“We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
As usual, it's not the scientists that are wackos, it's the press that is claiming things completely different from what they say. There are proposals for better test equipment that should be taken, but I don't see any other claim for change there.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
The wildest of the claims anywhere on the linked papers is a ~10% increase on the rate of one of the rarest types of cancer, so this line of research won't give you the answers you are looking for.
These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_network_slicing#Key_concept...
"The "one-size-fits-all" network paradigm employed in the past mobile networks (2G, 3G and 4G) is no longer suited to efficiently address a market model composed by very different applications like machine-type communication, ultra reliable low latency communication and enhanced mobile broadband content delivery.[2][11]"
"to address a market model" in the sentence seems to support your claim.
Thus: 5G.
It (it being the millimeter wave 5G) doesn’t solve any problem that a customer has.
What does "network slicing" mean here? I'm not familiar with this term.
That would definitely invert the value calculations. I work in the industry and there's no question that the savings from 5G are regulatory in nature. Ironic that it's the less regulated tech that has the more questionable health effects.
I wouldn't be. To a good first-order approximation, the military doesn't give a hoot about long term health consequences and wouldn't release any such studies, if any were made, unless they indicated a requirement for the military usage to change.
"The main results obtained in the present study were a doubled incidence of all neoplasms with a threefold increase of cancers of the alimentary tract and a sixfold increase of malignancies of the haemopoietic system and lymphatic organs in 20- to 59-year-old career military servicemen exposed occupationally to pulse-modulated 150- to 3500- MHz RF/MW radiation. However, this does not prove a causal link between development of neoplastic diseases and direct interaction of EM fields, since retrospective analysis cannot provide convincing evidence for such links. Nevertheless, the high incidence of certain forms of neoplasms in personnel exposed to pulse-modulated RF/MW radiation clearly shows a need for urgent identification of causal factors present in the occupational environment."
Two other quotes from the paper showing author's awareness of what can and what can't be claimed as proven:
"The highest difference in morbidity rate between RF/MW-exposed and non-exposed personnel was found for malignancies of the haemopoietic system and lymphatic organs (Table 2) with the odds ratio exceeding 6 and the incidence of above 40 new cases per 100000 of exposed subjects annually.
Neoplasms of the haemopoietic system and lymphatic organs are among the malignancies that are to a considerable degree related to multiple environmental and occupational factors, including ionising radiation, organic solvents, some synthetic stains, resins, higher alcohols and numerous other substances [l]. Therefore, many industrial occupations, including e.g. aluminium production, petroleum refining, painting, mining, driving and car servicing, are considered to increase the risk of development of leukaemias and lymphomas. Electric and electronic industry workers have also considerable possibilities for exposure to potential leukaemiogenic factors and substances during their routine or additional duties. This may strongly influence and bias the morbidity rates of haemopoietic and lymphatic malignancies occurring in these populations and their relation to EM fields."
Also some technical details are provided:
"Although assessment of the individual exposure levels (‘dose’) was not possible, it is known from measurement of field power density at working posts that about 80% of the investigated personnel were exposed to RF/MW fields of 0.1-2 W/cm2 and 15% to mean power densities of 2-6 W/m2"
and earlier, showing that the cm2 above is a typo:
"Evaluation of the exposure intensities revealed that at 80-85% of posts, the fields (mostly pulse-modulated RF/MWs at 150-3500 MHz) do not exceed 2 W/m2 (0.2 mW/cm2), while the others have intensities 2-6 W/m2"
It seems that those were the people being exposed to the radar beams during their work hours (or maybe even outside of these). We should for the start compare that amount of exposure to that of humans in the cities due to the cell phones to know which orders of magnitude is the difference.
It's true that correlation studies are not as conclusive as laboratory experiments in general, but when we're talking about negative long-term health effects on humans, you can't establish causation without doing something unethical. But does that mean science becomes useless? I don't think so.
There are times when it's appropriate to infer causation from a correlation and act on that conclusion. For example, the famous lead toxicity studies are correlation studies. One such study, cited over 1000 times, [0] meets only 6 out of 9 criteria for inferring causation [1], and people are comfortable making that inference.
A good next step would be to go through the PowerWatch list of studies [2] and evaluate these studies based on these criteria (or a similar list).
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[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199001113220203 [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003591576505800... [2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl...
Why do you feel the need to “scare quote” industrial solvents which is a common term used to refer to toxic and carcinogenic chemicals used in industrial processes?
> No data published; for Szmigielski (1996) it is implied that there were two to three brain tumors in the exposed group, in which case we imply that the 95% CI for brain tumor is incorrect.
> Several of these studies did not follow workers after they left the job of interest (Garland et al. 1990; Grayson 1996; Szmigielski 1996), with the potential for bias if individuals left employment because of health problems that later turned out to be due to cancer; this might especially be a problem for some types of brain tumor, which can be present for long periods before diagnosis.
The above two criticisms are only regarding the brain tumor incidence data, which is not the most significant finding in the paper.
> “Expected” rates in Szmigielski (1996) paper appear to be incorrect, according to the Royal Society of Canada (1999).
Link is broken, and why Canadian cancer incidence rates are assumed to be equal to Polish ones is not explained.
> Significant excesses were reported for several cancer sites not seen in other studies, and for cancer overall, suggesting possible bias.
Not sure why reporting what you found suggests that you're biased, but okay.
Maybe it's initially counter-intiutitve, but the rise in the rate of cancer should be expected as lifespans are increased and deaths from other diseases decline. E.g. every male will get prostrate cancer "if" they live long enough.
Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call their research "bullshit" or "impossible", call the people "thruthers" or claiming "Russian troll farms" are behind this story.
I don't think I've ever seen so much non-scientific HN comments on a science article.
At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.
"In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
Cancer rates are strongly driven by age- cancer incidence increases exponentially as people age (stochastically, of course).
I also believe many of the cancers we successfully treat would be non issues if left alone. (all the young women who found lumps and become breast cancer survivors)
We live in an increasingly sleepless society and lack of sleep is effectively a carcinogen.
The present meta-analysis suggested that neither short nor long sleep duration was significantly associated with risk of cancer, although long sleep duration increased risk of with colorectal cancer.
^Matthew Walker, presumably the 70% drop is from work at his Berkeley lab
"In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
Situation: person has an almost undetectable cancer. They see a doctor, no cancer detected, later that week they are shot by police at a routine road stop.
We get in our time machine, go back a week and a bit, and supply the doctor with a better detection kit.
Situation 2: person has an almost undetectable cancer. They see a doctor who refers them to a specialist, cancer detected, another notch on the cancer tally board. Later that week they are shot by police at a routine road stop.
Nothing has changed except in the second case there’s another cancer detected. The person is still dead from non-cancer causes, just in one scenario they died as a haver-of-cancer and in the other they didn’t.
Better/earlier detection will necessarily lead to a decrease in cancers that are never detected (which I interpret as an increase in cancers detected before mortality from other causes), otherwise it’s not better/earlier detection.
My money is on diet and pesticides/preservatives/etc. being another big one. With this, too, there is little official evidence that, say, Roundup, causes cancer, but there is, imo, a stronger lobby against a positive outcome in those studies, and they don't necessarily control for interactions such as Roundup combined with the surfactant that it is typically mixed with that increases cell penetration.
In sum, I’d rank the risk of Roundup being carcinogenic on roughly the same level as that of 5G: possible but unlikely, given the best available evidence.
For the record, the other reasons are to do with the larger ecological impact of roundup-based practices, such as harm to soil fungi and bacteria, and collateral damage from runoff or wind. Plus, there were some studies finding it may cause harm to intestinal lining and such, even if it's not actually a carcinogen.
Pollution is lower too (again, in the US): cars used to pollute a LOT more. Smog used to be far, far worse in the LA area decades ago, so even with more people and more cars, pollution is lower, particularly localized pollution that affects people more. Of course, global warming pollution is certainly higher, but that isn't localized and shouldn't have any effect on you (it's just CO2).
Obesity is significantly worse, however.
"In other words, the individual incidence of cancer deaths has actually fallen."
Suppose that today the average person tells their doctor about a symptom of Example Cancer (which is incurable) six months before it kills them. 1 million people per year in Standard Country die of Example Cancer, with an average of six months between diagnosis and death.
Now, let's imagine I invent a machine, it can scan seemingly healthy people and tell them if they've got Example Cancer on average 12 months earlier. Nothing changed in terms of whether people get Example Cancer, it's still incurable, but now we've improved time between Diagnosis and Death by 200% but even scarier the incidence of Example Cancer, the number of people who know they have it, has also increased by 200%. It's an epidemic!
That machine is pretty unrealistic. A more realistic machine also gives false positives for Example Cancer. Now the number of people living with Example Cancer has increased by 500% but good news, most of those people don't die of it, because they had what medics would call "Sub-clinical incidence" meaning, sure, you had the disease but it didn't actually affect your life so who cares?
Here's a longer list for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421... though a lot of those studies are about DNA damage and not cancer per se. Though DNA damage is known to increase cancer risk.
So no, not zilch, not at all.
"the biological activity of any specific type of EMF is inversely proportional to its frequency and proportional to its intensity"
Clearly? The actual article (here's a full text: http://www.fraw.org.uk/data/esmog/lerchl_2015.pdf) doesn't seem to show that clear link. First, there's no dose-response effect, mice with higher doses didn't present higher rates of cancer (sometimes lower). Also, Table 1 with the actual findings is just crazy. For example, the group with no radiation has the second-highest incidence of lung carcinoma. The rate of lymphoma is the same at 0W/kg and 2W/kg, but doubles at 0.4W/kg.
I'm not going to say that the article is trash because it doesn't seem to be, but it is definitely not a clear link, there is a lot unanswered there. There is no mechanism proposed, there are a lot of carcinomas studied (high probability of finding something with a correlation) and there is no dose-response effect.
There is no break from the pattern in this thread. People still call for following the science - they just consider this article's science to be the RF engineering equivalent of Wakefield study.
Those 240 scientist have not published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields"
They are mostly experts in other fields.
We are bathed in radiation everyday.
So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation.
Do people care about that though? No. The effects of radiation are grossly exaggerated, and frankly any negligible effects we feel are just the price we pay for living in high tech times. I doubt anyone wants to go back to a tech free lifestyle just so they can live maybe a few more years only to die of something else anyway.
So yes, it’s quackery to say 5G is unsafe and the only reason an article like this would rise to the top is so people could come out and trash it. You want to see scientific comments then go to more interesting articles.
Just so you know.
Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well!
Better live underground, i guess.
Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight, right, so radiowaves could harm you, right? Yeah, but skin cancer is caused by ultraviolet, high energy, high frequency EM radiation (3-30PHz). Petahertz, Coral! That's several orders of magnitude less than most extreme 5G!
Don't even get me started on the power levels of sun vs a base station!
So yeah, the claims of health impact are bullshit.
Every time I was enticed to look up more about hormesis, I see the same issue: an intrinsically linear effect of a factor is studied, with a precise linear generator of the factor, but outside of the generator there is a background component to the factor which is ignored, which causes a misinterpretation of non-linearity.
A concrete example, suppose you have a light sensor in a "dark" enclosure, then at large enough intensities the current through the photodiode is linear with the incident illumination, but if there is some light leaking (or alternatively thermal radiation, and hence temperature, and hence dark current) then as the light generator is set to lower and lower levels, the light sensor will no longer linearly approach 0, since the signal starts to delve below the noise floor (so it will allways be measurable, but require more and more oversampling to decrease the noise floor). To confuse this effect which has nothing to do with photons getting converted to electron hole pairs, it is a misinterpretation to consider the effect "non-linear" close to the noise floor, and an even bigger misinterpretation to consider it "beneficial". Sure even high levels of ionizing radiation can be beneficial to the offspring of a colony of bacteria, fungi, or plants as a group, but it most certainly is harmful to the the individual bacteria, fungi or plants individually.
In the case of the light sensor, the current through the reverse biased photodiode will still be ideally linear with the total incident illumination, just no longer linear with the illumination of the non-dominant light source.
I think it should be pretty obvious that we can't avoid radiation, and we were evolved to handle a certain amount of it.
Oh and also. To make a scientific claim, you have to make a hypothesis. Not just a claim "5G causes cancer", but "5G causes cancer by this and this method". Without method of action best you can do is a corelational study, which is jus one step higher a case study, which is basically an anecdote.
Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Women suffering from anorexia developed fewer tumors. Similar experiments on lab animals in a controlled setting have the same result. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 I believe there are other changing risk factors in behavior as well, for instance women who have never had a child are more likely to develop breast cancer and fertility rates have dropped dramatically over the last 100 years.
Cell phones have only been widely deployed in the last two decades, and I don’t think those trends in cancer rates you’re referencing correlate very well to cellular deployment.
I’d still be curious to see more research happening in the field of millimeter waves, personally I don’t see this technology as very useful right now either compared to traditional cellular due to its lack of penetration.
Yeah I’m gonna need some data to believe that one. 90% obese / overweight? I’m calling bullshit.
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
Please note the table you showed the 73% is combination of "overweight" and "obese" while the row that shows obese is the same number as my citation.
EDIT: I misread the original message and thought it was referring to just obesity, not obesity/overweight.
Edit: I should have said adults in the parent post though, this statistic doesn’t apply to kids.
The large increase in sugar and starch in our diet does contribute to fast growing cancer cells and there are studies that link being overweight/obesity with cancer.
We weren't this fat decades ago. Some may blame more office work, but the biggest factor is the amount of sugar/carbs in our diets. It's grown tremendously and yet no one seems to take it seriously, discrediting things like Adkins/Keto as "fad diets" when they were closer/more consistent with American and Western European diets for several decades.
I've had trouble finding good studies on this. I don't think it's true. I've been on pretty hard keto for over two years at a time. I know other friends who have and have never heard of kidney trouble.
You occasionally have a day or two where you eat out with friends or have some fried chicken every month, and initially there is a period where you feel sick for a week as your body withdraws from sugar, but other than that I've never had kidney issues and my blood work has always come back fine.
With Adkins you do start reintroducing some carbs eventually, but you still keep it under a limit, and go back down if you start getting unhealthy.
https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps....
I checked the "conclusions" of the first two: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29996112 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29709736
Conclusion of 1) Despite the improved exposure assessment approach used in this study, no clear associations were identified. However, the results obtained for recent exposure to RF electric and magnetic fields are suggestive of a potential role in brain tumor promotion/progression and should be further investigated.
Conclusion of 2) Ever use of wireless phones was not significantly associated with risk of adult glioma, but there could be increased risk in long-term users.
They both read as, "we found no significant effect".
That said, given the scientific consensus from rigorous meta-analyses, I expect that these “positive” studies are mostly of low quality and/or limited sample size. And scepticism is generally warranted when advocates start listing large numbers of studies instead of referring to a few meta-studies. As it happens, the best available meta-studies come to the opposite conclusion (namely, that there’s probably no harm from mobile EMF), so this long list is essentially bogus.
To partly redeem myself, I followed the links to the first two articles prefixed by "P". They were https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055
The first didn't have a conclusion and the results were just the measured RF power in an apartment.
The conclusion of the second is, "A total of 900-MHz EMF applied in middle and late adolescence may cause changes in the morphology and biochemistry of the rat ovarium.", which makes no sense. "A total of 900-MHz EMF" is gibberish. The complete text is not freely available.
>> Study Effect Codes:
>> P This study reported effects from the exposure or radiation category (effects can be either positive or negative and may be primary or secondary outcomes)
>> N This study reported no effects from the exposure or radiation category
>> - This study offered important insights or findings but is neither evidence of an effect or a null finding
I'll be honest, this ordering seems dubious to me. P (for positive?) can show either positive or negative effects. N (for negative) shows no effects. - (for neither?) shows neither evidence of an effect or a null finding. I would think that P needs to be subdivided better to show which papers show a positive or negative effect.
Can someone do a count on the number of each category?
Couldn't it simply be that we are curing/reducing the incidence of most other diseases? Cancer is something that typically doesn't occur until the later years of life. By reducing the number of people who die of other causes, you are increasing the potential population of people who end up getting cancer.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 The article only measures exposition, no conclusion on effects other than a literature review.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 Can't get the full article, but I only see mentions of a 900MHz source (inside 3G frequency band) and no mention of power. Also it's a biochemical study on rats. Slim evidence.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25747364 One author, talks about wildlife orientation.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 This study talks about the effect of intensive radiation (3x the FCC limit for mobile phones, during 8 months) and it looks like it's actually beneficial for Alzheimer's disease. Funnily enough, it links in the abstract a lot of studies showing either inconsistent or no association between RF and cancer.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ An study from the department of ¿Psychology and Psychiatry? that finds changes in EEG activity due to mobile phone use, only when the phone is placed near the ear. Little mention of whether the RF radiation can interfere in the EEG measurement.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 Mentions the CERENAT study, which shows increased risk with really heavy mobile phone usage (as in calls). The only one with actual positive effects and looking like a serious study.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885019 Decreased nasal mucose in rats. No mention of whether thermal effects were at use here.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 Finds decreased sperm quality, but also discusses other studies finding no effect, and also says "A point of limitation in this study is the inability to assess [...] whether sperm affections are time related or not".
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25531835 This one is about nicotine sulfate + RF exposition in frog embryos, and doesn't find effects of RF alone.
That's just off the first page and a half. Probably someone should do a more thorough review, but it does not give me any assurance that most of the studies with reported positive effects are done by people not in the related fields, have no relation to the problem or do not answer the actual important questions.
> And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.
Mobile phones are not the only thing that has changed radically in the last years.
5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.
You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.
It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...
I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.
Note: I'm a biophysicist who has studied cancer and RF at the graduate level, and postdoctorate level, I can read the literature, and also make reasoned efforts at evaluating whether the literature provides any useful information that would affect the roll out of 5G from health perspectives. I am unable to find any reliable evidence that would indicate that this rollout will actually have "crisis" levels of health impact.
Now. On to the next step: I completely support high quality research done by high quality scientists on non-ionizing radiation. I would, like many other scientists, to see convincing evidence about the nature of damage that could be done by 5G. So far, nearly everything has been indirect in a way that does not inspire enough confidence to propose policy changes.
You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.
> The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.
That’s a pretty strong group.
Learned all about him from Malcom Gladwell's podcast this weekend. A really fascinating story of someone that wouldn't give in to peer-pressure, because he was convinced:
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/40-the-obscure-virus-...
>"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents."
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis...
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.
Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.
One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".
What about the cell-phone-radiation-for-brain-cancer concern? Haven't heard about it for a while.
5G will work better in populated cities and I don't think it is a good fit for most areas in USA. Likely we will have 5G for very dense areas while 4G for the rest.
I will absolutely not live or work in close vicinity of any 5G towers.
I mean, what else is there left to kill us?
I think the push to make these scientist seam like wackos, is all the money loss for the new tech(and even existing tech)
Oh, and more important than the studies is who is doing them and who is funding them.
Over a long enough time span, your probability of getting some form of cancer goes to 100%. Probably more like 200% or 300%, since there are so many types that they can cut out or beat back relatively successfully these days, at least until you get too old and decrepit.
That may sound like hyperbole but somehow I doubt it's far from the mark. Tons of modern advances were from novices or unaccredited. Flight, Relativity, Baysian and Boolean logic; Two hicks, a patent clerk, a preacher, and a self-taught math nerd.
MIMO is multiple inputs, multiple outputs, not massive. If the author is bending terminology to enhance his case, that makes the case look weaker...
Diagnosis has simultaneously increased, especially in cancers where the rationale for treatment is low (e.g. prostate cancer in most men).
(work in cancer research)
> Cancer have risen to 1 in 5 in women and 1 in 3 in men, and nobody knows why
'Nobody knows why', seriously? Did we not establish that the likelihood of cancer increase with lifespan? When you only gets to live to 50 of course you don't die of cancer and heart disease nearly as easily. Your risk of cancer increase each year of age lived after a certain age, and any increase in life expectancy will result in more people eventually dying in cancer.
Once religion is out as a guide to navigate the world, there's really not much left except science to cling to.
Despite plenty of evidence that everyone and everything can be bought, despite plenty of respected researchers raising their voices against, despite all the proof you could want of how these situations tend to play out long term.
Once you give up blind belief in science, there's nothing left to hold on to; and that's obviously a scary thought for many.
After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. Most, if not all, of these publications are in no-name journals with few citations. I found one paper where the author listed a gmail email address (are they unaffiliated with any institution?)
Just out of curiosity, what field was that in? I could certainly see some scientific disciplines having unaffiliated world-class scientists, but others it would be virtually impossible to do high quality research outside of a lab
There were already a few codes in the area and plenty of papers, and he was mathematically inclined, so it didn't take long for him to become an expert. Once he was an expert, he pointed out major problems in existing codes (both functional and performance).
