Slashdot Mirror
A Balanced Look At Cellphone Radiation
A month back we discussed an article in GQ on the alarmist side of the cellphone-radiation question. Now reader pgn674 passes along a PopSci feature article looking at the current state of cellphone radiation research. It profiles people who claim to be electro-hypersensitive, "who are reluctant to subject themselves to hours in an electronics-laden facility" for studies. The limited research on that condition is still showing that sufferers, in blind tests, are unable to detect radiation at levels better than chance. The article also touches on the relationship of non-ionizing radiation to cancer. The conclusion is that while it seems unlikely high-frequency fields in consumer devices directly cause cancer, they might promote it, and might also indirectly cause other health deficits beyond simply heating nearby tissue — though one skeptical researcher cautions, "The gap between a biological effect and an adverse health effect is a big one."
who are reluctant to subject themselves to hours in an electronics-laden facility
Which just goes to show how much the tinfoil hat actively interferes with the thought process.... In order to conduct a valid scientific experiment on such matters, it requires a room which is 100% free from other radiation sources. Which means the rooms in the facility are anything BUT "electronics-laden".
But we're already fully aware that being vulnerable to EMR is the very least of these people's problems, which are usually only solved through extensive use of mind-altering drugs.
A lot of those so-called "radiation sensitive" people are nothing but Luddites in disguise.
In Malaysia, there have been cases of communities in uproar, having many people claiming that they suffer from "excruciating painful headaches" to "cancer" and all that, just because there is a cellphone station nearby.
Those "radiation sensitive" people demand that the authority remove those "radiation hotspots" immediately, and it turns out that, in some of those cases, the so-called "cellphone stations" haven't even begun operation and never emit any radiation !
Luddites !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
How much "promotion" does it take to
1: "GQ" :( ... /. without it!)
2: "PopSci"
3: The entire summary reads like a news announcer sounds. I can actually hear in my head as I read it, my inner voice's pitch changes exactly like a certain bored-out-of-her-skull Asian Reporter.
4: kdawson
5:
6: Profit! (wouldn't be a list on
You know who else is "electro-hypersensitive"?
Dracula, that's who.
And he has about as good a chance of existing as a real "electro-hypersensitive" human being.
Utter bullshit, these people receiver more radiation energy from every shortwave broadcast station on the planet than they will from 100 cellphone towers. It is all in their pathetic fucking heads. Hell, given good band conditions, my 1.5kw amateur station radiates them more than a city full of cell phones.
Go ahead, fear the cell phone if you want. The body absorption rate is higher at 146mhz, and I can legally run 1500 watts there, and make a habit of running 5-50 watts.
While they are bitching... why not study how much more radiation they are getting from the local weather radar.
1) Inverse-square radiation law for distance - The phone transmitter is in contact with your head
2) Energy of EM photons are proportional to frequency
Check out your pharmacy. I'm fairly sure there are some Bach flowers tinctures available by now that can cure the problem. If everything fails, get a few healing crystals.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You were right. Fraud Alert, in my opinion.
Anonymous Coward DE another Anonymous Coward You are S9+80 here and annoying all your neighbors with TVI. Pls QRP. QSL?
The gap between electronics which (as a byproduct of what it is designed to do) emit microwatts of electromagnetic radiation, yards away from one's body and brain, and a cellphone emitting watts of electromagnetic radiation an inch away is at least as big if not much bigger.
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
My chiropractor assures me that my bag of crystals and wrist magnets will protect me. Besides, with a little acupuncture I'm good as new, plus I never microwave food so I get lots of anti-oxidants. Well, I'm off to sharpen my razor by putting it under a paper pyramid.
the other han,d there is a tremendous psychological incentive here to wishfully believe that there is no danger-- because the proposition that cellphone radiation near your head (or wifi for that matter) actually is dangerous leads to thoughts horrific to contemplate-- namely that you'd have to stop/reduce the amount of calls you do, or worse, to live in a wifi-less world.
