Does anyone have a link to the actual paper? As usual, it's impossible to get any useful information from a sensational mainstream science article.
The article states that they studied rats and mice at 9 hrs/day exposure (at what RF power?) but aren't reporting results for mice at this stage.
Of the rats (how many?), they found the "cancer association appeared in male rats" but no effect size or confidence interval is reported. No mention of dose sensitivity is mentioned.
So they report some cancer association (how much? we don't know. how confident? we don't know) in a small subset of their study population (excluding female rats and all mice) at some unknown RF power and at an exposure time considerably larger than what most humans would receive.
I'm sure the science behind the study is much more rigorous than this, but wow - the reporting sucks.
- The rats were exposed in utero and throughout their lifetimes
- They did pilot studies to find what radiation level did not cause a body temperature rise to remove that as a confusing factor
- 900MHz CDMA and GSM signals
- SAR of 0, 1.5, 3, 6 W/kg. For comparison the FCC limit is 1.2 W/kg in 1 gram of tissue. In the UK/EU it's 2 W/kg.
- 18 hour cycle each day, 10 minutes off, 10 minutes on (i.e. a 9 hour 50% duty cycle)
- 90 rats per gender per group (I think 1260 total)
- 106 week study
- Litter weights were slightly lower in exposed groups (~10%), but over time there was no significant weight difference between the exposed and control groups
- For the things they studied, the exposed rats had a defect rate of a few percent compared to control values of zero. Historic control values were (in my opinion) comparable to the exposed group and it seems to be barely statistically significant. The exception seems to be heart schwannomas which were as high as 7%.
- More will be published this and next year.
Here's a fun statement:
At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR. Survival was also slightly lower in control females than in females exposed to 1.5 or 6 W/kg GSM-modulated RFR. In rats exposed to CDMA-modulated RFR, survival was higher in all groups of exposed males and in the 6 W/kg females compared to controls.
> At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR. Survival was also slightly lower in control females than in females exposed to 1.5 or 6 W/kg GSM-modulated RFR. In rats exposed to CDMA-modulated RFR, survival was higher in all groups of exposed males and in the 6 W/kg females compared to controls.
Part of me wants to spam every genpop I know now with this link and the phrase: "scientists prove cellphone radiation makes you live longer!".
I see a pattern here: everything that slows aging increases the chance of cancer.
Take e.g. anti-oxidants, which fight ageing agents (free radicals) but cause cancer to spread faster.
Take reducing the role of telomeres, which stops putting a limit on cell division (thus allowing cell replacement on old people as it happens on young people), causes any appearance of cancer to spread way more quickly.
>At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR...
ex-biologist here. Re: the last statement, if radiation is actually affecting tissues (I don't personally really believe the data shows a de-facto effect) then there is a hypothesis among some scientists that study radiation exposure that small chronic doses actually prime your body for dealing with minor changes in genetic structure (if you're into it, the mechanism is hypothesized to be via epigenetic up-regulation of DNA-repair protein coding genes[1]). Since Sprague-Dawley rats are known to develop spontaneous tumors after one year regardless of treatment, this is my hypothesis for explaining the apparent effect of shortened life in the control group.
[1] - just google scholar the keywords "radiation upregulation dna repair". there are tons of papers on this effect.
Thanks for the summary, I just read the article and I feel like you touched the main points.
Regarding survival, I also noticed it, surprising. Could you define "survival rate" for someone who's not in the field? Does it mean what it looks like it means, i.e., survival rate is higher when rats die at an older age in average?
Not a medic or biologist (or a statistician!) so I don't know the specific definition, but I assumed it simply means the number of rats still alive at the end of the 106 week period.
This is correct. Because you can't know the future, 'survival' means up to a certain point (whenever you stop looking), beyond which adverse events are not counted (even if you know they happened).
Pretty much everyone uses CDMA these days. 3G/UMTS and 4G/LTE are both based on CDMA, which transmits continuously, unlike 2G/GSM/EDGE, which transmits in pulses and makes the dit-dit-dit-bzzz sound in nearby speakers.
Edit: actually LTE uses OFDM, which is mathematically distinct from CDMA, but a naive receiver is unlikely to notice the difference.
"CDMA" means something different than "code division multiple access" multiplexing when contrasted with GSM.
Instead it refers to the CDMA2000 family of telephony protocols (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDMA2000), which are a series of whole stack (radio modulation all the way up to text encoding schemes) protocols. Calling it "CDMA" is a branding thing than rather than having anything to do with multiplexing.
Why would CDMA and GSM operating in the same frequency result in different outcomes. It doesn't seem like there should be anything biologically significant by way of difference there.
I was always more comfortable with CDMA than GSM, partly because the speakers near a GSM phone can pick up on the GSM transmission code, what code is being sent, the duration sent, and the time in between transmissions. It was literally like hearing the morse code.