This is an area where you're working with fairly straightforward data and math (linear strings from a chosen alphabet, probabilistic model is well-established). You don't need to understand the underlying biology in detail to contribute.
Where did you read "an apparrent increase rise in cancer rates" ? in this article or in one of the articles it references? which one?
I am not a biochemist, but I would assume academics are referring to incidence rates, not causes of deaths... If you did actually witness such a confusion in the papers, it's important to point it out, but if you didn't it would be equivalent to a physicist suspecting a colleague of confusing mu (the reduced mass of a binary system) with mu (a muon)... rather incredulous if you ask me...
Every academic discipline expects its disciples to be at least proficient in disambiguating words from context, so when one refers to a "cancer rate" in the context of causation, that it would refer to "incidence rates" i.e. the transition probability per surviving individual per unit time. This is independent of deaths by other causes.
> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.
Which suggests that there is an apparent increase in cancer rates. So yes, I was referring to an incident rate. Regardless, the semantics here don't change the meaning of my statement. We have solved (for lack of a better word) many of the lower hanging fruits of human disorders. As such, we can't effectively control for incidence rates over time
There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer.
Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.
I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?
If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.
Annual invasive cancer incidence rates have been declining in the U.S. for over two decades.
https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html
Also, the lifetime risk of incidence is about 40% for both men and women:
https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...
https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...
* Frequency of radiation
* Power of exposure
* Duration of exposure
* Where in the human body absorption is occurring
While the effects of the latter three are pretty well understood for certain kinds of radiation (ionizing and non-ionizing) ranging from "acute radiation sickness due to gamma burst" to "listening to the radio your whole life doesn't have a link to cancer", there is truth that a specific band of millimeter 5G has been less studied than others.
However, science follows patterns, and interpolating the existing data to this sub-infrared region opens a kind of wiggle room similar to, but in fact the opposite to, low dosimetry of ionizing radiation that has given the Linear No Threshold model a run for it's money. Except in this case, skeptics are typically concerned about chemical effects due to subdermal heating (not really as compelling as ionizing radiation effects), or debating the "non-ionizing-ness" (which is less common because its even less supported by evidence).
It comes down to a persons personal risk. In my opinion, the sun beats out all non ionizing radiation concerns, particularly when it comes to heating of the skin and subdermal tissues. Wear a hat and sunscreen (against the sun).
Still worth researching and acknowledging the data gap, as the EU does in its metastudy of 40+ years and X00 scientific papers [0], but there's no reason to be alarmed based on the existing corpus of evidence.
[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Edit to add citation
What's the "hat and sunscreen" protection against millimeter wave cellphone towers, that someone else installed on their private property near you?
I'm not yet convinced the risks exist. But conceptually if there was a danger, there's no "personal risk" argument. We're blanketing the whole area around a tower with millimeter wave/5G, a person cannot opt out.
Ultimately this isn't simply an issue of "personal risk." If there's no danger, there's no danger. But if there is and you live in a major city simply not owning a cellular device may only lower your exposure.
(Yes, they're not zero: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0029/44876/m... )
And in either way - more towers, less power per tower.
Extremely tiny exposure of non ionizing radiation, you probably get more from the monitor your looking at right now.
You make it sound like EM waves aren’t being emitted or reflected by everything in the universe short of a black hole.
And cell phone EM exposure levels for someone who isn’t carrying a phone - hopefully this person knows better than to walk outside, or stand near a window!
Right besides the tower you're in a blind spot, then it gets more intense as you move out of the blind spot and then it gets lower as you move further away.
> 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation. 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO) which pose unique challenges for measuring exposures.
It can use more towers at higher frequencies in really really crowded areas or industrial setups, but those work at lower power outputs, and penetrate the body less (due to higher frequencies).
Now compare to AM/FM transmitters that cover a huge geographic area. Those can be scary. FCC allows up to 50000 W transmission power. It's required because the antennas are spaced so far apart.
You don't need hat and sunscreen for street lights or flashlights nor would you need it for cellular power levels, orders of magnitude difference in exposure.
A simple power comparison is not a great measure of affect.
The problem with every argument about radiation from cell phones being dangerous is that for every proposed mechanism, the Sun is orders of magnitude more damaging.
The obvious worries with cell phones are repeated stress injuries, insomnia and disruption of personal relationships. There's just no plausible mechanism for the radiation to be damaging, though.
Therefore, 99.9999038793% of the energy emitted is at wavelengths shorter than 1E-4m (0.1mm).
Or, across the entire continuous spectrum (0, 1e-4m], the total energy from the Sun is 0.0009612W, or 961uW.
You might complain that 961 uW is much more than 10nW, but again, you have to consider that 961 uW is across the entire spectrum (0,1E-4]. The Sun is less powerful at narrow spectrums because otherwise it'd drown out the cell phone tower (Or rather we pump power into the antenna to overcome the "noise" from the Sun).
I'd reproduce the numbers, but unfortunately my HP48 underflows at such narrow bandwidths.
And the "LED" at your face is, of course, much more powerful than the Sun since (as you pointed out) by the inverse square law, it has to pump out a lot of power to reach the tower.
Nor do I happen to think LEDs are harmless. Using LEDs to affect biological system is a very rich area of study.
Do I think non-ionizing radiation is harmful? I doubt it. But comparing a 1000W/m^2 @ 5400K black body radiator to a cell phone tower is dishonest.
Shorter wavelengths have higher photon energy. It's the short stuff that you have to worry about.
Is it consequential? Probably not, but the OP's original comparison of 1000 W of Sun vs. 100W from a tower and nW from cell phone is disingenuous.
The concern with 5G seems to revolve around the uses of higher frequency millimeter wave radiation compared to 3G/4G which has shown no repeatable damaging results at normal power levels.
If higher frequency = bad, which is actually true, comparing 5G the sun is not dishonest IMO. I am trying to give some perspective to show how it seems odd to worry about extremely low power cellular radiation while giving little thought to the extremely powerful nuclear radiator in the sky.
Dosage matters, cellular frequency will cook you given enough power, so will visible light. The power levels we are talking about do not generate enough heat to damage our tissue, so if they do harm it would need to be through some other unknown process. Should we keep looking for possible other processes, yes of course. However I would be much more concerned about the much more powerful visible range artificial radiators around us every day, like the monitor I am staring at right now emitting a 100 times the radiation of my cellphone right at my face all day long.
I think when comparing this to the sun there are lots of things worth considering from many different angles.
1. To say this threat is nothing compared to the risks we face from the sun, completely ignores the fact that we have millions of years of evolutionary exposure to sunlight and because of that fact the immune system has become way more acclimated to dealing with it's carcinogenic properties. Of course, our immune systems aren't perfect but considering how much more exposure we all are to sunlight than any other carcinogen, if we didn't have a strong evolutionary tolerance to it; melanoma would obviously be the #1 leading cause of cancer. But it's not.
Now in hindsight, what we don't have evolutionary genetic tolerance for is microwave radiation. While i'm not in anyway an expert in biology or the physics of light, I do have enough insight to know that we should never underestimate the possible negative outcome of any potential problem when it's still just a mathematical theory we're playing with rather than a reality of nature we're all dying from.
I mean, we underestimate and miscalculate these kind of things all the time and it's kind of counter productive that the answer to the question of "When will we learn to stop doing this?" is always "Once, we underestimate and miscalculate, discover our error and become smarter because of it"...
2. The bigger issue this has when compared to the sun is the fact that all of us can agree while there is such a thing as getting too much sun. However, there isn't such a thing as internet that is too fast. We essentially all want to be able to download terabytes at the speed of light so that we can one day be on Mars and be able to seamlessly stream Netflix from Earth while were up there. And while of course there is a speed of light limitation of like i believe 8 minutes, that doesn't mean people aren't going to complain why they cant instantly stream from there.
This is what we need to understand about this issue. There is no limitation to how much radio wave radiation we want when we are thinking of that radiation in the language of the internet, as "Content".
3. When it comes to protecting ourselves from this, if it actually does turn out to be a substantial problem. All the solutions suck.
The radio wave EM shielding for example protects you from the potentially harmful waves. But it also creates like I said, a deadzone.
So putting it in your walls of your home, because you don't want you and your entire family constantly being exposed to the cell tower that might only be a football field length away from your house (as the one near my house is), also means you can't receive or make calls to and from your cell phone. This is a deal breaker for most people, and as far as i'm aware RF shielding isn't like sunscreen where it blocks out most of the harmful light while letting in the some you want. It's an all or nothing solution.
Which is why I think putting the RF shield in clothing like a hoodie would be an interesting venture idea. The shielding protects your body, while your phone is still outside of the shielded area. (although this obviously doesn't protect your face and i don't think RF shielded masks are going to find a market other than antifa)
And another reason why the implications of this would really suck, is that it means were stuck with crappy wires and the companies who own the rights to pumping internet to and fro over them. I am mostly looking forward to 5G because I view it as the primary means we are going to get ourselves out of the era of shitty slow internet and greedy cable company overlords who wouldn't know how to disrupt something if a tv with rainbow bars on the screen hit them in the face.
Nor would such a thing be possible unless we could somehow drastically reduce our water content.
But speaking of miscalculation, mentioning Mars before starting to go on about tinfoil hoodies is, well, there's a lot of actually definitely dangerous radiation on Mars and a whole lot more on the way there.
One last note, higher speed or bandwidth has not scaled linearly (or really at all, outside early 3g?) with antenna power.
But if you do want to shield your house, most telcos offer seamless wifi calling these days. Then again wifi runs on the same freq as microwave ovens.
If you want to counter that you can't just pile up small studies that might be hinting at possibility that there might be some other effect.
You need a smoking gun. Single study, but bulletproof and large, showing strong effect. Everything else will be dismissed as "maybe, possibly, but most likely not really".
As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.
Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause damage to DNA, or has a very large correlation established that does a very good job of controlling for other factors, these studies will be dismissed out of hand.
What's even scarier is that this sort of an effect will not be found in a standard Ames test and also is unlikely to be found in highly controlled lab settings, since it requires a second factor - a contaminating primary mutagen - to manifest its effect.
By what mechanism (and it's likely not limited to DNA then)?
It's far from limited to DNA, but it's not hard to imagine why people care more about DNA than other conductive molecules.
Microwave radiation (especially in the GHz range) illuminating DNA has been long known as a phenomenon, of course it does depend on which frequency band in the GHz range you're in, too.
