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Studies Find Harm From Cellular and Wi-Fi Signals
Over the years we've discussed the possible health risks of cellphone and other microwave radiation: studies from Israel and Sweden indicating a link between cellphone use and cancer, one from England exonerating cell towers as a cause of "microwave radiation sensitivity," and a recent 30-year Swedish study that found no link to cancer. The question won't go away though. Reader Artifice_Eternity writes "I've always tended to dismiss claims of toxicity from cell phone and Wi-Fi signals as reflecting ignorance about microwave radiation. However, this GQ article cites American and European studies going back decades that have found some level of biological harm caused by these signals. Why haven't they gained more attention? Quoting: 'Industry-funded studies seem to reflect the result of corporate strong-arming. Lai reviewed 350 studies and found that about half showed bioeffects from EM radiation emitted by cell phones. But when he took into consideration the funding sources for those 350 studies, the results changed dramatically. Only 25 percent of the studies paid for by the industry showed effects, compared with 75 percent of those studies that were independently funded.'"
Or "in part funded by opponents of radiation"?
One that hath name thou can not otter
The article mentions "modulations" over and over again as if they are some sort of evil force messing with your head.
Roughly speaking, modulations are changes in the energy at the sidebands of the carrier where the information is carried. Old cell phones were pure frequency modulation, the digital ones use a different scheme. But from you're brain's perspective, it shouldn't mean more than a slight change in the total energy being radiate at 2.4 GHz or whatever. The idea that your brain is affected by "modulations" seems extremely specious.
The fact that you're warming up your brain slightly when you hold the cell phone to your ear for a long time might have some sort of long term effect, I dunno, but I'm not too afraid of modulations.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
People around RF welders have serious shielding, and most plastics welding is automated. There have been 'accidents' such as seared skin, blindness, and neurological disorders among those who worked around these welders. Of course, we haven't heard much about them. Then again, we had not heard about brain injuries to football players for over 100 years.
Bluetooth is just another version of wifi.
The bluetooth frequencies range from 2.402GHz to 2.480GHz
Just the power output is different.
There is a huge difference between a cellphone and WiFi. First, a cellphone can transmit up to 5 Watts. I can actually hear noise induced in my computer speakers every 10 minutes if the cellphone is nearby when it does it automatic call-home.
WiFi is typically limited to 20mW.
Also, a cellphone is pressed against your head, while Wifi is usually 1 m away. With area of sphere = 4PiR^2, the Wifi will have an energy flux of 1mWm^-2, and a cellphone will have 40Wm^-2 or 30,000x that. You could use bluetooth to reduce your cellphone exposure
BTW, a microwave is allowed to leak 1Wm^2.
Bottom line, 1 hour of cellphone exposure = a lifetime with WiFi.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
(1) Based on the standard rules of statistical acceptance, a study only has to reach requires a 95% confidence level. That means that 1 in every 20 identical studies will produce a false positive merely by chance. When you have an area of study in which thousands of studies have been done over decades you end up with hundreds of studies reporting positive results just by chance.
(2) Statistical meta analysis of studies is largely nonsense unless your talking about a field in which nearly identical studies are done over and over again. Usually, when these meta studies hit the media you find they they equally weight to every study regardless of presumed rigor of the studies. In this case, the gold standard is the Swedish study that followed tens of thousands of people over decades. How to you compare that to a study that just data mined a few hundred medical records?
(3) Exposure to all types of radio range radiation has increased by literally millions of times since WWII. We know spend something close to 3% of our entire energy budget generating radio signals. Yet, in the last 50+ years, cancers rates have not increased and indeed most likely have fallen (especially when you exclude cigarette smoking.
(4) A a sociological matter, just because a study is not linked to an industry does not mean that the researchers or the people funding them are some how impartial or operating from nobel motives. A lot of people outside of industry have both inherent biases as well as professional and monetary incentive to distort science. Academic today tilt strongly to the left side of the political spectrum and many believe in the post modernist concept that every one has a moral obligation to use whatever power they have, such as that held by respected scientist, to advance their political beliefs. They are inherently hostile to the economically productive. Politicians have incentives to create crises to protect voters from. Trial lawyers stand to make hundreds of millions on law suits and they fund "studies" to contaminate the jury pool. Even competing industries can use studies to undermine competitors.
We should remember that science has its reputation because it produces the same answer regardless of the individual motives of the people who create it. When someone begins the question the motives of researchers, they are making an implicit statement that they have no science to back their position up and that they must instead fall back to human factors. If you have solid science, then you don't need to smear people's motives and call their integrity into question.
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I'm not fucking kidding, fellas.
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If some scientists are publicly humiliated because of said scams and, in the process, thousands are saved from floods, storms, freezing to death, getting cooked by heat... well, I think they'll grin in happiness while being scorned.
I know I would.
Well it's my bet that none of their advertisers are at risk in this report. Hence they run no risk by reporting it.
I'm willing to bet they have ads for Blackberries, etc.
The rat organ toxicity from GMOs study posted here on Slashdot last week was funded by Greenpeace. Total junk science too - meta study using shady statistical methods published in a non-refereed journal.
That's ludicrous. Organic molecules are constantly being bent and deformed due to thermal collisions.
The basal metabolism of the human body is roughly 120 watts. A couple of sit ups releases far more thermal energy than could be adsorbed by the body from a cell phone.
(1) it's a meta-analysis, looking at other studies, not a study actually looking at links between RF exposure and disease.
(2) it's a meta-analysis of a veritable zoo of studies. About the only things the subject studies have in common is that most of them involve humans and most involve RF! This is not a valid application of these statistical techniques!
(3) the so-called conclusions of the meta-analysis look at opinions on factors in the subject studies which were not controlled let alone investigated and measured according to a set of standards -- opinions on funding.
And somehow I don't think this paper was subject to peer review, although I'm not familiar with their review process...
FWIW, I'm a GSM RF Engineer. Two issues with your post:
In the US, phones are limited to 1 W max for 1900 MHz (aka PCS) transmission, and 2 W for 850 MHz.
The interference you hear on your speakers isn't due to the amount of power being transmited, but it's actually caused by the modulation of the signals being transmitted. That modulation occurs at 217 Hz....which is audible.
An electric chair uses current, not radiation.
Hate to break it to you, but power lines emit RF too. That's why this is a joke: all alternating currents emit RF.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
RF radiation, at the extremely low levels of energy that wifi and cell signals use, is harmless to humans, always has been, and always will be.
If big business was constantly hammering you with endless FOI requests designed to cost you time and money, why wouldn't you avoid them?
Looks like you don't know your basics Radiation can mean any number of things - in this case it is electromagnetic radiation - so yes they are talking about photons. Light IS radiation. It doesn't matter if it is visible, UV, IR, or radio waves - all photons.
Your brain's awash in radiation all the time, with a higher energy per photon than what you get from a cell phone, and with much more of it.
If you leave a transistor radio playing on top of a baseboard radiator which has been cranked up for the winter, the same will be true. But the radio, due to its design characteristics, is only going to respond to the wavelengths transmitted by the radio tower miles away. But if you put the radio next to an electronic device which outputs noise which falls within its range of reception, then you'll get static.
The problem is that the brain responds in some very weird ways to a range of modulated signals delivered via microwave carrier, and those signals happen to come from cell phones and other electronic gear. Among many such responses, one of the big ones is that the Blood Brain Barrier stops working properly and starts allowing all manner of foreign particles across its membrane, so if you have medicines or other toxins in your blood, they are able to enter and affect brain cells. That's just one of many ways EM can alter your nervous system.
-FL