I immediately correlated the electromagnetic feelings in my body to this signal. And never trusted GSM phones again.
It's important to note that according to official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer. I've heard my own concerns about non-ionising radiation dismissed (even belittled) so many times that I've lost count. Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered. But one should understand that if this dogma was correct, there should be no link found at all.
I did a physics degree at uni, and then spent many years working in genomics. And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer.
After working with biologists for many years I've come to the understanding that biology is extremely complex, we have an extremely limited understanding of it, and there could be any number of as yet undiscovered effects of non-ionising radiation on cellular biology.
I would hope that as more of these studies are done (this is not the first and probably wont be the last) that we would hear less of this dogma spouted by supposedly smart people, but I doubt this will happen. It doesn't matter what you do, intelligence and education often go hand in hand with ego and a feeling of infallibility. And the dismissive "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" people never miss an opportunity to tell you that doubting this "proven fact" makes you stupid.
"official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer."
I doubt that you can find a scientist doing research on radiations effect on the body that dogmatically has said that "non-ionising radiation _can not_ cause cancer". I will personally call this scientist up and lecture him/her on the merits of doing science scientifically.
So if you "doubt" the dogma by saying "non-ionising radiation _can_ cause cancer" every scientist, and me, can go "Fk yeah, thats a working hypothesis, go prove that and bring society forward".
But if you would say that "non-ionising radiation _causes_ cancer" you are "stupid" in the way that you don't base that sentence on the current state of science and you are just making things up because you have been "working with biologists for many years" and you are a proud user of Common Sense™.
> And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer.
...and it is not justified to make that assumption, because there is reason to believe that there is another possible pathway. DNA is known to be conductive, and it is known that due to the shape of DNA in chromosomes it can act as a fractal antenna and non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation can induce currents in it.
It's also know that damage to DNA can change the conductivity of the damaged section. Some major researchers suspect that part of the mechanism cells use to detect and repair DNA damage makes use of this by looking for sections of DNA where the conductivity is not what it should be.
If this does turn out to be part of how damage is detected, then it is possible that currents induced by non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation when the DNA acts as a fractal antenna could confuse the repair mechanism causing it to fail to recognize and repair damage that would normally be found and dealt with.
See my comment in that discussion for some more information on the possibility that this is connected to DNA repair and a link to one of the major research groups that is looking into this stuff (Jacqueline Barton's group at Caltech).
I guess a better way to say it is: Non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer the way UV, x-ray or gamma rays cause cancer. We haven't found any other way radiation can cause cancer yet.
That may not be true. UVA is not ionising and possibly increases risk of skin cancer.
Non-ionizing radiation can cause chemical reactions (photochemical, heating, burns) that damage cells and might lead to increased cancer risk.
I really doubt if that is the case with mobile phones but I think it makes more sense to look at the epidemiological data rather than make a bunch of hand wavey arguments about the radiation. There are a hell of a lot of cell phone users and if there is a risk worth being concerned about I think it should have shown up before now.
Non-ionizing radiation can also cause other adverse health effects. A famous Norwegian case in the early 90s related to navy personnel on board an attack vessel, where 17 of the 85 children of soldiers who had served on the vessel, had birth defects. A disproportionate number of the employees on the electronics workshop of its home base also has children with similar birth defects
The negative effects are widely believed to have been caused by a 750W radar jammer, which frequently radiated the ship deck. There hasn't been established a clear cause-and-effect link.
They could have shared exposure to an awful lot of things.
Short of some indication that they were turning on the jammer all the time in the workshop I would sort of think chemical exposure would be a more likely explanation.
Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the scientific method shouldn't be bandying around words like 'proof'. Science is always provisional and new evidence can always overturn a theory.
Sadly many areas of debate attract cranks in larger than usual numbers and the health effects of electromagnetic radiation is one of them. So people get rather weary of fighting the same battles again and again and tend to become a little flippant in their replies.
No, the "dogma" is just that scary cellphone RADIATION! is no more harmful than the radiation from lightbulbs, flashlights, candles etc.
And probably a couple of orders of magnitudes less so.
But hey, radiation, you know, nucular, scary.
Snark aside, those lightbulbs, flashlights, and candles are not placed directly against the head and near the reproductive organs (in pockets) for upwards of a thousand hours per year.
> It doesn't matter what you do, intelligence and education often go hand in hand with ego and a feeling of infallibility.
This is a bit overly general. Many of us who are highly educated and traditionally intelligent battle with imposter syndrome. We're just the ones who you won't find out there acting like we know everything.
The idea that this is often the case it likely more a matter of "the squeaky wheel" than scientific fact.
I'm not saying you are a quack, but you are crying the rallying cry of quacks everywhere.
You also setup a straw man. Any scientist or thoughtful person says "there isn't a known/proven" link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer and so far most evidence seems negative.