Generally, the research of Jackie Barton showing that DNA is a conductor and speculating about the role fo 4Fe4S cluster in the BER mechanism was emergent in the late 2000s back when I was a biochemist and not a programmer, but they're now (last 2 years) publishing papers that are fleshing out that hypothesis:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jkbgrp/Research.htm
Specific papers: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-bioche...
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00566
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acschembio.8b00347
etc.
But BER doesn't sense double strand breaks. It senses changes in the curvature of the dna induced by point mutations that are solvable by extracting the base and replacing it templates by the other strand. So you'll want to induce damage with something that causes thymidine dimerization or DNA alkylation.
Actually you got that wrong. This was related to real piracy (i.e. people with eye patches on ships robbing other ships) which went down, not software piracy. So the decline of pirates is related to global warming.
(The example came from Bobby Henderson, the founder of the flying spaghetti monster.)
(i) it seems this "non-ionizing radiation" has many parameters that can modify significantly the way it propagates in the environment (and in human bodies), so I'm not sure speaking of non-ionizing radiation in a general way is sufficient to address the problem
(ii) following this reasoning and your comment about "a single study, bulletproof and large": it does seem that it is in fact what is being asked by this group - that time be given for a meaningful and large study of the specific radiation from 5G tech
and therefore requiring that kind of large study before widespread implementation actually seems warranted.
It's not hard to find 250 wackos if you pull random scientists working in random fields at random institutions. Most have no better way to know safety of 5G than I do.
Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.
But an appeal to experts -- with no real experts behind it -- doesn't do it for me. Neither does an appeal to papers based on volume, without a clear description of what they found and how. Most science is junk science.
So I guess the moral of the story is "don't believe everything you see in pop science magazines," although I would have hoped nobody did to begin with(?)
https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal
Likewise for a list of relevant papers:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl...
Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill? Can we dispense with the tired ad hominems and talk about science? A self-proclaimed guess from a self-proclaimed non-expert seems ill placed in a credentialist diatribe.
After their primary university admissions scandal? Absolutely not, not that I ever trusted them in the first place (Memphis has a far better medical program.)
If a faculty at HMS signed on, that'd be okay. If a ransom person with a degree from HMS does, that doesn't carry the same weight. I was pretty clear about "at" versus "from."
Science isn't a democracy.
They receive A LOT of funding from cellular companies in particular, any research that throws doubt on 5G could lead to their funding being pulled. Not only this, but most of the interesting 5G hardware is coming from the cellular companies on loan.
My point is: You have a perfect storm for a rushed technology with potential for health risks. Almost every Country on the planet is investing lots of money into 5G and the technology itself requires a significant number more cellular towers to be built in closer proximity to people.
If there is any genuine question about 5G's safety, I would rather stay on the side of caution. It's not as if people will kill over if they don't have 5G immediately. Not only this, the technology will be more mature and the price will likely come down for infrastructure development.
I can think of a few people I know that are much less exposed to 2/3/4g radiation, by living in the forest and not having a phone on them all the time. Isn't a control group that has been exposed to significantly less radiation still useful ?
I highly doubt that 26+ GHz will receive much attention. You have no range, you need line of sight otherwise it won't work. At least 3.4GHz (and the other LTE bands) don't have that issue.
People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mark for a piece of science. It means that hopefully it's not complete bullshit. Sometimes it still is, because noone can forbid you to call your journal "peer-reviewed" with your own weak standards of peer review. And sometimes credible journals make huge mistakes (remember the "Wakefield-study"...). Even with only well-performed, non-flawed studies you'll always have some studies saying that something is there that actually isn't. That's simple statistics, you'll have outliers.
"Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results.
Also it's not true that "nobody knows why" cancer incidence has risen. It's a mixture of people getting older and diagnosis getting better. Not mysterious at all.
The sixth link in the article will get you what you want: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421...
Self-evaluation of quality is not quite a systemic review of literature. Neither is research on drosophila melanogaster quite in the same ballpark as research on homo sapiens.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
[2] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...
If cell phones give me cancer because they make me live longer, then maybe I should start carrying around a second one.
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/newsroom/releases/2018/novemb...
The study's conclusion, "a meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic [sic] studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD", unleashed a wave of news reports claiming dietary saturated fats were no longer considered harmful, further tilling the grounds for a movement urging the increase in consumption of saturated fats for added health benefits.
The 2010 meta-analysis has been criticized here: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/91/3/497/4597072
Again, I'm not a party to this particular debate on dietary saturated fats, but I am critical of the suggestion that a meta-analysis of an inconclusive body of studies will yield an actionable conclusion.
With a potentially large # of studies on a specific subject, some of which may be contradicting, meta-analysis will be done.
Whether by accredited scientists, or institutions who do this on a professional basis with open and established criteria and consistency in approach (though there may still be flaws in the approach); and/or by individuals when confronted with large # of studies, when I feel bias would almost certainly be the primary driver.
While you absolutely cannot eliminate the latter, it feels it would be foolish to dismiss or eliminate the former.
As long as:
a) World is a bit tricky (phenomena difficult to define and isolate; limitations in equipment and measurements; limitations in humans)
b) We use statistical analysis as primary differentiator of significance There will continue to be contradicting studies.
Not disagreeing it's always better to improve studies and experiments, but it feels like meta-analysis of multiple studies is not just a necessary evil, but a good and desirable next step.
Thoughts?
Hmm; I don't think we fully understand each other.
Absolutely do the study; in fact, do several.
What then, though? A "study of studies", or any method of reconciling or making sense of these multiple studies, is the "meta analysis" in question. It's going to happen, in some way, somehow, by somebody. There is no way to reconcile multiple studies without doing some form of what we are calling meta-analysis. Even if it's just you or me googling it up and then deciding which of the studies to trust, that's a "meta-analysis".
My claim, therefore, is that it's far better to acknowledge this need and reality, and have dedicated teams of experienced professionals do it with an open, consistent method; then for each of us to mentally, subconsciously, "biasedly", to pick & choose and prioritize the studies.
[in the end, proper meta-analysis, and study replication, are the methods of how we discover inconsistency, contradiction, data issues, or other problems, whether in psychology or other domains. It's not a method of "fixing something", but a method of collecting, analyzing, and reporting on multiple studies and data points]
Yeah, a meta analysis is only as good as its inputs. Unfortunately many meta analysises read like "we found 20 studies on the topic, but 19 of them are crap and the one good study didn't really ask the question we're asking, so we really don't know". And yeah, there's considerable wiggle room for a meta analysis. But I don't think you'll find any serious scientist doubting the usefulness of a meta analysis per se.
By combining the results of the best studies and giving us an overview of them, meta-analyses really are the best studies we have.
"In addition to providing an estimate of the unknown common truth, meta-analysis has the capacity to contrast results from different studies and identify patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light in the context of multiple studies." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis
With a meta-analysis, you do have to look at the whole thing. Phrased like, "when controlled for.." you can't control for some things over 10 different studies. You need to read how they attempted to control for things and why the came to their conclusions.
They are still valuable and you shouldn't just chuck them in the bin.
For example, eating barbecued meat causes cancer, but it we don't ban it.
Even lasers spread. This guy agrees with me: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-light-from-lasers-reduced-by-th...
But in the near field, that's not the case.
Beamforming arrays have planar wavefronts close to the source, so the inverse square law does not apply. The wave fronts will become spherical again at a "large" distance from the emitter, where the meaning of "large" depends on wavelength and emitter size.
Focussed lasers also do not have spherical wave fronts in the near field. The distance at which the inverse square law starts to apply to lasers depends on beam width, coherence, and focus.
I hope that helps picture the situation. My original comment that a beam can have a different exponent was incorrect except in some approximate sense. The inverse square value will still apply, but from the beams real or imaginary focal point (if it is a point) But it the case of a transmitter beaming a signal at another, that focal length can be far beyond the reciever, so the 'rule' can be completely confounded.
"Laws" tend to be less rigorous and more narrowly applicable than "theories," though the colloquial meaning of the terms is switched.
Ohm's law was a law long before the electron was discovered. It's an emperical linear relationship that just seemed to work. Since no mechanism is suggested, it's not possible to determine whether ohmic behavior is expected or not. In contrast, The Drude Model's explantion of ohmic behavior could be considered a theory. It makes an attempt to understand the underlying physics, and from this it is possible to predict whether a material will follow Ohm's Law or not.
You can say the "the theory of quantum chromodynamics," but not "the law of quantum chromodynamics". 'Law' implies a small number of simple equations, while theory allows for a much larger scope of complexity or rigor. The meaning is absolutely different. Modern science is pretty complex compared to what went on 200 years ago, so it's not surprising law has fallen out of favor.
There are excpetions to many inverse square laws, they just aren't relevant to the problem at hand.
Shouldn't smoke follow the inverse square law as well (in the absence of air currents)?
That's why smoking is allowed outdoors.
It's not really uncommon to see "no smoking on the patio" or "no smoking within 100 feet of this door" signs. And some states have legalized smoking cannabis, except outdoors.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a smoker and never have been. I like these laws. I'm just being a bit pedantic. There has been a general trend of restricting smoking and I think that trend has continued outdoors. It used to be that you could smoke anywhere, then businesses started creating indoor smoking sections. Then indoor smoking sections were banned and smokers moved to the outdoor seating. Then smoking outside near exterior doors was banned, in a way that effectively banned smoking at many restaurants entirely. Beyond this, in some places like NYC you have smoking bans in public parks and beaches as well, regardless of how far you are from any exterior door. (To be clear, I support these bans because cigarette smokers are notorious for their litter.)
And in the case of cannabis the restrictions are even more severe. In Washington you cannot smoke cannabis in view of the general public or in most buildings (except residential, although many apartment buildings have smoking bans too.) California is more permissive, but even they enforce a 1000(!) foot smoking ban around schools and youth centers.
Sure, but the absolute risk is very low and it's probably zero if you add veggies to your meal. And also causality was not established, observational studies on this topic suffering from the healthy-user bias in addition to a lot of confounding factors and in general for nutrition the evidence is very low quality, compared with medication research.
This isn't a boolean. Saying that "this or that causes cancer" is meaningless without giving the risk factor, which has to be statistically significant and in case of meat it isn't.
In other words if you want to compare the risks of 5G with anything, I think nutrition is a really poor choice due to the low standards for evidence we have and due to all the confounding factors and biases.
Not sure if assessing the safety of 5G is easier, but at the very least you can do double-blind studies. At the very least you can compare it with the placebo effect. Which in nutrition isn't possible.
Working in a Faraday cage seems more appealing.
https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf
"Lyon, France, May 31, 2011 ‐‐ The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer1 , associated with wireless phone use."
