, which are rather common.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Troll? Really?
Did the moderator even read past the first sentence? I doubt it. Whenever it's my turn to moderate, I want to offer the assurance that I read every word in a given post and think carefully before assigning a moderation. I distribute points very fairly; I regularly mod posts 'interesting' even when I happen to totally disagree with a point of view but think the comment nonetheless adds new ideas to a discussion. Interesting and Incorrect are not mutually exclusive. A little care then, please.
-FL
A microwave pumps photons?
Bullshit.
It emits, surprise surprise, RF microwave EM radiation, which vibrates the water molecules in the substance to be heated.
Even for Slashdolt that displays extraordinary ignorance!
LOL. I'm being lectured by someone who doesn't know that microwaves are photons.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.