Of course there is a lot we don't know. That doesn't mean we are incapable of making any statements about anything at all. If cell phones caused a significant risk in the rise of cancer (say 1-10%) we'd have easily seen that by now. We haven't. This study didn't see it either... In fact the rats exposed to radiation lived longer than the ones not exposed!
So what we can confidently say is that if cell phone radiation causes cancer, it is an extremely minor contributor. In all likelihood it's contribution is zero, but that is also unproven and should be further studied.
In a round-about-way you are hinting at the 'science is a religion' mentality. If something can't be explained by current scientific knowledge then, the people who think that way, must have the idea shot down and disregarded. It's a binary thought pattern that would probably be less common if history (and philosophy) had a greater value in society.
I think it would help a lot if they could somehow compile a list of the likelinessnes for getting cancer from a specific sort of radiation. It should also contain the radiation that we are naturally always exposed to.
Even if the values were only rough estimates I feel like this would put the real risks more into perspective.
Very true, but the same can be said for scientists. While paying lip-service to what it doesn't know, the hubris of modern science is its vice.
We live in an age of relative technological ignorance. Let's keep a proper perspective. In a few centuries, people will look back at what we know today and laugh. (Infinite examples could be given. Only 100 years ago people said man would never fly, etc. )
> Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered.
Such biologists may even believe they know how cells divide, because they've observed stages of cell division and given them fancy Latin names.
> A spontaneous tumor incidence of 45% was noted in 360 Sprague-Dawley rats (179 males and 181 females) and a 26% incidence was seen in 254 Swiss mice (101 males and 153 females) used as untreated control animals in an 18-month series of carcinogenesis experiments.
A tiny increase in cancer over a large base rate is going to be tricky to find.
The establishment demands that non-ionizing UV can be carcinogenic, but laugh if someone thinks that microwave - at various doses - could be! Why does it take so much evidence to even propose that low doses of the frequency that cook food can have adverse health effects on living humans? The fact that they're not willing to recommend bluetooth or earbuds without a mountain of evidence is another demonstration of closed mindedness. If something in nature has an even infinitesimal chance of being harmful, then you put it closer to your hands and legs - and not your eyes, face, and brain.
Fire cooks food, but waving your hands above a candle for warmth doesn't "cook" your hands. However, if you do damage your skin (especially repeatedly), the tissue damage and repair cycle can increase the risk of cancer.
So when it comes to cell phones, do those microwaves merely warm human tissue very slightly, or might it occasionally be concentrated in a way to cause micro-burns? Supposing the body is repeatedly having to heal tiny microwave burns, it wouldn't be surprising at all if cancer risk is increased.
Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced.
We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA.
> But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced.
We certainly seem to understand many of the processes by which cell mutations are produced, but that's not the same as all of them, and, perhaps more importantly, what we do understand about how cancer is produced is that there are lots of factors besides cell mutation involved, and those of them that we do understand in general terms aren't understood in detail, and aren't sufficient to explain the entire process.
> But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA.
That seems more like a statement of subjective plausibility than a supportable statement of quantitative probability, and, moreover, in order to be relevant to the result seems also to falsely assume that it is necessary to "produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA" to alter the incidence of cancer. We already know that even when a potentially-cancer-inducing genetic mutation exists, various other non-genetic factors in the body (including qualities of the extracellular matrix around the cells which have the mutation) play significant roles in whether cancer actually develops. Its quite possible that if there is a cellphone-to-cancer link, that the mechanism doesn't involve changes in the frequency of genetic mutation at all, but affects on the body that affect the whether cancer manifests when a potentially-cancer-inducing mutation has arisen through other means.
Cancer is complicated, but it emphatically is a _genetic_ disease, with inherited _genetic_ risk factors. Environmental influences are typically mediated by their ability to cause or promote mutation via cell stress (e.g. by promoting local inflammation) and cell proliferation, which in turn increases mutation load. There are subtler influences that could weaken the natural immunosurveillance of neopeptides by T-cells, but the importance of such surveillance in prevention is debated and perhaps more relevant in later-stage cancers. We may not fully understand such a complicated disease, but with modern sequencing we have a pretty good lens on the phenomenology of emergence of cancer, and that "subjective plausibility" is a working gut-bayesian framework that doesn't put a strong prior on ambient microwaves as a likely causative factor. Also, the field of RF- and microwave- induced cancer has been a long-running cottage industry producing bad science for many years now: i.e. studies with poor statistical power and poor replicability… so there’s a reason skepticism prevails on this point among biologists. It’s not just dogmatism: if anyone can get a replicable animal model we could dive into it to find new mechanisms… but these results always seem to sit at the edge of detection.