Even if it was "carcinogenic to humans", there's a lot of things that are vital to modern society which fall into that category. It's then up to the regulators to guess an "acceptable" limit of exposure.
I'm surprised this statement passed muster on HN where there must be some number of PhDs now working in other fields. Certainly the ones I know wouldn't take kindly to the idea that somehow, just because they left academia their research can be easily and completely dismissed.
Peer reviewed used to be the epitome of proof, now it's been relegated to base minimum?
Are you saying that consensus is no longer considered valid proof? (not that I disagree, it's just that this is a rare argument in my experience)
"Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology."
This article does not represent scientific consensus. It is alarmist, linking nearly every report that supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism.
[0]: Not that the anti-wireless people are particularly influential right now, but they're fairly close to antivacciene people in how they perceive the world with an almost complete absence of rational thought.
Second, the whole reason articles like this get published and read is that, in this case, one man's "alarmism" or "deception" or "paranoia" is another man's sober scientific caution. It's the same problem with GMOs. People are rushing to market with unproven technology to make money while insisting it's all perfectly safe.
Why not wait a century, do more research, and decide then? What's the urgency to roll it out now?
I understand the distinction, but posting dubious opinion articles on news sites is still problematic. The Scientific American does not host articles espousing racist ideologies / vehemently blatant pseudoscience, by publishing this it is a form of tacit endorsement (despite it going in their opinion section).
>Second, the whole reason articles like this get published and read is that, in this case, one man's "alarmism" or "deception" or "paranoia" is another man's sober scientific caution. It's the same problem with GMOs. People are rushing to market with unproven technology to make money while insisting it's all perfectly safe.
The problem is that both the antiEMF and antiVaccine people are in fact not applying scientific principles to the issue. Cherry picking studies and opinions that support a given viewpoint is at best a rhetorical argument from authority, it is absolutely not a scientific approach to verifying a hypothesis.
>Why not wait a century, do more research, and decide then? What's the urgency to roll it out now?
The urgency comes in part from the fact that the 4G network is congested and at capacity in dense urban areas, and also from political dealings between US and Chinese telecom companies.
I understand your hesitation with regard to increasing the invisible radiation flux. I would likely feel the same way if I wasn't close to the field. From my point of view I would be far more worried about the materials used to produce modern phones and the disposal of the resulting industrial waste, the volatility of their batteries (particularly from manufacturers with shoddy QC), and the ethical considerations of sourcing the materials used.
In re: EM, I have a better-than-average layman's understanding, but I'm certainly no expert. The specific thing that concerns me is the interaction of lots of sources with the urban environment. One or a few transmitters might be safe in the lab for N years' exposure, but dozens of transmitters operating in an environment with all kinds and shapes of metal and plastic and stone/concrete could conceivably lead to transients that have (relatively) severe side-effects.
I think, with examples like lead in gasoline and asbestos in insulation, etc., that we should be more cautious than we have been in the past. Especially when a given technology is more a marginal than a vital improvement to our lives.
In any event, you bring up a very good point: "... I would be far more worried about the materials used to produce modern phones and the disposal of the resulting industrial waste, ..." Indeed, there are a lot of problems "in line" before you get to "Cellphones gave me cancer!".
Cheers! Well met.
This started as early as CT, then DECT, GSM, 3G, 4G and now 5G.
After 30+ years of having consumer grade wireless telephony we are still debating whether the radio signals have any negative effect on living beings.
If we can't draw any conclusion from a sample size that big, then I must conclude that the effects of EM-radiation are so minimal (if any at all), that it is not something I should worry about.
Edit: typo
This is similar to homeopathy. Even if the state of research is not great, we're discussing a theory that is just not physically plausible. The default assumption should be that it is wrong.
I mean we could ban 80% of all Indian food because first time westerners eat it they react much stronger to the spicy ness than they would to smoking.
Stating independent of the actual science that “It was always obvious that smoking caused cancer” isn’t any better than the people stating now that “obviously EM radiation causes cancer”.
Same with asbestos, lead in gas/paint, uranium lipsticks, &c.
Whereas with smoking we can see over ten times higher risks for certain types of cancer-related deaths. That doesn't mean there's no effect due to mobile phones, but I think if it were remotely comparable to smoking we'd see a significant impact by now.
Cancer rates are rising and we're not sure why. Is that acceptable?
That said, I am sure there are structures in the body that can selective absorb or react to non-ionizing radiation that we may not yet know about. Our cellular mechanisms are impressively complex.
It is a good thing that we spend research effort into identifying why this is happening.
All I'm saying is that I have concluded, for myself, that EM-radiation is the least of my worries when it comes to negative effects (including cancer).
* People get older
* Cancer detection is improving
* Cancer mortality is sinking
The symptom isn't classified as a disease at where I live, so it's hard to get any decent medial treatments and I'm afraid 5G might harm me even harder when higher frequency typically makes me feel worse without a way to get away from it.
- Turn off wireless signals like Bluetooth (I keep WiFi with low emission setting which isn't as bad as BT but 5Ghz is worse than 2.4Ghz, so I only use 2.4Ghz frequency.)
- Many of recent phones. (Bought iPhone X, Pixel 3a and those I can't keep close to me no matter how I tweak their settings, so they're away from me kept in boxes but I still need them for testing for my work.)
- LED displays keep me uneasy. I use fluorescent ones.
- IC chips used for credit cards and passports. I keep them minimum in my wallet.
These are from what I've bought and sold just to find what might feel better for me. I wish I could just keep what I want.
(Also not EM but chemical substances, just to say I've been living with hypersensitivity.
- Keeping clothes on after coming back home from outside. So I quickly wash and take shower.
- Need to clean wall every few weeks before I feel kind of choked, maybe due to glue used for the wallpapers.
- Very small amount of mold. I have to clean my air conditioner from a professional service every season.)
I can keep going but those are some.
Sadly the only other mention I've ever seen is the fictional series "Better Call Saul". And the character's suffering was depicted as entirely mental.
That's because it is entirely mental.
Blind tests were done on people, and their ability to recognise a radiation source was the same as random picking.
Anybody claiming to be able to sense radiation can be tested simply by taking two mobile phones, turning one off (leaving one connected to the internet and doing something online), putting both in a bag/under a bucket/..., having someone else randomly swap their position and trying to guess which is the one that is radiating at the moment. I can guarantee you're guesses will be around 50% in the long run, so basically random guesses.
My ammature theory (5Ghz wifi feels worse than 2.4Ghz wifi) also says higher frequency for short range signals does more harm, thus it's more sensitive to turn those off than being exposed to other lower frequency used outside.
I hate to admit it, but I seem to notice effects when I add wireless networks to my home. I think it's probably psychosomatic, but would like to do a blind test. I would situate myself between wireless devices, with all devices within 10 meters either being on or off, the test being to determine if any devices are on. I would feel weird asking anyone to help in this, so perhaps I'll rig something up with smart plugs or a programmable router.
I think northern Europe has recognized EM hypersensitivity as a symptom but last time I checked, it's not widely recognized worldwide.
I can completely say this is not mental. Like, say I get a new phone which I wanted to buy and then if it damages me, I regretfully have to sell it. Also I can feel better by turning off Bluetooth, so there are clear physical causes for me.
While I understand that you might want to silence vocal minorities for business reasons, I've only stated facts from my past 20 years of life.
Also, what has lead in gasoline to do with EM-radiation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Room
TL;DR: We poisoned ourselves for about half a century.
> The episode describes how science, in particular the work of Clair Patterson (voiced in animated sequences by Richard Gere) in the middle of the 20th century, has been able to determine the age of the Earth.
> Patterson found that his results were contaminated by lead from the ambient environment...
> Tyson goes on to explain that Patterson's work in performing lead-free experiments directed him to investigate the sources for lead. Tyson notes how lead does not naturally occur at Earth's surface but has been readily mined by humans (including the Roman Empire), and that lead is poisonous to humans. Patterson examined the levels of lead in the common environment and in deeper parts of the oceans and Antarctic ice, showing that lead had only been brought to the surface in recent times. He would discover that the higher levels of lead were from the use of tetraethyllead in leaded gasoline, despite long-established claims by Robert A. Kehoe and others that this chemical was safe. Patterson would continue to campaign against the use of lead, ultimately resulting in government-mandated restrictions on the use of lead. Tyson ends by noting that similar work by scientists continues to be used to help alert mankind to other fateful issues that can be identified by the study of nature.
Emphasis added.
I was debating a different technology with a friend and he made such a comment, but my response was that the frequency, scope and importance of past technological advancements won't hold a candle to those of the future.
Something which was true/false for 10 years is more likely to remain so for the next 10 than another thing which was true/false for 1 year.
What I find particularly troubling: 4G is for me already more than good enough. 5G is really not so well thought out. They require a lot more cells. The exposure is much higher... They cost more (?).
Why are we having this technology?
The article you linked second, is interesting. He makes some bad claims (The electric fields produced by muscles are strongly polarized contrary to his claim that they are unpolarized) and there is some questionable math, but what I really want to highlight is how he uses the pulse repetition interval in his section on forced oscillation. By his own math, a CW signal at mm-wave frequencies produces no biological effect being to low of intensity. The formula given is proportional to 1/(2pif) so it follows, but he then uses the PRF to set the frequency and displacement and finds that at these low frequencies, the effect is strong enough to be dangerous.
The problem with this though, is that the PRF is how often you activate the transmitter and not the frequency of the transmitted RF signal which leaves us with the perverse conclusion that, mm-wave is fine under normal circumstances but becomes more dangerous the less you are exposed to it.
It's an interesting comparison with the vaping thread last week or the week before, where a similar number of comments came to the conclusion that it should be heavily restricted because we don't have enough data.
That said, caution should be observed when data points to potential issues.
For people reading this stuff, always search for something called the Odds Ratio (OR), which is a gold standard way of comparing how clinically significant a thing is. For example, smoking has an OR of 60 for lung cancer. A well covered paper on birth control suggested its OR for developing depression is 1.26, and the massive aspirin on heart health study had 0.95 OR of cardiovascular disease in one of the surveyed counties (ie aspirin improved clinical outcome).
If error bars on measured OR contain 1.0 you can’t say if it is helpful or harmful. OR accounts for baseline incidence in a way that RR (relative risk) does not. So it lets you actually choose among behaviors instead of within diseases or outcomes. It informs why it’s possible to tell everyone they shouldn’t smoke (OR is very high), keep taking birth control (because depression outcome is better than unwanted or complicated pregnancy outcomes), and aspirin for cardiovascular disease prophylaxis (very limited side effects, very cheap so even 0.95 is worth it).