I strongly suspect that people are more likely to believe things that do not challenge/threaten their current lifestyle (or whatever it is that makes the money).
So I wonder if any of that bias leads to a more ready dismissal of the cellphone/cancer danger. As Lessig said in his latest website chat, 75% of studies not funded by the cellphone industry found evidence for a connection.
The author seems convinced that Per Segerbäck is allergic to radio waves, even though Segerbäck doesn't demonstrate this in a blind test, and a psychosomatic explanation looms large behind every incident described. This article is worthless to those looking for scientific evidence on the subject.
So x-rays must be completely harmless if I can't "detect" them? Think of airplane noise, as it is permanent near large airports. Would be ridiculous to claim it seeds tumors in human bodies. It just disturbs attentiveness, concentration, calmness, sleep. If you are a sensitive person, these disturbances may severely affect your quality of life. Noises can be heard, i.e., "detected", so there's no dispute as to the possible harm they can do. But how adequate are these criteria? Consciousness is not a system monitor. It is a bonus that some species were endowed with. The human body is not a robot. Our physiological systems were not designed. They're not just modules with interfaces. Their behaviour is not just determined by a set of formal rules and a specified input. They're not circuit boards. When our bodies and their functions gradually evolved in nature's history, they were not exposed to electromagnetic fields of the quality that is in question now. As long as life is not understood (and it isn't, unless we'll have succeeded in building living cells from scratch), it is not unreasonable to be cautious. The cancer claim is notorious because any lesser claim is not shocking enough to make it to the news. It is a suicide bomb of reputation: You get some attention at the expense of credibility.
I would rather run 1500W on 2.4Ghz, blocking all wifi and cooking dinner at the same time.
Or 1500W on 160M with a half wave vertical dipole and get a qso card from every country
Obviously, yes, there are those people claiming hypersensitivity, basing it simply on their fear of the radiation getting to their bodies.
But, I wouldn't go as far as saying that there is no danger at all because of them, much the same way I wouldn't conclude the radiation being dangerous if non of these people claimed hypersensitivity.
The question to me comes down to long-term exposure damage, which we cannot much about yet - and it would be difficult to force companies into very long term safety tests before being allowed to market their devices. But I do feel that the subject should stay under investigation for longer.
In the time after WW-II, US armed forces tested how their troops could fight near the blast of a nuclear weapon - and, hey, pretty much everyone was healthy in the first tests afterwards. Cancers don't measurably spring up within hours of a test. Still, you have claims from soldiers claiming their cancers were caused by those events decades later...
In Germany, soldiers working on mobile radars are trying to get compensations for tumors they seem to have received by operating the radar devices. Yet, I bet you, on the first tests of those, there were no permanent health problems reported in the days/weeks after the initial tests.
Most famously, big tobacco - your first cigarette isn't clearly measurable the one killing you. Neither is the second, third, twenty-first or onehundredfifthyfourths the lethal one. There is no doubt left about cigarettes being lethal now, but big tobacco made lots of profits over the years by claiming that cigarettes are safe, and that noone could ever link any individual cigarette to lung cancer. And it's still the argument used now by smokers against 'too heavy handed' anti-smoking legislation - why should smoking be banned in pubs. Let non-smokers go somewhere else. Or - more ridiculously, smokers in some countries (like the UK) actually claiming it's breaching their human rights if you prohibited them from lighting up in public. (Who cares about the human rights of the non-smoker next to him, if noone can prove it was 'my' cigarette that gave him lung cancer)?
Neither of those examples can obviously prove whether there is cellphone tower radiation is harmful; much the way that the luddites trying to raise panic about them can prove their harmful, nor that their existence proves cell phone radiation harmless.