> Environmental influences are typically mediated by their ability to cause or promote mutation
That may be typical, in that there are definitely lots of environmental influences that work that way, but its been established for at least on the order of a couple of decades that there are also influences that impact the emergence and development of cancer when potentially cancer-causing mutations exist, and that genetics while important to cancer, aren't the whole story and mechanism. Attributes of the extracellular matrix, which can definitely be affected by physical and chemical effects that are not mutagenic, are one of the established influences.
"But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA."
I really like this sentence. I wish more science commentators would talk about probability like this.
I've always been curious: I understand that h.nu from cell phone radiation isn't big enough to ionize (say) DNA, but since the molecules in our body are in thermal equilibrium, can't h.nu + kT get it done every once in a while?
[edited because using an asterisk to denote multiplication was a bad idea]
kT is very little energy compared to a chemical bond. Take for example [0], they give an excitation energy for water of about 8 electron Volts which is ~750 kJ/mol, whereas kT at room temp is about 2.5 kJ/mol.
Right, but it's the 'every once in a while" part that I wonder about, i.e. the variance of that distribution. Maybe you could argue that since the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is narrower the lower its mean, if kT is small then it's an exponentially tiny effect.
So yes, kT is small on average (does fluctuate) and it is also 1 kT per degree of freedom. So yes, in principle a few hundreds of atoms could randomly fluctuate in energy to create this effect. However, this is hyper unlikely. I would be suprisd if it happened once in the life time of the universe. Also consider that you cannot create Maxwell demons[1].
"But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than..."
It was a randomized block experiment. You don't need to assume that there were no unmeasured confounders in order to make causal inferences. That assumption is only needed in cross-sectional and cohort studies.
There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions.
Another way to think about this is with an analogy: "non-lethal weapons"... but then see https://mic.com/articles/123410/nonlethal-weapons-are-much-m.... It would seem smarter to start thinking about things as "less" and "more" of something, rather than "non".
If you find some wavelength in the middle that seems to be safe, perhaps it is safe in the near term, but when put in terms of "less ionizing than we can notice" it doesn't sound like something I want to hold next to my brain for the next 15 years.
Also note, it's already known that Bluetooth and WiFi cause the blood brain barrier to become 10-100x more biologically leaky[1], letting more chemicals into your brain.
Edit: apparently, this Bluetooth / WiFi point is moot.
Also note, it's already known that Bluetooth and WiFi cause the blood brain barrier to become 10-100x more biologically leaky[1], letting more chemicals into your brain.
It's been a while since I took chemistry and physics so I could be wrong, but I think you may be incorrect due to quantum effects. Specifically, the quantum in quantum mechanics refers to various phenomena which are quantized, a very common example of which is an electron moving to a different energy level. It's entirely discrete what energy levels an electron may orbit an atomic nucleus at, it's not a continuum, and for an electron to receive enough energy to be free of the nucleus (causing the atom to become an ion) requires some minimum energy level. Energy is directly proportional to wavelength in the case of em radiation, so there in fact is some minimum energy required for something to be "ionizing".
It is possible that other mechanisms cause cancer, but your conjecture is almost certainly false. Someone who does this for a living please let me know if there's clarification needed.
You are somewhat correct. In principle the system is quantized but due to the sheer number of degrees of freedom (or quantum states) the spectra may still appear continuous.
Take for example a single water molecule in vacuum: If you calculate the QM vibrational (motion of the nuclei) and electronic frequencies you would conclude that there is no way that microwave radiation can excite a water molecule. This is because the nuclei interact with three discrete (quantized) frequencies in the infrared (IR light), whereas the electronic degrees of freedom only interact with much higher energy photons (UV and above).
However, if you now move into the bulk, you will notice that there are is also an interaction energy between the water molecules which causes rapid changes in the water conformation at room temperature. From the quantum mechanical perspective, you now get an explosion of possible states including states which excite the hydrogen bond network between the water molecules. You can now induce translation and rotation of water with respect to each other. This is why water absorbs across a large spectrum of frequencies including radiation in the microwave region.
For DNA, the situation is similar. You will also find a continuous broadening of states. BUT how well you absorb energy at a given frequency still varies. Cell phone bands do not carry enough energy to break electronic bonds directly (unlike UV light). Instead, you can only induce thermal motions of the nuclei (heat). Luckily, our DNA transfers excess heat very rapidly (~picoseconds) to its environment, so no danger of local heating to the point of bond breaking if you don't climb up a massive cell phone tower.
In the end, its very unlikely that cell phone radiation alters chemical bonds in our DNA. However, beware of the sun while talking on the phone! I would guess that outdoor usage of cell phone significantly increases the dangers of cell phone usage. ;-)
It is a probabilistic thing. If your photon arrives at the same time as another photon, then you can have two-photon absorption (which wouldn't have occurred without your photon). Ditto if your photon arrives at the same time as a thermal vibration or any other carrier of energy. This is why semiconductors can still occasionally absorb photons with energy below their bandgap. Anything in a thermal environment has some chance of being excited, and adding extra radiation will only increase those chances.
