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Comment by fromthestart | Hacker News Reader

So the authors observed increased markers of damage after exposing DNA to a range of non ionizing EM frequencies.

Are the authors implying that even non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation can damage DNA because of resonance accross a wide range of frequencies? Is there truth to danger from cell phones?

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> So the authors observed increased markers of damage

I'm not in that field, but the way I read the article, they claim that a lot of other articles support their claim, namely that the DNA could be damaged by EM radiation which is not "ionizing." But this particular article doesn't seem to contribute any new proof, and the only "new" message of the article is: "DNA is, the way we understand it 'a fractal antenna', therefore even non-ionizing EM radiation 'could' be dangerous." But the proof of that claim on the level of physics is not explicit (not in a way I'd expect to read about it). Especially their kind-of claim that even 60 Hz EMF can influence DNA in damaging way is still very... let's say, suspicious, to me.

If somebody would actually prove something like that, I'd expect he or she would get more Nobel prizes at once... it's that much far away from what we understand. The wavelength of the EMF of 60 Hz is 3000 miles in the air. How can such a change affect anything in any DNA in any cell of any living organism, even if we accept any "fractalness" of it I can't even imagine. Even if we accept that the longest cell is in the range of 1 meter, the wavelength of 60 Hz is 5 million times longer! So even a 1 m wide DNA would "surf" on a 5 million times longer "wave." You can say "but it's fractal" as much as you want, I'd need more than that, for me it still doesn't appear different from "it's sprinkled with the dust of fairy."

On another side, the "obvious" statistics of some problems appearing should be enough even if the mechanism is not known. Given the amount of the EMF we live with, something should give us enough information...

Note that they mention "the stress response" of the cells and that since "the stress response is activated by other stimuli that are potentially harmful to cells (Kultz 2003), it is clear that the stress response is a natural protective mechanism" which could actually mean that the cells remain "more protected."

> Especially their kind-of claim that even 60 Hz EMF can influence DNA in damaging way is still very... let's say, suspicious, to me.

Yeah, I really don't understand why these kinds of people always mumble about 60Hz. That's the biggest red flag for bogosity. We have had so much extremely high intensity 60Hz flying around for so long that the effects should be obvious.

If you just simply don't mention 60Hz at all, your claims get a lot harder to refute.

And we also know which wavelengths do affect the cells: the wavelengths shorter, not longer, than 200-something nanometers (i.e. < 0.2e-6 m). That is, UV light and all shorter EM, like X-rays (specifically < 0.01e-6 m). That's at least 1e13 times shorter than 5000km of 60 Hz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_germicidal_irradia...

All the living organisms get a lot of EMF of longer wavelengths: the plain, sub-UV light, for the start. Much closer to the UV (e.g. blue light ~ 0.45e-6 m).

I sorta agree with you, but to be a pedantic bastard, a single hydrogen atom can absorb and emit 21cm radio wave[1], so molecular sizes don't completely rule out radio absorption.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line

But note that that kind absorption doesn't mean that such hydrogen atom becomes "less" or more the same "hydrogen" than before. The electron remains "there" in both states: its magnetic moment gets to be either parallel or anti-parallel to that of the proton, that's all. Also note that the "mean lifetime of the excited state" of that electron which still remains bound to the proton (that is, of the "higher energy" moment of the electron) is "of around 10 million years." So all this is relevant for the observations of the light passing through the universe, that is, when we worry about the photons traveling the many light years of space, but not relevant when we worry about if electrons remain by the same atom or not.

Compared to all that, the ionizing radiation (UV and shorter, that is, measured in nanometers or smaller, and not in centimeters) does remove or add the electrons around, changing the properties of the atom, and as soon as the electron is being hit by the photon. That is why it is provably damaging.

Of course, there's never only one wavelength of the photons, it's always a distribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#/media/File:Solar_spe...

But that would still mean that the potential for the damage is order of magnitudes bigger by the "plain" light than by the infrared, micro, radio or 60 Hz waves. The photon energy is proportional to the frequency (i.e. more Hz more energy):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%E2%80%93Einstein_relati...

That is certainly a popular conspiracy theory.

It’s hard to believe, though. Cellphones have been around for a generation. The early ones had higher output power than modern ones. If there was any risk of harm, we would see it by now.