What I would wish for - is that the subject stays under some form of independent investigation - without any lobbying from either side. (don't see though, how that could ever happen)
The conclusion is that while it seems unlikely that high-frequency fields in consumer devices directly cause cancer, they might promote it,
Like, how? They take out public service ads? "Hey, kids, cancer is your friend!"
A critic in me reckons that increased cancer levels (if there are any) may be attributed to overall worsened environment conditions (pollution, etc.), decreased food quality (and mass usage of food additives) and mass hysteria related to the risks of adverse health effects caused by EMF radiation.
Anyway, I really believe anyone can make his life safer (as for now God really knows if EMF radiation can interact with our own electric fields) by using mobile phone as little as possible - I speak on my cellular for no more than two minutes a day.
... then I guess we'd better wait for the Fox News coverage! They'll be fair, too!
Glenn Beck: "What I wanna know is, why don't these cell phone companies deny this rumor that their phones are cooking my brain? I'm not saying my brain is actually fried, but it sure feels that way and why won't they deny it?"
Does a micro-wave have ANY potential to break an atomic bond? If the answer is 'yes' then I think the simple conclusion would be that wireless radiation could cause cancer. Of course the next issue would be probability.
On a different angle, microwaves produce heat in the absorbing material, and the warmer matter becomes the more likely atomic bonds are to break, so another simple (I'll stress simple) conclusion could be that microwaves increase the likelihood of cancer.
Those two conclusions, however simple, would concern an average person. The next step of quantifying the risk takes a lot of research, with a lot of variables and equations and, and would be venerable to fudging from any vested interest (perhaps all of the contradicting papers over the years are evidence of that). I guess the most reputable answer only time will tell.
It's just about getting on disability in Sweden. They're the laughing stocks of the world to buy into this kind of fraud.
"The gap between a biological effect and an adverse health effect is a big one."
IMO the gap not as big as some scientists try to paint. And heck, that was about food, stuff which is digested by our stomach on a chemical level.
The radiation which directly influences the organs? Hell yes.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
The issue is one of penetration. For the radiation from cell phones this is very low. The depth affected is comparable to that which is warmed by, for instance, sunshine. Except for a cell phone close to the ear - where most of the heating comes from the battery and the electronics getting warm - the effect from all combined sources is very small, much smaller than the effect of sunshine or even an incandescent lamp a couple of meters away.
So, barring the discovery of some kind of magic effect, the conclusion has to be that the risk is negligible because the absorbed radiation is infinitesimally small compared to the energy absorbed from the other wavelengths of incident radiation.
You get much more penetration for lower frequency radiation - up to VHF - than for microwaves, and for the best part of a hundred years we have been exposing people to rather high doses of it. The radiation from the converter stages of a superhet radio or a VHF/UHF television greatly exceeds what you get from wi-fi or your DECT phone. But strangely, nobody suffered from headaches as a result of listening to AM radios, perhaps because they did not know that radio and TV receivers actually emitted radiation, often at several volts per meter.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"2) Energy of EM photons are proportional to frequency"
The energy is fixed at a low level, so that a local cell of a cell phone transmitter will not interfere with other cells.
Talking about "photons" doesn't really make sense until the wavelength is much shorter.
sry, but bullshit is bullshit. id like to sit these ppl down, give em an antenna and let em guess if its transmitting or not.
Note that this abstract of a paper said that the individuals were not able to repeat their demonstration of sensitivity. That shows, probably, that the individuals had some other way of determining whether the radiation was on or off during the first test.
These are the problems in Physics: 1) The wavelength is too long to couple much energy into any one molecule. 2) There is an enormous amount of energy of approximately the same wavelength always present at room temperature. It's known as heat. A wide bandwidth of microwave energy is always there unless the temperature is absolute zero. Absolute zero is -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit or -273.15 degrees Celsius.
Planck's Constant is 1.054571628 x 10-27 erg-seconds. Twenty-seven is a lot of zeroes. See the sub-section, Black-body radiation. Anything that is warm radiates microwave energy.