Furthermore, if we want to get really technical and into even lower probabilities, photons don't have single well defined energies. Wavelengths are not singularly defined for waves that don't extend to infinity. Therefore, even radiation that is emitted around, say, 500 nm, still has a small of chance of being absorbed by a 499 nm transition. Obviously these probabilities get tiny as the difference gets large, but they never drop to 0, technically.
I'm not saying any of this is medically relevant, but practically everything that is quantum mechanical is probabilistic.
(I have a PhD in physics, focusing on experimental quantum mechanics)
It's exhilarating to have a long-held belief broken. Thank you!
Two-photon absorption becomes an important effect at high intensities (if I understand the wikipedia article). How do "high intensities" compare to the intensity of radiation from a phone?
"I suspect that this experiment is substantially underpowered and that the few positive results found reflect false positive findings."
- Dr. Michael S Lauer, Director of Cardiovascular Sciences at NHLBI. Peer Review in Appendix G starting on page 36 of the study.
Indeed, I did not find their response to this reviewer to address the statistics criticisms satisfactory. Also, although they try to adjust for this, I'm not sure if their rate correction fully corrects for longevity.
"This report presents partial findings from these studies. The occurrences of two tumor types in male Harlan Sprague Dawley rats exposed to RFR, malignant
gliomas in the brain and schwannomas of the heart, were considered of particular interest"
So a key question should be: how many variables was the study looking at? If they were testing 40 different things, you'd expect two 'significant' results by chance.
The discussion also mentions that pooling other studies in the program, the rate of gliomas in male controls is 11/550, rather than the 0/90 from this study. The incidence in the test group (pooling all dose levels) is 11/540, which is indistinguishable from that larger control group.
The numbers for heart schwannomas are a bit more compelling, but that's now just one variable, so the question of how many things the experiment is looking at is crucial.
From the paper a sample of 90 control rats had no cancer found while the groups (90 in each) of rats exposed to radiation had between 0 and 3 instances of cancer being found. I would have though the odds of it coming out like that by chance would be fairly high.
I also note the control rats seemed to have survived less well "At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all
2 groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR" which shows these things are a bit random and would probably not justify saying cell radiation makes you live longer.
>Also it was unusual that the control group had zero tumors. In previous studies at the National Toxicology Program, an average of 2 percent of rats in control groups developed gliomas. Had that happened in this study, there would have been virtually no difference between the exposed rats and the controls.
At the moment the wsj article doesn't correctly link to the abstract so I put it in my post [1] (which also includes the full PDF link to the study [2]).
Considering there are an absolute ton of studies showing there isn't a link this is highly interesting. I'm not a telecom engineer so I don't entirely understand the methodology but part of their pilot study was to test various field strengths that do not raise the mouse or rat's body temperature (does this mean they are not using the same field strength as our towers?). They were also put into custom reverberation chambers; wouldn't that amplify or at least repeat the signal? Or is that not an issue and if so, why?
Also this section has me confused (maybe I'm reading it incorrectly?):
"At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR. Survival was also slightly lower in control females than in females exposed to 1.5 or 6 W/kg GSM-modulated RFR. In rats exposed to CDMA-modulated RFR, survival was higher in all groups of exposed males and in the 6 W/kg females compared to controls."
This makes it sound like the ones exposed to RF lived longer than those in the control. Am I reading that right?
Ok this is the first study that says there is a link, but let's assume for a moment that what it says is correct and it has the same effect in humans: Would the same also be true for wifi?
According to Wikipedia the average cell phone TX power is 500 mW vs 200 mW for 802.11n [0]. Cell phones usually operate at lower frequency than wifi, however wifi (at 2.4Ghz) is at the same frequency as microwave ovens.
In the study the rats were exposed for 10 minutes on - 10 minutes off for 18 hours a day (at an unknown TX power), if you work in an office you are going to be exposed continuously (apart from coffee / lunch) for 9+ hours a day, and even more if you then go home and use a wifi device.
I think the reason why people worry about cell phones and not other radio equipment is that they are transmitting very close to the body. Remember, EM intensity falls off as 1/r^2 so proximity makes a big difference.
And a particularly stupid way to react to cell phone radiation fears is to insist that cell network base stations should be moved away from schools and there should be no wifi base stations. Think of our children!
What that means is, of course, increased exposure. The kids are not going to give a way their phones, they'll continue using them. When there is no wifi, they will be using the LTE or 3G or 2G networks. When the base station is further away,the phone will transmit at higher power. The phone itself is by far the dominant source of RF power to people's bodies.
Thus, ignorant parents want to decrease radiation, and the very proposals they make would increase it. Whether that really has any impact, we don't know, there's no proof, or a good theory about possible mechanisms, just speculation, mostly based on fear and suspicion.