> If there was any risk of harm, we would see it by now

That statement feels a little problematic to me. Who's to say that possible effects aren't cumulative, maybe more exposure time is needed for big problems to appear, and maybe it's been contributing to smaller problems so far. Truth is, we don't really know enough to say that for sure.

Think asbestos and mesothelioma. The onset of that can be forty years after exposure to asbestos. That's roughly two generations. And a one off event can be enough.

> Think asbestos and mesothelioma. The onset of that can be forty years after exposure to asbestos. That's roughly two generations. And a one off event can be enough.

Except that mesothelioma can onset at 15 years and is less rare at 25. And it is one of the longest because of the particular mechanism of encapsulation and migration. DNA disruption has no such reason to be slow.

There are almost always some people with a fast response to a biologically active agent. DNA damage would almost certainly show up quite quickly in some subgroup.

While you can't prove a negative, absence of evidence certainly moves the Bayesian priors.

Mesothelioma has a specific and distinctive set of symptoms, so people took notice and look for a root cause.

Hypothetically, if EMF radiation were to cause a wide range of low-level effects such that common diseases had increasing prevalence rates over time, how would we be able to link that back? Cell towers are ubiquitous, there's no non-exposed control group that epidemiologists can easily compare to.

The Amish. Their water and soil is no less contaminated by other factors, so the only thing left is far reduced EMF exposure.

Nah, most amish communities are surrounded by normal folks and have pretty good cell coverage. A better control group would be communities around radio telescopes where cell towers can't be built for fear of interference with research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...

Believe it or not, some Amish communities do use cell phones. We look at their selective use of technology as a general ban on all new technology when it's more nuanced than that. But certainly some groups do reject cell phones some some sub-groups could be a partial control group.

> there's no non-exposed control group that epidemiologists can easily compare to.

Incorrect. Time of onset is a control.

Look at the results on breast cancer from when they stopped giving post-menopausal women hormone replacement therapy.

Different countries and areas of the country get different generations of cell phone and towers at different times.

While there may not be a huge amount of funding going into this, the result of finding an effect between cell phones and biology would be so huge, that researchers in relevant fields very much pay attention.

If someone they thought they could get any correlation, even with massive p-hacking, someone would publish it.

Time of onset only helps you if populations are relatively immobile, or latency time is relatively short.

If latency time is decades long (not unreasonable for brain cancers, for example, which are very slow growing), then every brain cancer survey will pick up people who moved in from other areas and were exposed at different times and rates, considerably lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Also relevant:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-studies-link-...

Whenever I'd start to dig into research relating to this, it always looked like there was plenty of documented interference by the industry. There's apparently a higher risk of a certain type of brain cancer, and fMRIs also show changed brain patterns (especially for children who have thinner skulls/highly developing brains) for many hours after cellphone use. There seems to be concerns being raised around the introduction of 5G now as well.

Not necessarily. If cellphones gave cancers to 1 promille of users it would be darn difficult to prove anything but it would still be much higher rate than many other factors.

The difficulty is in getting statistics right. How do you compare two groups of people controlling for the variable when people who don't use cellphones are very different in other aspects than people who do.

perhaps it's possible that it's not enough to be dangerous in isolation, but perhaps significant enough for those that already have a lot of existing dna damage (e.g. late stage cancer patients and elderly).

The thinking of the body as a holistic system is where research seems to generally fall short, and likewise there are so many variables related to exposure - including each individuals' capacity to deal with cancer cells/damaged DNA, etc.

Edit: To add to this, when I was 8 years old my dad developed kidney cancer - or at least that is when they found it. He was a commercial airline pilot, which so happens to have a higher level of kidney cancer (probably other cancers too) due to being surrounded by electronics in the flight deck + exposure to more radiation; I can only imagine they've tried to improve reducing exposure as much as they can, however who knows if that means more direct costs and perhaps they don't care about indirect costs. I know power line workers and certain other professions have a much lower life expectancy as well, we also know that exposure to strong(er) magnetic fields like from MRI machines can disrupt pregnancy. Knowing all of this it's hard to come to the assumption that smaller quantities/exposures can't not have some impact with in the "right" environment.

> we also know that exposure to strong(er) magnetic fields like from MRI machines can disrupt pregnancy

No. The American College of Radiology contradicts this: "Present data have not conclusively documented any deleterious effects of MR imaging exposure on the developing fetus. Therefore no special consideration is recommended for the first, versus any other, trimester in pregnancy."

