Wi-fi is an important threat to human health
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
It's just a link to PubMed, which is an aggregator of journal articles hosted by the NIH's National Library of Medicine.
Nearly any life sciences article published in any kind of journal, good or bad, would end up with an abstract on here. Evaluate it on its own merits.
With that being said, I am skeptical of this paper.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I would love to see nih.gov implement a voting and discussion system similar to HN so that folks can debate the poor quality research and improve upon the good research.
fundamentally, it is just a specialized search engine, which will point you to articles published elsewhere, that (unfortunately, in my opinion) happens to be hosted on the nih.gov domain.
[0] - https://livertox.nih.gov/Ibuprofen.htm
And all their references; to your point, are for PubMed.
Perhaps it a call for reformation is due, or perhaps setting up wiki's and forums that give people a place to challenge and pick apart these articles.
Quote: "The presence of an article in PMC does not reflect an endorsement of, or concurrence with, the contents of the article by NLM."
PMC is PubMed Central, and NLM is the National Library of Medicine is the center at NIH in charge of managing it.
I don't claim to be an expert on EMF effects on the human body, but I interpret his core claim to be that because the seven effect studies he cites had insufficient power to determine there was no correlation, there must be correlation because "similar" EMF studies did show a response, and therefore the effects should be considered established (ergo the fairly clickbait title). I use quotes for similar because it doesn't seem they were all that similar, which is why he objects to the studies he references.
If he had simply restricted himself to saying that more research was required because previous studies were inadequate (due to small sample size, methodological issues, etc.), I think this would have been a lot more defensible. Right now it reads like tinfoil hat time.
Also, did I miss it, or is there zero discussion about how the discussed publications were selected? A quick google search turns up lots of additional null results.
The authors also do make some correct criticisms of common statistical mistakes. For example, it is true that failure to reject a null hypothesis is not evidence for that null hypothesis in a frequentist framework. Even so, we should consider the power to reject the null, which depends on:
1. The practical or clinical effect size 2. The sample size
Even if we do detect statistically significant effects of EMF/WiFi, that in no way implies that the results are of practical significance. The cited studies do have small samples, but no discussion is given to the magnitude of effect which would be expected to have been detected.
They also note that previous studies should have published their data and p-values, which is true.
My takeaway is that more information is needed, and that we should hear from someone with a good grasp on all the relevant literature to see how representative these studies are. Also, this kind of thing would be clearer if we were all Bayesians, and published our data :P
This is full-on crank territory here.
i wonder if his medicines can help?
... single-author papers scream "crank" to me.
http://www.autismone.org/content/martin-l-pall-ba-phd-autism...
http://sethmnookin.com/2011/04/20/researcher-who-does-not-me...
http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2016/10/1730-martha-herber...
Not necessary. Consider this: https://scholar.google.ru/citations?user=qc6CJjYAAAAJ&hl=ru&...
single author papers in fields that require lab work—medicine, biotech, chemistry, etc... all scream crank. in fields that need infrastructure, collaboration is normal.
you can be a perfectly fine mathematician publishing single author work more reasonably than, say, a cell biologist could.
More specifically, http://ap.io/blog/radiofrequency/, The gist being if the photons don't have enough energy to affect your atoms, your don't need to worry too much. Since the power falls off proportional to 1/d^2, just don't use your router/cellphone as a pillow.
The whole "human body is complicated and it could possibly affect you in some other way" is certainly a good place to investigate, but probably really hard to demonstrate without drastically increasing the density and power to unusual levels.
Maybe they chose wifi in particular because it’s more relatable to the common person and quite ubiquitous on its own. They could draw more expansive conclusions in the future, if they want to. Or other curious scientists can pose that question and design an experiment / meta-analysis to answer it.
If that is true, then it is quite significant.