Indeed, increasing and improving technology and reducing exposure can go hand-in-hand, and it seems that many people don't understand this. More antennas; less power.
The wifi antenna in a laptop is in the monitor. Even in your lap it is still much further from your body than the antenna on your phone when you have it to your ear.
There are many factors. I had a friend studying the induced magnetic field and it's effects on tissues (vs frequency etc) long time ago. The conclusion was that there are overall cancer related and other brain related problems. It was her postdoc, and she also had access to the city subway lines for more tests.
So from the people I've known doing research and other anegdotal evidence, there is a link.
It still perplexes me how most of the studies in the end conclude there is overall no human-related high risk.
So maybe cellphones+ other generators are like peanut allergies, to some are fine, to others they are fatal.
It's too complex of a subject anyways.
...
Edited for minor misspell
Power of transmission is only one part; another is distance to the source, since AFAIR the power drops off at a rate inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Being exposed to a router at a few meters, and even to a computer at a meter or so, is probably significantly different from having your phone touching your head or in your pocket.
No. Microwave get hot spots because their antennas produce an uneven distribution of emery. This is further exacerbated by reflections in the microwave box, creating zones of high energy and low energy.
> this is the first study that says there is a link
From 2011:
WHO: Cell phone use can increase possible cancer risk [1]
"Radiation from cell phones can possibly cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization. The agency now lists mobile phone use in the same 'carcinogenic hazard' category as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform.
"Before its announcement Tuesday, WHO had assured consumers that no adverse health effects had been established.
"A team of 31 scientists from 14 countries, including the United States, made the decision after reviewing peer-reviewed studies on cell phone safety. The team found enough evidence to categorize personal exposure as 'possibly carcinogenic to humans.'"
Not really. That carcinogenic hazard hazard category is a favorite of scaremonger reporters. Lead, engine exhaust and chloroform sound scary but they aren't known to cause cancer. This is Class 2B - "This category is used for agents for which there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and less than sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals." [1]
>Where to begin? I didn’t see any sample size calculation, nor any discussion of what they expected to see. One of the reviewers did a power calculation for them (page 37) and found that based on 90 rats per group, the power was about 14%. This means that false positives are very likely. The cancer difference was only seen in females, not males. The incidence of brain cancer in the exposed groups was well within the historical range. There’s no clear dose response. Why schwannomas? Schwannomas in other locations than the heart were not significantly different. These are rats. I don’t know how this compares to real world exposure. And one more thing – the survival of male rats in the control group was relatively low, and if these tumors developed later in life, this could be the whole reason for the difference.
>Cell phones are UBIQUITOUS in the United States. If they were causing cancer, we would expect to see rates of [brain] cancer going up, right? That’s not what we’re seeing. They’ve been decreasing since the late 1980’s. At least when we talk about vaccines and autism, the rates of the latter went up as we increased the former. With cell phones, there’s an inverse relationship. What’s going on?
I suggest reading the whole post.
Personally, I am unconcerned by this single study of rats, in groups of only 90, that found barely significant correlations out of many possible correlations looked for.
With regard to cell-towers: the inverse-square law will underestimate your radiation exposure from a cell-tower, because they are directional and the inv.sq.law relates only to to perfectly isotropic radiators. In other words: you need to factor the cell-tower antenna gain (typically between 7-10dB) into your calculation.
You could possibly use the Amish as a control group. They are probably exposed less than almost any other group to these types of radiation due to their distance in proximity. They, of course, do come into contact with it in minor ways when interacting in public, but far far less than the general population.
That's actually a bad control group; you want some group whose lifestyle, including lifestyle changes, matches pretty well the rest of society but for exposure to the kind of radiating devices at issue, to isolate changes due to the effects of the devices at issue from the effects of other lifestyle changes.
Since the Amish lifestyle and lifestyle changes over the time period of interest don't match the general public in ways other than cellphone/wifi exposure, they aren't really a good control.
The Amish live in a very different environment from the general population in all sorts of ways. So they're not a good control group, because where their health differs from the general population, you don't know if it's because of radiation exposure, diet, electric lighting, chemicals in cars, or any of a thousand other things.
Sanity check: This was 9 hours per day exposure equivalency for their entire lifetime. Consume or use almost anything at the same cycle over your lifetime and one can expect blow back.
One in 20 studies will find that, with 95% certainty, there is a link. You can easily find 19 others that found that, with 95% certainty, there is no link.
That article does not describe a meta-analysis (or at least it's not clear that it does), and it certainly doesn't 'prove' a link. They classified it as 'possibly carcinogenic' because there is some evidence indicating that it increases the risk of cancer. The evidence is inconsistent, and applying the precautionary principle doesn't 'prove' something.
In a similar vein, don't even think of questioning GMOs. You even just hint that you wanna see more studies on their safety you will be torn limb from limb, even if you admit to trusting them and eating them yourself.