I'm just guessing, and it's only my opinion, but it seems to me that the Popular Science author is engaging in fraud. Definition of fraud: A deliberate deception used to get a dishonest result.
Don't get too close to Heidi Klum. She radiates microwave energy! It's true!
But, of course, so do all women, and men, and everything else at the same temperature.
It wasn't until later that I noticed that the article about Heidi Klum, to which I linked above, was also misleading.
It seems that there are a lot of people willing to take advantage of the low level of science knowledge.
You know what radiation is a hundreds of thousands of times stronger than cellphone microwaves, and incredibly brighter?
THE SUN!
If you are in fear of getting sick from microwaves, you MUST have hundreds of thousands of times more fear of sunlight. It’s simple physics.
So? Your choice?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's why I use a headset and keep my phone in my pocket right next to my genitals.
Here's a review of the scientific research on brain cancer and cellphones:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3073
"So where do we stand now? My interpretation of the evidence thus far is that we can say with some confidence that there is no short term risk of brain cancer from cell phone use. However, after more than ten years the evidence is less clear but trends towards either no detectable risk or a very small risk that barely rises above the noise."
The people that ran this study started off their article ok, but it turned in a heap of false information. There is so much wrong with the entire bullshit "science" used to support the argument that cellular phones and non-ionizing radiation causes cancer and "other health problem" that it is starting to become a real problem. This is turning into another carbon dioxide(CO2) scare and I am getting tired of some people attempt to scare the shit out of the majority of the populous.
Hell, I believe the fact that the "alarmist" article was in GQ, and not some respectable scientific journal, is a great indicator of the uselessness of the information contained in said article. It is people like the author, Christopher Ketcham, and frauds, like Michael Kundi, that perpetuate false information, like the existence of "Electro-Hypersensitivity"(EHS). These people have done nothing more than give hypochondriacs another excuse to seek attention from the medical community and given lazy people a way out of contributing to society. The article should be titled, "Examples of Why Sweden is Out of Touch with Reality".
The really sad and dangerous issue in this article is the obvious misdiagnosis of Mr. Segerbäck. First off, his getting sick when he heard a phone ring points to Pavlov's Dog Experiment. Any living being can be conditioned to react a certain way to external(and internal) stimulation and this is an obvious example. I am willing to bet that if someone stuck a cellular phone in his out, without Mr. Segerbäck being aware, then left the phone continually connected to a call, Mr. Segerbäck would show no adverse reactions.
What is Mr. Segerbäck has some type of cancer(no, not from a cellular phone, as you cannot get it from such a device) and it is a paraneoplastic syndrome that is causing his adverse reactions? At best, Mr. Segerbäck is a hypochondriac and at worst, he has real and serious health problem, which he needs to seek immediate treatment(which, again, would not be caused my electromagnetic/non-ionizing radiation, because it is impossible).
Until real scientist in truly objective setting run a study on EHS and give honest and objective scientific evidence that it exist, then I will continue to believe such a condition to be utterly false.
With the massive amount of genetic variation in the human population, it is very possible that certain people may have an adverse reaction to EMF's that is indeed genuine. It doesn't mean that the entire world is harming themselves with EMF's, it would just mean that some unlucky ones are indeed affected by it, and would need to isolate themselves from it. I certainly don't believe that everyone who says they have this disorder indeed have it, but just that there are possible some who are actually affected.
You become a little more open minded to these things when you have a disorder that many people don't believe in...I personally have MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity) and have adverse reactions in response to most synthetic and natural chemicals that have a detectable odor. I have no reaction at all to EMF's, which is nice because I do love technology...but it would be foolish to dismiss something just because we can't currently explain it.
Get in the sack!
http://outcampaign.org/
Say you hide active RF transmitters on your body and visit the guy. If he doesn't react then it is pure bullshit. Use controls with powered down RF transmitters, no RF transmitter etc.