Pall, 2013; Pall, 2014; Pall, 2015a; Pall, 2015b; Pall, 2016a; Pall, 2016b; Pall, 2018
> The VGCCs each have a voltage sensor which is made up of 4 alpha helixes in the plasma membrane, with each such helix having 5 positive charges on it, for a total of 20 positive charges (Pall, 2015b). These voltage sensor helixes are each called S4 helixes because each is the fourth helix in a distinct multi-helix domain. Each of these voltage sensor charges is within the lipid bilayer part of the plasma membrane. The electrical forces on the voltage sensor are very high for three distinct reasons (Pall, 2015b, Pall, 2015a, Pall, 2016a). 1. The 20 charges on the voltage sensor make the forces on voltage sensor 20 times higher than the forces on a single charge. 2. Because these charges are within the lipid bilayer section of the membrane where the dielectric constant is about 1/120th of the dielectric constant of the aqueous parts of the cell, the law of physics called Coulomb's law, predicts that the forces on those charges will be approximately 120 times higher than the forces on charges in the aqueous parts of the cell. 3. Because the plasma membrane has a high electrical resistance whereas the aqueous parts of the cell are highly conductive, the electrical gradient across the plasma membrane is estimated to be concentrated about 3000-fold. The combination of these effects means that comparing the forces on the voltage sensor with the forces on singly charged groups in the aqueous parts of the cell, the forces on the voltage sensor are approximately 20 × 120 × 3000 = 7.2 million times higher (Pall, 2015b). The physics predicts, therefore, extraordinarily strong forces activating the VGCCs via the voltage sensor. It follows that the biology tells us that the VGCCs are the main target of the EMFs and the physics tells us why they are the main target. Thus the physics and biology are pointing in the same direction.
If I ever write a paper I hope it will be more persuasive than this.
On the other hand, quitting her job might have done that alone ;)
I don't know enough about wave transmissions to know if higher frequency would be more or less likely to cause issues, anyone?
Compare to 5GHz WiFi (10^6). We're not sure if this is physiologically relevant because the relationship between energy and health effects is not linear, and different tissues react in different ways. It's worth looking into, though my personal feeling is given the ubiquity of such radiation, we should be seeing a lot more effects and they should be measurable.
And the more we have electromagnetic waves in our environment because of the spreading of the technology, the later we die because medicine and healthcare move faster than the putative harm. What is certain, is that whatever the harm electromagnetic waves cause, it can't be huge like silicosis or asbestos, because we just don't see it in the statistics while intently staring at it, it has to be weak.
> All the studies reviewed here were of Wi-Fi using the 2.4 GHz band, although there is also a 5 GHz band reserved for possible Wi-Fi use.
The study is recent (brand new) so this strikes me as an oversight to describe this band as "reserved for possible use."
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393511...
and now I feel sick :)
A better question could be: Can we replace it with something better?
Just like we are replacing combustion engines with electric engines.
The last purchase made in my family of an Ethernet-enabled system was running Windows XP.
I have some of my home devices wired: tv, console, home server; but for laptops and smartphones, it gets tricky.
It also wouldn't help getting rid of the neighbour's wifi, unless I get some sort of faraday-cage insulation.
iMacs and iMac Pros still have ethernet ports: https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/ https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/specs/
and, I don't know how well it works, but it's possible to run ethernet over USB-C into a MacBook: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HJKF2ZM/A/belkin-usb-c-to...
although with usb-c 3 .. one port would be enough for all
Presumably lower power signaling would be effective. But what if we allocated a different band (yes, I realize that this is much, much harder than it sounds)?
Answers by people who understand this better than me here [1], but 2.4GHz is not "the" resonant frequency, water has a number of frequencies it interacts with radiation. And water isn't going to behave like a tuning fork anyway, it would be more analogous to sand. Microwaves interact with water by dipole interaction, and they just unload heat.
That's why wifi isn't going to do much to your body, any cooking of you being done by radiation is trivial compared to your own body heat.
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/169173/what-is-t...