That's because there already have been many many studies, and regulations require that each new food GMO be studied as well. If you don't mention all those, I'm guess the "tearing limb from limb" is actually annoyance at your ignorance.
Absolutely don't mention the tiny, but potential serious problems associated with introducing novel organisms into the environment, either through horizontal gene transfer or escape into the wild. Supporters will spend a lot of time patronisingly explaining that we have been indulging in GM for millennia thanks to selective breeding, while neglecting to mention the degree of novelty and rapidity of introduction that modern techniques allow.
You and others proved my point. I wasn't even criticizing GMOs myself, only talking about the dialogue about them, and still downvoted immediately and responded to negatively. There is no other tech on this planet with the same rabidly fervent support as GMOs that disallows even discussion about discussion.
Well I didn't downvote you, but if you refuse to even acknowledge that "torn limb from limb" is just annoyance with your inability to acknowledge the existing information, then perhaps the fault is with you and not others.
One might also say that there is no tech with as rabidly fervent detractors as GMO. I don't really care about the technology much, and for some reason you think I'm a fervent supporter! Ridiculous.
I have the opposite experience: most of the people I speak to are sure GMOS and "transgenics" are obviously bad for you and "unnatural" or "unproven", and that "more studies are needed" (until when? nobody says). The internet is chock full of sites repeating conspiracy theories about GMOs.
If someone is more careful about repeating scary "common sense" knowledge such as this, usually it's because they have a scientific background.
Another area besides GMOs where you're going to experience a visceral reaction for offhanded skepticism is evolution. Saying, "I think we need more studies on evolution" has implicit in it the assumption that we don't know much about it. While of course we have a lot left to discover on evolution, making that statement without acknowledging that we do know a lot about evolution and its status is not in doubt, will put you in the nutter category that denies that evolution is a fact.
Similarly, if somebody tells me "I think we need to study climate change more before we can tell if humans are causing it," then I'm going to challenge them to actually tell me what they know, and why they ignore the science.
If you've never encountered somebody that's spreading similar FUD around the science around GMOs, then great. But anybody who's informed about the actual science of GMOs is going to be somewhat put off by uninformed skepticism of the science that is endemic in the general population.
There's a huge body of evidence that GMOs are safe, over decades, that rigorously assessed safety of many types of GMOs (each one of course is unique and presents its own unique potential risks). Despite this huge amount of study, no safety concerns for food have been found. Yet I still get regular emails about, say, the impacts on monarch butterflies, when in fact that early-stage study was followed up upon in a conclusive manner, and the early-stage concerns were not found to be significant.
Any reasonable discussion of GMOs must acknowledge what we already know about GMOs. I don't know who you're talking to where you get shut down form talking about it, but in my experience that feeling comes from those who refuse to lok at the data that's out there that may not support their presuppositions.
You see though, you don't even know the details of my thoughts and you build a strawman that doesn't resemble them.
To be clear, by your analogy, I do believe that GMOs exist.
Jokes aside, GMOs are not a binary proposition, like the question on global warming or evolution, which is whether the theories are true or not. The question is two fold - whether individual GMO crops are safe or not, and whether it is possible that harmful GMOs are possible at all. The answer to the first question seems to be that existing crops are safe, based on several studies. The answer to the second is easy - yes, harmful GMOs are obviously possible - it doesn't seem all that difficult for instance to insert a gene from a toxic organism into a food plant. Not that anyone would do that, but it's physically possible. People conflate these two questions, which is where the crazy internet arguments come from.
Considering that it is indeed possible to create a harmful GMO, and considering that we barely understand how regular old nonmodified genes operates in relation to the entire organism, it is neither unscientific nor absurd to question whether subtle problems could arise from transgenetic modification. Current safety testing involves statistical studies across time and subjects, looking for correlations between the crop and harmful effects. It is impossible to simulate from first principals and predict all effects to an organism and its ecosystem due to the countless parameters involved. Science doesn't prove anything - it only posits theories and strengthens them with evidence, which could always be overturned with future data. To claim otherwise is the true anti-science stance.
Let's go back to your original statement, that baited me into responding:
>You even just hint that you wanna see more studies on their safety you will be torn limb from limb
So what more studies do you want to see on their safety that hasn't yet been performed, or would not be required by law for a new GMO?
You started with persecuted hyperbole, but now it seems to have come to this:
>Considering that it is indeed possible to create a harmful GMO, and considering that we barely understand how regular old nonmodified genes operates in relation to the entire organism, it is neither unscientific nor absurd to question whether subtle problems could arise from transgenetic modification
which is essentially "we don't know everything about gene regulation, therefore anything could happen." This is somewhat fallacious.
Well, really, nearly anything could happen. But it's all about chances of bad things happening. Maybe due to random quantum fluctuations, my fingernail turns into a blackhole. The risk of that is extremely small.