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jmri.24011

The “surrounded by electronics” explanation really need a citation. It doesn’t make sense to me. Nothing in proximity to the pilot emits any kind of radiation - the radio antenna is not in the cockpit.

The higher dosage of solar/space radiation due to the altitude is surely the correct explanation.

Interestingly, there is a belief in military pilot communities that pilots will have far fewer boys than girls. Two close relatives of mine are military pilots, and my observations have confirmed this. From individual families we know, to officer neighborhoods on base that have an unusually high proportion of girls. It's still anecdotal of course, but very interesting.

Apparently there have been a few studies, but with questionable rigor. For example http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.603...

It's one of those things where I believe only mathematical/physics model could potentially show us answers, as that's the only way we'd ever be able to get "exact" resolution of what's going on between interactions. Whether we can ever model these systems to be as refined as reality is impossible to know - however perhaps we should start trying and see if what we are able to model shows anything that could perhaps help us direct more inquiry into; it makes me think of the Periodic Table, and how we were able to discover new/missing/unknown elements simply by ordering and seeing gaps in the model.

Well, the rate of some cancers have increased steadily in the last 50 years, same with Alzheimer's, with no clear cause. Part might be due to the global aging of the population, it's also theorized increasing pollution or use of pesticides might be involved. If the link with electromagnetic fields exists but is very tenuous, it could be very hard to prove, but when considering that virtually everyone is explosed to artificial EM fields it could still have a sizeable effect.

A huge portion is just more diagnosis, like with ADHD. Our tools and individual access to healthcare are greater.

I am pretty sure the opposite is true, the newer cellphones expose users to more radiation. There was even an article few days back on HN describing the trend in context of introducing 5G.

Relative to the old analog phones which had to reach out over enormous distances? Extremely unlikely. I imagine that my single analog phone call while I crossed northern Nevada probably exposed my head to more radiation than the rest of my cell phone usage combined.

With 5G, the carriers are having to densify the cell towers significantly. So, on average you are going to have to transmit less distance for less time.

A good test would probably be: does your battery last longer doing radio things? Energy in a battery is fixed. If the battery is lasting longer and hasn't gotten bigger, it's turning less of that energy into radio power.

If beam-steering antennas are used in 5G handsets [1], the handset will beam-form a more narrow, higher ERP antenna pattern to improve transmit and receive performance if a body part gets between handset and base station. This would increase power density at the intervening tissue.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/a-beam-...

There is misconception that all radiation and all patterns of it is the same. Comparing output power is largely useless because what is really important is how it affects body and this depends on very many factors, not all doses are the same.

For example, standing in full sunlight might not be a problem normally unless you stand for entire day and get burned (extended exposure without allowing the body the time to repair) or maybe the sunlight gets concentrated by a lens and burns your finger without changing total exposure to sun (concentrated in space) or maybe gets somehow converted to UV (concentrated to restrict wavelengths to hit specific molecules reacting with UV) or stored as energy in the form of oil and released quickly when burning (concentrated in time).

The first cellphones where much larger devices placing the source of the radiation further away from your body. They were also omnidirectional making sure that the maximum density of the field was low. New devices use beam forming which means it sometimes hits with a dense wave travelling through your body as if it was a sunlight concentrated with a lens.

Also, new cellphones are much better transmitters with much better control of the spectrum to maximise the power at a specific frequency. It further exacerbates the effect meaning if the beam interacts with something in the body it interacts much more strongly, again, akin to the concentrating lens. With old cellphone everything would be getting warmer a bit, with newer ones it may come into much stronger interactions because it may do it much more selectively (in space, time and choice of a molecule it interacts with).

Old analog cell phones used about three times as much power, but the frequencies were lower and the antennas were held farther from the head. The old tower transmitters used more power but were much less densely distributed than today and especially tomorrow. Assuming microwaves do have the potential to cause some kind of damage (beyond simple heating with absorption), the power level would be only one factor and possibly not the most important one.

There was something here on HN earlier this year linking WiFi to problems (health related but I don't recall what exactly). To call it a conspiracy theory is a bit much.

On related note, I've wondered if the circulatory system would function as antennas of various lengths.

The authors observed nothing. There is no experiment and no result in the underlying paper. It's a low quality meta-review of literature.

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