I don’t know if there’s a consensus that electromagnetic radiation from electronics has clinical significance. If there is clinical significance it will be a small OR for most outcomes. It won’t be comparable at all to e.g. smoking.
However this is still an imperfect measure. In Japan OR for lung disease from smoking is 15, 4 times better than the US. The researchers speculated this has to do with a specific filter on common Japanese cigarettes but it could be genetics or other things that they didn’t control for (ie BMI and gender matching but not Japanese ancestry). So technology can have huge effects on clinical outcomes but 4x 15 is a much bigger deal than 4x 1.015. My point is that it has its limitations but OR definitely measures something real.
This is a robust framework for evaluating how this research matters to you in a way that does not require conspiracies or investigating the researcher’s backgrounds. Additionally it is widely accepted by legitimate medical practitioners across the world.
Under this framework, the reviews posted here do not document clinical significance, although individual papers cited in them might.
A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR (high RR in mice vs placebo is strong research evidence just not strong clinical evidence). So mouse OR isn’t often predicative of human OR. But this applies to chart reviews too. Still a pretty durable framework.
Do people also assume that EM radiation is a linear no threshold? Because we know it isn't true for ionizing radiation, but it is a great model to use in practice because it overestimates harm (which we'd rather over estimate than under).
I've read a few of those papers on the EM radiation on mice and they seem to assume a LNT model, which doesn't seem all that honest to me. A few of the papers I read didn't have great p-values either and had drastically differing rates of cancer development for radiation levels and sex (IIRC one big one had high cancer rates for low power, nothing for medium, and moderate cancer rates for high power. Which there was no explanation to this. But that might have just been one bad paper).
https://atomicinsights.com/science-falsified-no-safe-dose-hy...
Also
To give you an intuition though, LNT would suggest that the body has no repair mechanism for healing damage from radiation (should be suspicious about this) and that all effects are accumulative (which makes sense if there is no repair, but doesn't if there is repair). We can heal from other things and have demonstrated in the lab that cells can repair from low radiation dosages.
Basically the thing is that measuring is incredibly difficult because there's a temporal component and effects are very different depending on where that dosage is received (eg. your eyes vs your hands. See equivalent dosage). So what do you do? You overestimate on the side of safety. Failure of modeling is built into the safety standards (I used to work on radiation shielding devices and I fully support the use of the LNT model in practice. Better safe than sorry).
I haven't read all of these and didn't archive what I have read so these are what I came up with quickly (I did read abstracts, of course)
(Short end is that it isn't clear how much cancer risk increases for dosages <100mSv -i.e. "low dosages" -, which is WELL above occupational standards - 5x actually)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2663584/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000927971...
not an article but a good high level response (notice the hand waviness) https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q12755.html
This part of the wiki page is also good and shows you the contrasting sides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#Cont... It also has links to other journal articles.
Would you mind elaborating on this? As a reminder, odds ratio is
((exposure_unhealthy / exposure_healthy) / (control_unhealthy / control_healthy))
Whereas risk ratio is
((exposure_unhealthy / (exposure_unhealthy + exposure_healthy) / (control_unhealthy / (control_unhealthy + control_healthy))
Overall it seemed to have pretty strong cherry picking feel. Are you sure this paper is objective?
This sounds like bullshit. What were there changes between 3G and LTE that would make it more dangerous?
More efficient use of spectrum?
I don't think you'll see a lot of reputable schools taking this on though. But this effect should be easy to replicate at least.
"Along with the patterning and duration of exposures, certain characteristics of the signal (e.g., pulsing, polarization) increase the biologic and health impacts of the exposure."
"The latest cellular technology, 5G, will employ millimeter waves ... 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO)"
FWIW, I don't have a fixed opinion on this issue one way or the other. I just really hate seeing supposedly intelligent people rely so heavily on ad hominem or similar distractions. If there really is a problem with the cited research, I'd appreciate it if somebody could point to where those are. Likewise if someone could cite sufficient contrary research to justify abandoning the precautionary principle. That's all fine. I'm willing to be persuaded, but not by appeals to or rejection of authority.
And yes, there are effects of 50-70 GHz EMF on biology, first one is heating, which is completely expected but might cause problems for insects. (But we already blast them with a lot of light at night, a lot of heat from the pavement and our buildings, and a lot of chemicals in the air.) Another interesting one is that cell bacterial division seems to be affected when combined with antibiotics. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261425 )
The towers are also spread more densely, with smaller cells and lower power, which also lowers peak exposure levels. For devices, just the fact they only have to transmit a short distance to a local tower tells you about the energy.
You are probably getting more cancer risk for stress hormones caused by the Instagram/Twitter on your phone than the electric field it generates, no matter how 'patterned' or polarised the field is.
Correlation != causation. And the author does not ask for caution and research, he asks directly for limits on the technology.
It's a strong self-identification with technology who instills a fear of appearing as a luddite, like the unwashed masses who fear this or that and fall for hoaxes about the dangers of safe substances (vaccines, chemicals) and harmless technologies.
But it can also be thought-stopping, and more emotional based than empirical.
But we have a lot of data (even if not as an enormous pile as about WiFi), and we know that so far the evidence points to no unexpected effects. There are interesting avenues of inquiry about the effects of 50-70 GHz on biology (heating of insects, interference with bacterial growth), of course those effects are a lot smaller than what we already do from air pollution to manufacturing an dumping lot of chemicals everywhere, heating our cities, and so on.
Do hugs cause cancer? If yes, then we can start narrowing it down to 3G/5G more after that. But by that stage I think we're doomed as a species anyway.
Of course that's one thing that we know about, we can reason about, and that's why people are not getting boiled.
> the wattage of a human at rest is 100W which is roughly equivalent.
We know these pretty well, but they are not trivial (due to non-linearity creeping in).
So any proposed grey area would in fact have to be a total surprise outlier, where EM far less energetic then visible light tripped over some biological weak spot.
It's strange the relation you pointed with anti-vaxers. I think that the fear to 5G and vaccines are very similar, but it a very emotionally load topic, so mixing them is a bad idea.
"The cancer morbidity rate for RF/MW-exposed personnel for all age groups (20-59 years) reached 119.1 per 100,000 annually (57.6 in non-exposed) with an OER of 2.07, significant at P < 0.05."
[1] https://www.brusselstimes.com/brussels/55052/radiation-conce...
This is just some youtuber soccer moms spreading FUD.
And I don't think the government of Belgium consists entirely of youtube soccer moms but there are probably some of them :)
Autism researcher from Harvard Medical School is not convincing.
- More 5G towers operating in the same frequency/power range as 4G means less RF energy emitting from your Phone to the (now nearer) tower.
- The emissions from the towers to the phones should also be less, because A) they need to emit less energy to reach the (now nearer) handset, and B) the "fountain coding" in 5G means that less data packages need to be transmitted to carry the same data payload as 4G. Of course, this is counterbalanced by the probably higher data usage under 5G.
- Beam-forming millimeter-wave antennas cannot penetrate flesh, so won't try to establish links in that direction. Regular 4G frequencies do (and, use your head as an antenna element). So, transitioning from 4G frequencies to millimeter-wave should reduce the amount of your-head-is-an-antenna utilization for a set amount of data...
And if anything, what time has shown me is that the for-profit people will not operate these right. As regular people, we can of course choose to stop buying 5G phones, as long as we do have other sources of Internet.
My personal mobile internet usage has shown me that it is grossly expensive, underutilized and doesn't majorly solve a speed problem for me - only remote connectivity.
And no, I don't need more cancerous substances than there are. Especially after watching Chernobyl, I sure as hell don't need radiation messing around with my cellular structure.
In short, 5G is unnecessary in most cities, and the risks outweigh the benefits, IMO.
>>We conclude that, because scientific knowledge is incomplete, a precautionary approach is better suited to State obligations under international human rights law.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...
As soon as there is a high-bandwidth transmitter very close to me - headache comes in seconds.
I've done blind tests holding non-remitting iPad or the one streaming 1080p movies at high bitrate and easily able to tell when there is no radiation.
It has been widely studied and no proof of such an ability exists. Would love to see some proof of this from you
Many people have been studied who present with these symptoms. They are consistently unable to detect the presence of fields.
PS I can already see fault with the experiment in which the streaming devices are likely to be warmer.
Once I set at the table next to my friend's open laptop and started feeling those head 'cramps' immediately as he started downloading a large ISO. Put on pause - the feeling subsides in a minute.
Doesn't feel like a pain, def. not sharp pain, but a significant discomfort, sort of a little brain earthquake. I don't know why EMF sensitivity is not properly studied, as it's def. not a myth!
Also worth noting that an iPad playing high bitrate video will be warmer than one which isn't; I could probably tell the difference too.
It began with a Sony Ericsson, but happened across a couple of different phone brands over the years. Still happens extremely occasionally now (maybe twice a year) with my iPhone.
I'd be interested to know if the signal strength is suddenly spiked when a call is connected.
Let me repeat, this is not a proper SciAm article in which some actual academics condense their interesting research into something more easily understood by people outside the field.
This is an Op-Ed. It's an opinion. And more specifically, it's an opinion from someone who is most certainly not unbiased.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4503846/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6240172/
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190429005914/en/Stu...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1607551X1...
I definitely would like to avoid 5G beam forming aimed at my crotch if I wanted to have more children. But isn't that sort of close to where we all hold our phones when we are siting? Yikes.
On the damage Wifi is shown to do here, let's say it doesn't only show up in sperm but also in other cells.
Now imagine a pregnant woman, the unborn child being a girl. She's five months into her pregnancy. The unborn girl has at this point in time, in her own ovaries, already developed fully all the egg-cells she'll have for the rest of her life. Now imagine damaging those cells. How long before that shows up? Two generations.
It pains me to see pregnant women carelessly using an iPad on their belly to watch Netflix.
Sorry for ranting, thanks again for the info.
>"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents."
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis...
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.
Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.
5G covers a huge spectral range starting at, yes, 5 GHz.
5GHz is coming out of every home router built in the last couple years. If it was unsafe, we would probably know about it. (Let’s say ‘unsafe’ as in, “it is ‘unsafe’ to drive a car” since we need some baseline risk tolerance).
The article claims this is in fact the case. Quote:
"We are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation."
I've clicked a few cited papers and they are all behind a paywall, so I can't make my own opinion how justified this claim is.