We spent many many decades bombarding plants with ionizing radiation in order to mutate them into better species, a roll of the dice every time. Most of these mutations were not desirable, but a very small few were desirable. Now we can be more focussed rather than just rolling the dice billions of times.
We base risk on the amount of experience we have with things, certain behaviors become less and less likely. Introducing non-native species to control some part of the ecosystem has proven to be exceptionally risky, for example. Randomly mutating plants with lots of radiation has not proven to be very risky. So far, genetically modifying them has not proven to be risky either.
If there's some potential risk that you can specifically determine that should be tested for, but is not currently, please publish your findings. But in all these paragraphs you've said nothing that would not be considered in the first five minutes by a thoughtful scientist, so I doubt that you have any deep insight here. I'm officially putting you into the nutter category. Consider this me wanting to tear your metaphorical limbs off ;) You have been vindicated in that sense...
> I'm officially putting you into the nutter category.
Insults and invective make you come off as immature and are explicitly disallowed on HN. You should be able to stand by the strength of your argument. If you feel it is too weak so that you must resort to epithets, then maybe you should keep your comments to yourself. I said nothing that I haven't tried to reason out, and am totally open to discussion, but you don't seem to be interested in having a discussion in good faith. if an expert in programming was discussing with a beginner making wildly wrong assertions, do you think calling that beginner a "nutter" would be in order? You seem to think you have a strong grasp of the subject, and I am clueless, so educate rather than insult.
I do have a response to your comment here, but I will only continue if you agree to discuss in good faith. I am not so hard headed as to be closed to new ideas, but I will not just throw everything out the window before thinking critically about the facts and understanding the merits and flaws in both my and your argument.
Eck, worth mentioning that science is done by consensus. Individual studies might be interesting, but it means nothing until it's shown in the context of an aggregated review.
So anyone know if the WSJ has accepted climate change and apologised for denying it for decades? Or are they still to be considered unreliable handlers of science findings?
Cellphones or Wi-Fi today are like cigarettes in the '50s. A huge lobby pretend they are just fine, people are in denial because they love them and we lack of longitudinal data about their effects on health.
But thanks to further research, and time, we are starting to understand better the effects of cellphone radiation on health. The World Health Organization already had a rapport in 2011 about cellphones possible dangers: http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/05/31/who.cell.phones/
Meanwhile, people should learn to use cellphones in a healthy way, and not living 24/24h with them (during sleep, for example). And at home would be better using cables instead of Wi-Fi...
Cellphones or Wi-Fi today are unlike cigarettes in the '50s in that if you run the numbers cigarettes cause loads of deaths (maybe 10 years off lifespan) while the effects of Cellphones and Wi-Fi if they cause any harm are so small as to be pretty much undetectable (see eg http://bigthink.com/laurie-vazquez/your-cellphone-absolutely...).
If there's a modern equivalent to cigarettes it's probably air pollution which can probably knock about a decade off your life in the worst places. ("Life expectancy is 5.5 years lower in northern China than in the south because of heavy air pollution, a new study examining 20 years of data has determined."...). Or maybe sugary food.
Don't put faith in that Chinese pollution study. Their "statistically significant" discontinuity in life expectancy only happened because they chose to fit the data with a strange third order polynomial plus step function. Take a look at the data behind that China pollution study and see if you would draw the same fit line: http://andrewgelman.com/2013/08/05/evidence-on-the-impact-of...
Agreed, exercise, smoking and alcohol are likely to be hundreds of times more effective at stopping cancer than giving up your mobile phone, wifi and bluetooth devices.
Sigh, this isn't going to help the (mentally ill?) people who believe cellphones / wifi are making them sick. I wish this study wasn't paywalled, it needs some careful reading to determine actual risk.
And then, if phones are causing cancer? Do you think everyone will stop using them? Do you think Apple will go bankrupt?
> And then, if phones are causing cancer? Do you think everyone will stop using them? Do you think Apple will go bankrupt?
Everything comes with a risk. If phones really do cause cancer we need to figure out the possibility and weigh it. It's likely very small if it exists whereas every person in the United States, over an average life time, has an almost 2% chance of dying in a car (which is insanely high when you think about it) and yet we're still using cars, non-stop.
The article states that they studied rats and mice at 9 hrs/day exposure (at what RF power?) but aren't reporting results for mice at this stage.
Of the rats (how many?), they found the "cancer association appeared in male rats" but no effect size or confidence interval is reported. No mention of dose sensitivity is mentioned.
So they report some cancer association (how much? we don't know. how confident? we don't know) in a small subset of their study population (excluding female rats and all mice) at some unknown RF power and at an exposure time considerably larger than what most humans would receive.
I'm sure the science behind the study is much more rigorous than this, but wow - the reporting sucks.