And his symptoms while on a boat can also be due to sea sickness. Or maybe it was the motor on the boat, you know, nice big spark gap generators called spark plugs if it's gasoline, or the generator supplying power to the boat.
I call that the Art Bell effect, after the man that legitimized the Outer Fringe whackos and Tin Foil Hat wearers, by showing them that they were not alone and that there was a whole community that believed in the same kind of things that they did! So Microwave sufferers, Pyramid power, hidden rooms created by Space Aliens under the Sphinx, bottomless holes guarded by the Army, Black Helicopters, Alien Abductions, You name it, they all were accepted as legitimate on his show!
Or - more ridiculously, smokers in some countries (like the UK) actually claiming it's breaching their human rights if you prohibited them from lighting up in public. (Who cares about the human rights of the non-smoker next to him, if noone can prove it was 'my' cigarette that gave him lung cancer)?
The problem is the anti-smoking crowd are verging into ever more tenuous territory. Some seem to believe that seeing someone downwind smoke is a hazard to their health. They also seem to be unconcerned about the dozens of cars spewing a great deal more toxic gasses right next to both them and the smoker. They do this without even a shred of a study showing that cigarette smoke in an open public space is the least bit harmful to passers by. Much like the anti microwave loonies, many will start coughing at the mere sight of a cigarette even when it's not lit.
Perversely, many of those anti smoking people also fight vigorously against any other form of nicotine intake, and for that matter, against people using nicotine in their own home. Like the anti EM loonies, the anti smoking loonies believe that nicotine=smoking=bad, just like microwaves=radiation=bad.
That isn't to say that the smoker isn't harmed by smoking nor that the radar techs weren't harmed. Both get a MUCH larger dose.
But you are incorrect. Bashing religion (and America) is usually considered politically correct by the "open minded" slashdot community.
True, quite true. But let's not forget MS Windows, Gates and Ballmer!
.
- aqk
F U
No danger because of them
The tower could be poorly constructed and fall on your house, or someone may be nearby when the fence near it gets hit by lightning, or a war could make it a target, creating a dangerous situation because of the tower. Since hypersensitivity is an immune system response, the effect should be measurable.
The effect you would be expecting from EMF towers is similar to tobacco (effect from continuous exposure at a particular frequency for a length of time) as opposed to asbestos (effect from improper treatment and handling). These towers are magic and man-made, so they must be evil. Now excuse me while I absorb up large amounts of healthy multi-frequency radiation from the sun. Oh, the sweet cleansing power of UV!
Much better to look at the effects that are a lot more likely.
More likely effects would be heating effects from such near proximity to a RF source, or possible cellular effects or changes.
While cell phones are not high power devices, you are holding them right against the ear unless you are using a headset. This puts you in the near field of the RF emissions, and it's fairly powerful.
There have been studies that show some cellular effects of RF fields that might be a problem. I don't have the cites here, I'd looked them up a year or two ago.
This is going to sound snarky, but I think that there is a fair chance that cell phone use makes a person at least temporarily stupid. I've seen too much walking out into heavy traffic, too much almost running into people or driving 70 mph in a 35 mph zone by people who wouldn't ordinarily do that. And they all have a cell pasted to the head. I don't completely buy distraction, because a lot of people are listening to radios, or Ipods and they don't do that.
As for cell phone towers, your so far away that there are no effects. That's tinfoil hat territory.
Regulate or don't regulate them, I don't particularly care. I use my cell for only seconds at a time, its for work and letting the family know where I'm at - my latest phone's counter shows 20 minutes total time afer almost 2 years - my wife does more than that in a half day, I wish she wouldn't but its a free country.
Use your cells without fear kids. and as long and often as you want, then after 20 or 30 years we'll know a little more, My money is on cellular effects, and no cancer whatsoever. I'll see if I'm right.
Why is this even on SlashDot?... Why is this even on Slashdot?...Why is this even on Slashdot?