I would be more likely to believe this risk if it was showing up as hand tumors since most people are now carrying phones far more often then holding them up to the head.
It would however be interesting if the known decrease in male sperm count worldwide was actually attributed to cellular devices in the pocket.
How about a “maybe it’s a factor and we should do some research first because we just don’t know” argument?
Honestly, my alarm bells ring when people get this polarized and passionate about a topic that shouldn’t be that intense.
Maybe they're killing us, but damned if I'll be that guy.
A small increase in cancer incidence seems like less of a danger than hurricane path predictions being off by 300 miles less than a week out (https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/5g-buildout-likely-to-put-we... and many others)
I scanned through some of the mouse studies, but they all had the same problem for me: to see effects, they blasted the mice with huge powers, on the order of 1 W/kg absorbed. For reference, the human body itself, through all its metabolic activity, barely generates that much. If you were absorbing anything near 1 W/kg of power at any frequency, you would start overheating, as if you'd just stepped out into the midday sun. Increase that by a few times, and you would probably shortly die, by literally being cooked. So I think most of those studies can be safely discarded. Anything is bad for you at those crazy intensities, which are far higher than what you get from a cell phone.
Of course, this leaves a lot of other studies that may or may not be more solid -- but without more time I can't draw any solid opinions.
Joel Moskovitz was co-author on a meta-analysis (https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2008.21.6366) that claimed to find a link between mobile phone use and brain tumours. However, this was a meta-analysis of case-control studies, which is the weakest form of study (worse even than a prospective observational cohort study). The problem here is they essentially had to ask people who did or not have tumours how much they used their mobile phones and trust them, which introduces the obvious issue that people with brain tumours who had heard that phones may cause cancer are probably going to report higher usage of mobile phones than those without tumours. Moskowitz even notes this in the discussion of his paper. He even notes that other, better, better, prospective cohort studies have found no evidence for a link between cellphones and cancer (https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/93/3/203/2906436), but dismisses the study because they looked at subscription data rather than examining 'actual exposure to mobile phones' (which his study didn't do either).
This fear mongering, with no a priori theoretical justification and no evidential basis from people who've checked anyway just to be safe, muddies the waters and distracts from real environmental problems like air pollution causing respiratory diseases. This isn't quite as bad as promoting antivaxxer positions, which are imbecilic because the benefits from vaccines obviously outweigh the costs even if they did cause autism, but it's getting awfully close.
Sounds like he's noting that the link found is (as you say) weak to non-existent. Which supports the claim in this Scientific American article: that studies are inconclusive and as such we have no reason to believe the technology is safe.
Also worth pointing out here (as I have elsewhere) that the ACSH link is not from reputable org. It seems to be the only link people are posting and re-posting to rebut Moskowitz's research here on HN.
What a bizarre statement. I'm curious where you get this notion that things are perfectly safe a priori. What examples do you have where this has been the case? X-ray? Asbestos? Cigarette smoke? Freon? Lead? Certainly they're evidence of things that were accepted as such.
While I do think that studies should be continued for a more definitive answer, and I personally don't feel a strong need for a 5G network as of now, I am more on the defaults to safe side.
I wish that I weren't so cynical, but I just don't think that anything would stop the initial deployment of something like this.
The amount of money that is expected to be made by content creators, network operators, and everyone in between, just makes it incredibly unlikely that health concerns would be taken seriously.
Unless you could force these companies to account for health outcomes as a real cost of doing business and not an externality that could be fobbed off on the legal system or public budgets...I just don't see how you change it.
23.8 GHz is the frequency water vapor in the atmosphere emits, which is what weather radars are looking for. A bunch fo 24 GHz signals all over the place are going to screw it up.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...
My vote would be fix the often abysmal wired networks first.
MIMO is Multi-Input Multi-Ouput, surely?
There does appear to be such a thing as Massive MIMO, which they might mean?
The higher bandwidth (up to 10 Gbps) and higher cell density should support quite a few simultaneous video feeds to a central government location.
You are right that the slippery slope has been started already a while ago.
What about the combined energy and interference with the myriad of other waves our bodies are subjected to?
5G is also pretty bad for the environment (netflix, instagram, snapchat are also pretty awful). The amount of energy and resources you need to make all those electronic is gigantic, not to mention the lifespan of a smartphones is so short, smartphones vendors are now trying to add more and more features to make customers replace their phones.
I'm really dying for any electronic brand to release durable hardware, and I'm also eager to have minimal smartphone OS that consume less CPU and memory.
I can't understand that race towards higher bigger everything.
I think it's called growth-economy. Solving things creates new exciting possibilities, which have problems that need solving. We're never satisfied, and that's a good thing. Otherwise we would've stayed in caves
More like "growth-economy with massive hidden externalized costs" - from the obvious like pollution and climate disruption, to subtle ones like economic pato-incentives that distort markets and prevent them from doing their jobs...
> Otherwise we would've stayed in caves
Yeah, but we're long past that state. A cave man can safely externalize stuff like recycling, and even most of food production to NATURE. We can't.
I love growth-economy per se, but our current brand of it is messed up, and markets don't seem to be good enough at pricing all the nasty externalities. We need to invent quickly some extra devices that price this stuff in at a global scale (doing it per country CAN'T work!) IF we want to keep our beloved growth-economy!
Otherwise we'll default to the crappy solutions of ducktape-enviro-socialism + state-capitalism + islands of "free" markets here and there, dragging ourselves through a new f dark age from war to war...
Would you prefer we revert to manufacturing plastic VHS tapes, then distribute them by diesel trucks like we used to in the good old days?
Would you prefer people get their morning news on broadsheets made from the bleached pulp of rainforest trees?
Or would you like to go back to the good old days of AM radio when the inadequacy of the receiver electronics was compensated for by sheer power at the transmitter, to the tune of megawatts of broadcast power?
You're probably one of those people who would prefer to breathe in lungfuls of woodsmoke rather than bathe your skin in the harmful rays of electric light.
I agree.
Remember: reduce, reuse, recycle is a hierarchy. Reduction is far more effective than the other two.
Like glasses with sensors in them so the waiter at a restaurant would know where he needed to go to refill someone's glass.
This was in a context where it definitely was not an ironic jab at the overuse of technology.
I don't know if the product actually exists, but honestly. Honestly. Smart wine glasses! I think it's just like... a really, really dumb idea. And if that's the kind of thing that 5G is going to enable, I absolutely do think we should consider it a threat to the environment.
That use case is already enabled by existing 802.15.4 protocols, no need to wait for 5G.
Drinking water shortages are certainly common enough.
Even storing document as PDF instead of paper might be worse after all.
If at least smartphones would be designed to last 4 or 5 years it would make a big difference.
Wirth's law is also an excellent way to describe how computer software is most often horribly designed, and it also plays a huge role in how we could have cheaper and eco-friendly devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
> You're probably one of those people
Lowering yourself to snarky comments is not helping your argument.
- Evidence that cell phones might not be the best thing for you
- Evidence that a vaccine might harm some people
- Evidence that some medical convention is wrong
All of these are things that we absolutely need to know if true, but even good evidence towards these points is dismissed as noise because there's a pseudoscience culture surrounding them.
It's really frustrating to see both social and scientific progress hampered by idiots acting as such.
In that sense, an improvement in the energetic profile is potentially helpful.
An xray or a plain ride is completely fine, but pilots as well as patience have some upper limits. xray is hard alpha radiation, but do you know how xrays are created?
He is a wifi / cell phone radiation "truther" who thinks the EMF in everyday devices causes cancer
https://www.acsh.org/news/2007/02/16/cell-phone-dangers-stil...
The fact that this is in Scientific American, even in the Opinion section, is simultaneously a testament to the openmindedness of science, and quite sad.
After reading his ideas, I think we should all feel a little lucky that Trump hasn't made hime the head of the FCC.
That brings to mind the old saying, "don't be so open-minded your brain falls out."
Also, I'm pretty sure Trump is very much not in the group of "cell phones/EMF/etc. cause cancer" believers.
Speaking of a pro-business bias, the ACSH: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_on_Sc...
it's a true statement, though, that conventional scientists and experts in EMF don't feel there is any real risk of these wavelengths.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/broccoli-i...
[2] https://kfolta.blogspot.com/2019/08/scientific-american-dest...
> ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
> Joel M. Moskowitz
Argue it then. Many readers will have never heard this name.
Edit: I was also prompted to spend ~30 seconds researching who ACSH are since everyone critiquing Moskowitz in this HN thread seem to be posting links from that website alone. Didn't take long to discover they're a privately funded pro-industry advocacy group.
I took the numbers from the country I'm familiar with (The Netherlands, which has excellent cell phone penetration), and no matter how I look, if I correct for age, they've only been decreasing. The Dutch registry is also one of the most complete of all European countries.
See https://imgur.com/a/FiNrVCQ, x-axis is year of diagnosis, y-axis is Incidence per 100.000. I used European Standardized Rate correction to correct for changes in age distribution, which is standard here. Top blue line is total, the other lines all denote different origins.
Does he have industry ties that we should be aware of, reputation issues, conflicts of interest, something else?
[0] https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis...
The article uses personal insult (calling the guy a charlatan) but does not say much about why he disagrees with those positions.
I see no companies on the name of Joel M. Moskowitz, no products sold, no industry sponsors.
On the other hand, I see a guy with no industry ties being slandered online by no reason, weird.
I don't know anything about the guy, if anyone can chime in on why his opinion is not trustworthy I would like to learn more.
[0] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_on_Sc...
The man been trying that "cellphones give you cancer" since at least 2009, with his earliest attacks being closer to some new age metaphysical bullshit, and only later he started to pull some scientific argument.
He has no real science background, no medical background, he is a psychologist. His "academic network" includes people going into homeopathy, antivaxing, GMO and something bordering on new age and conspiracy cults.
Why UC Berkley still keeps him around, I have no idea.
He is a wifi / cell phone radiation "truther" who thinks the EMF in everyday devices causes cancer
https://www.acsh.org/news/2007/02/16/cell-phone-dangers-stil...
After reading his ideas, I think we should all feel a little lucky that Trump hasn't made hime the head of the FCC.
edit: posting as primary reply, because the point is important, but was downvoted because of how obliquely it was made.
I hadn't heard of ACSH, so checked their about page:
> a pro-science consumer advocacy organization
A consumer advocacy org. Not a scientific research council, as —I would argue—their name highly implies.
Their about page also says:
> We do not represent any industry. We were created to be the science alternative to “news”
The top-3 links in the references section of their Wikipedia page that seem to contradict this line:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/0...
