Slashdot Mirror
Cellphone Radiation May Protect Brain From Alzheimers
We've discussed cellphones and cancer many times. Here's a new angle: reader olddotter sends in a Reuters article suggesting that cellphone radiation may protect the brain from Alzheimer's disease. "At the end of that time, they found cellphone exposure erased a build-up of beta amyloid, a protein that serves as a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The Alzheimer's mice showed improvement and had reversal of their brain pathology..."
Thank you! Thank you!
Finally, somebody has been able to point out that "correlation does not imply causation" without using that goddamn phrase.
Here is the abstract, but there isn't much mentioned in the abstract beyond what's covered in the press releases.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
...there's no correlation of cell phones to brain cancer. What coin flipping is necessary? Cell phones are not actually known to cause any health problems by any valid study, and this research strongly suggests that they might help with Alzheimer's. Seems like a pretty good bet to me.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Actually, I think you wanted to say "Correlation does not equal causation"
Correlation often *implies* causation, especially in well designed and executed scientific studies that eliminate most other possible causes. Of course, implying it does not prove it - that is much harder.
Why accept this, but not the original arguments regarding microwave radiation?
Because there isn't any evidence that cellphone use is harmful. Conjecture is useless until tested.
Free Martian Whores!
From Wikipedia:
A common misconception is that microwave ovens cook food from the "inside out". In reality, microwaves are absorbed in the outer layers of food in a manner somewhat similar to heat from other methods. The misconception arises because microwaves penetrate dry non-conductive substances at the surfaces of many common foods, and thus often induce initial heat more deeply than other methods. Depending on water content, the depth of initial heat deposition may be several centimetres or more with microwave ovens, in contrast to broiling (infrared) or convection heating, which deposit heat thinly at the food surface. Penetration depth of microwaves is dependent on food composition and the frequency, with lower microwave frequencies (longer wavelengths) penetrating better.
Also, very interesting article in that I've read many times before that microwaves operate at a resonant frequency of water molecules. Turns out that's bullshit. They heat by dielectric heating, and anything with a high dipole moment (such as water) will be heated - but other molecule types will experience some heating as well, depending on how polar they are. See the Wikipedia article for more info.
Not to mention a Danish study covering over 400k people over periods of up to 12 years that showed no correlation at solid confidence intervals.
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/98/23/1707