- https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/american-counci...
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/09/magazine/obam...
Tracy Chandler, BSc (Hons) MBChB FRNZCGP FNZSCM, PGDipSEM, Cert Dermoscopy, Cert Homeopathy, MACNEM member.
Homeopathy? ummm...red flag.... ok... maybe an anomaly.... who else from NZ?, huh, no one from any credible research org.
Having an additional 'Cert' in homeopathy would be like having a CS degree but also certifying in AWS or Azure products, for example, which wouldn't even necessarily say that I endorse them, perhaps just that I have clients that might like to see that certification.
Equating certifying in a stack or methodology like AWS or Azure with homeopathy lends it 1000X more credit than it deserves.
By all means certify in herbology or natural medicine but if you are a real (equivalent or otherwise) to a medical doctor and you certify in homeopathy you are legitimizing fake bullshit and you should be judged for it. Homeopathy preys on the sick and desperate and deserves no slack.
Maybe this seems overly harsh but people I care about have paid thousands for this bullshit and the smooth talking bullshit salesmen had way to much ""science"" on their side.
A layman looking for medical attention should not be responsible for having to make that distinction. The fact that a layman conflates the two is the issue at hand.
I would not get a certification in computer shamanism, even if it made my clients feel better about me when I mumbled the Old Tongue and clapped my hands above their laptop. If this was something people wanted, I'm sure others with more compromised morals would be happy to set up a certification board and oblige.
I have no ill feelings towards those that believe that computers or human bodies are magic. This is not their fault. I have no respect for professionals that are complicit in this. Shame on them. They are one short step away from professionally proscribing homeopathy because it "makes the client feel better, so the ends justify the means".
Hey, some people believe the placebo pill is ethical. I believe it violates the letter and spirit of informed consent. I feel the same about homeopathy. Homeopathy is bunk no matter how a sick person or salesman or doctor feels about it.
Also, I can now add Blood Sacrifice as an optional extra for my clients, who see the fee as a small price to pay for covering all the bases.
Airport mm-wave machines are somewhere around 24-30 GHz (so around 10mm). (source: https://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_l... )
So far concerns are about insects (heating) and bacterium (antibiotic resistance "could" develop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261425 ). Though the heating effect is probably negligible compared to how cities already radiate a lot more heat and insects are loving it.
Furthermore, if there is any serious new/strange/second-order effect on biology we would have already seen it, as people blasted lab animals with every kinds of EMF and we got only the coincidental expected flukes.
That's a very reasonable general approach. Whether his proposal to stop 5G deployments altogether is proportional to our understanding of the potential risks, if any, is debatable, to say the least.
If made in good faith, yes. I’m not convinced that this is the case here, however, given that the author is fundamentally at odds with the scientific consensus on 2G, 3G and 4G safety, without acknowledging that he’s in the clear minority. In fact, he claims that the majority of relevant experts have signed the 5G moratorium, and this seems to not actually be the case. I actually think that disagreeing with the consensus, based on limited but potentially valid evidence, is completely acceptable. But he goes further and pretends to be in the majority, and that contrary evidence only marginally exists.
In sum, he makes demonstrably false claims about the current state of the scientific consensus, which makes me sceptical of everything else he says.
What's more important, since you mention the 'scientific consensus' and his claim that there isn't enough data is: What is the consensus on 5G (I suppose that means mmWave) and what are the studies it is based on? That would allow to make a factual comment on his claims about health hazards.
That’s true only if we indeed know nothing about 5G, and that’s demonstrably not the case. In fact, the pretend open-mindedness is tantamount to denialism, if we accept that findings on ≤4G translate to 5G, and there are good scientific reasons for thinking so, based on our established understanding of physics and biology. It’s possible that 5G changes the picture, and I am indeed open to the possibility. But at the same time intellectual honestly compels me to describe the chance of this happening as low, given what we generally know about the biological effects of non-ionising radiation.
Put differently: Given what we know, it’s honest to say that 5G might carry risks, but that there is currently no good reason to assume so. It is not honest to claim, as the article does, that “we have no reason to believe 5G is safe”.
This is a reasonable approach and it is a general approach. Now, about 5G, again the question is what we know or don't know about any risks.
If there are no or very few studies about the effect of mmWave then it is indeed reasonable to ask whether precautions should be taken.
You seem to suggest that there are indeed no such studies but that it can be assumed to be safe because emissions in a different part of the spectrum are safe.
Whatever the reality is, this is simply not a scientific approach and does suggest that you have no factual reason to believe that mmWaves are safe (or dangerous actually, you simply don't know).
I am not saying that he is right, but scientifically we cannot just counter his argument by "no, you're wrong".
Citation needed.
I mean it can't be good all this radiation exposure. As far as I know, people living near large electrical wire high tension poles are at a higher risk of cancer already.
I think so much can already be done with the network bandwidth we already have available. Just using a better protocol on top of HTTP, like everything switching to HTTP2 should be a huge improvement.
How much bandwidth more do we really need, we have hit the limits in terms of video on what is noticeable by the human eye already.
As far as you know from what? This might sound harsh, but this is just fearmongering.
HV power lines are, in an electrical sense, very far away from you. Even if magnetic radiation had some health effects, (which as far as we know, it doesn't, which is why MRI's are incredibly non-invasive to people without metal implants of some sort), you are not getting any of that from an HV power line.
The only people I know spouting such things are either charlatans^W salesmen trying make a buck or people that have no understanding or training in electricity. It can't "jump out at you". A power line is not a radio.
There are plenty of microwave towers and satellites and cell phones to be irrationally afraid of. But power lines? Like it just screams "I do not understand electricity or am trying to make a buck off those that don't." There's no radiation coming off that power line that gets to you.
I've seen family houses literally next to high tension poles (not just regular poles, I mean those huge ones many times the height of the house), for example in Portugal.
I don't see any definitive conclusion online for the link between high voltage lines proximity and cancer, but I am not an expert. Seems to me the consensus is far from general.
If nothing else, it looks ugly.
Consensus is not far from general. You don't have to be an expert. If you are really afraid of radiation, talking about power lines really weakens your case. They do almost nothing compared to normal household appliances we use all the time. The inverse square rule is real.
I think to avoid your best bet would be joining an Amish community. And don't go outside, without covering up. The sun's radiation is like, actually proven to be harmful to skin and DNA, and is many times more powerful. Too bad getting sun is also clinically associated with many health benefits! Oh what will we do...
Studies funded by the 5G industry are 10 times more likely to say there are no side effects on human, which is suspect and an indication that is an attempt to manipulate science going on - https://nutritionfacts.org/video/does-cell-phone-radiation-c...
The leading independent organization on cancer causes says that current cell phones are "possible carcinogens" - https://nutritionfacts.org/video/cell-phone-brain-tumor-risk...
Good thing I'm talking about overhead powerlines and not 5G then. Unless your reply was meant for someone else.
Although I believe the chance that 5G is harmful is basically nil, mostly due to my EE degree and a basic understanding of "non-ionizing radiation" and "ionizing radiation", it is probably about 100X more rational than complaining about overhead powerlines.
Seriously I just don't get it what problem do people have with overhead powerlines. Saying overhead powerlines cause cancer is like, on par with calling aircraft contrails "chemtrails" and saying they are part of a nefarious government plot. There are plenty of real nefarious government plots, but you hear people talking again and again about chemtrails because they don't understand aircraft engines or heat or water. Just like there are real issues in the health system, but again and again people cut off the legs of their own argument by going off about overhead powerlines.
Lastly, WTF are those sources? Is nutritionfacts.org a leading independent organization on cancer causes? That is a 5-minute long video of someone doing zoom-highlights on excerpts from studies from 2011. The first comment is someone saying the WHO is bought-out by corporate interests, although, the WHO is like the main ethos argument from the video.
Do you use a cell phone? How do you hide from the other people using their cell phones, or the Wi-Fi rays coming from your computer? If you have a new router, 802.11ad already communicates in the 60Ghz band, that's a pretty big number if big frequency numbers are scary.
It is crucial to understand what this actually means. the IARC classifications are valid but — particularly to lay people — incredibly misleading and pretty much useless. All that “possible carcinogen” means is that we haven’t yet collected sufficient evidence to discount harm. It’s not evidence of carcinogenicity at all. If anything it’s the opposite, because it means that, despite the existence of relevant studies, there hasn’t been any consistent demonstration of carcinogenic effect.
Furthermore, IARC only classifies risk itself, not hazard [1], nor dosage effects.
For context, IARC classifies sunlight exposure and processed meat consumption as “definitely carcinogenic” [2]. Despite this, regular exposure to sunlight is crucial for your health, and regular meat consumption is known to have little absolute effect on cancer risk (in other words, although red meat does have an effect, the effect size is tiny).
[1] https://worksmart.org.uk/health-advice/health-and-safety/haz... [2] https://monographs.iarc.fr/list-of-classifications/
For real VR/AR, 5G is not fast enough, would have to work in the THz regime for wireless (wow, nature has a huge bandwidth requirement...). Interesting thing about THz is that most electronic materials breakdown and stop working.
Researchers are using this effect now with mobile camera sensors and can image on the 100 nm length scale using interpolation.
The light bulbs in your home spew out radiation. The heating of your home is all spewing out radiation. "Radiation exposure" is meaningless without considering whether or not radiation at a given wavelength will interact with your body in detrimental ways at the given power levels (of course, if you heat your home too much, or set fire to it, the infrared radiation/heat will kill you; but we don't for that reason conclude heat is inherently bad) or not.
Talking about "radiation exposure" without being specific about those things is as meaningless as suggesting eating is bad for you because some things are toxic.
Some radiation is very bad for you. Some is essential for you to some extent and dangerous for you if you get too much. Some just won't interact with your body in any way that matters.
> As far as I know, people living near large electrical wire high tension poles are at a higher risk of cancer already.
There is some very limited evidence that shows that strong electromagnetic fields may have some limited effect specifically for incidence rates of childhood Leukemia, but notably only at levels found at too few houses for the researchers to get a large enough sample size to be able to draw conclusions either way. In other words: We don't have any clear evidence of that. We have some research that may hint at some link under conditions to rare for us to have anything conclusive.
It's worth researching, because even a very minor increase in risk would have substantial long term effects, but it's not something that really has any relevance to the safety of 5G at all, any more than the fact that too much infrared radiation (heat) will burn you. They're different things.
[1] provides a detailed walk-through of different claims, sources of electromagnetic fields and radiation and what different studies say about this.
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...