A radio frequency exposure test finds an iPhone 11 Pro exceeds the FCC's limit
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
They mean to say that you should expect a power about 6 times higher, (5^2 / 2^2). This is rubbish.
The square of the distance model is for a pair of points. Phones in pockets at such closed distances are more closely modeled by a pair of infinite planes where the power falls off not at all. The real result will be in between, but very much closer to 1 than 6.
I've designed a short-range 'antenna' that is intentionally not impedance matched to the vacuum, and radiates very poorly - but the RF intensity close to the antenna is very high because of this effect.
The base station also tells the phone to back-off. If the TX were running at full power, the battery will die quickly. Leave your phone in a metal, security cubby and your battery will die quickly; no power control and worse-case antenna loading.
Also the highly asymmetric data usage these days. Very little energy on the uplink.
FWIW I design antennas and amplifiers for a living. The only time I'd worry about RF exposure is to the cornea; that is a proven hazard. RF burns are a right of passage for PA designers, and are harmless as it's the outer skin layers.
Which is the best selfish reason to remember to switch on flight mode on an aeroplane. (Also when you’re trekking in areas where you know cell coverage is nonexistent.)
A literal example of skin effect?
Could probably gives non-permanent tattoos with this method.
If the phone can't hear a network (not just faint signal like airplanes on certain heights), would it actually transmit?
I think the battery drain would be from active RX searching for networks instead of sleeping. You get a similar though probably lower effect, when in roaming without setting a fixed network - an idle phone without crapware will burn way more energy.
So... does this mean I will die from radiation or not?
The somewhat related study mentioned in the article was much more interesting in terms of "phones in pockets".
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/tjem/248/3/248_169/_art...
The most basic example from electrostatics: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/elesht.h...
Why rely on a model?
20,000 phones are being sold an hour. Why not buy 200 phone's off 200 shelves and test them comprehensively at 0 mm, 1mm, 2mm, 3mm ..... The cost to volume sold is completely negligible and it is useful consumer information as 3 percent of the population is electrosensitive.
An estimated 30 million people suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue) in the world and the average diagnosis takes seven years. Chronic health conditions are increasing exponentially. Healthy people aren't sensitive to environmental stimuli but unhealthy people are and the number of chronically unhealthy people grows by the day as livers strain under the stressors and weakening of modernity.
Turn your wifi off in your house at night and see if you sleep any better. Pretty simple anecdotal experiment. A house without the wifi on or excess electrical componentry on has a nicer feel. We did not evolve with this electromagnetic radiation and the cost of testing is negilible given the global population's growing exposure to it and something interesting may fall out of the research.
The risk of Apple having to make slight design modifications if research raises an issue is not a huge concern of mine. One hours phone sales should cover it and then they could further differentiate their products and raise prices.
How many electrical engineering schools are there in the world? Sounds like a great way for a university to get their staff free Iphones with a research grant.
It's a disorder made up by hypochondriacs. If you said 3 percent of the population are hypochondriacs then I would believe you.
Much like the Earth going around the sun, bacon causing cancer, BPA in plastic being bad (and now the substitutes too) etc. etc.
It's always not true until we discover it is.
capacitive touch is derived by galvanic response that can be impacted by pH balance and electrochemistry.
potassium is used to reduce the impacts of gamma radiation (wrong band, but not irrelevent)
microwaves can be lethal from a distance of 1 km (death ray)
there is so much radiation in the air, to study the affects of one wave length i'd suppose you'd need multiple band pass filters to narrow the band in question and a noise generator for controlled results.
You can sense heat, can't you? If your phone is really warm in your pocket, will you notice? Higher output from the radios = more electricity flowing = more heat generation. You will likely notice this.
On another note, do you have eyes? They are sensitive to various frequencies of electromagnetic radiation (i.e, the visible spectrum). Some people are more attuned to the outer edges of this (infrared, and ultra-violet).
Seems a bit aggressive to dismiss all electrosensitivity as "not a thing", considering people are obviously very sensitive to different forms of EMR.
If you disagree, try standing in a fire, or sleeping with a spotlight on your face.
As for possibly almost seeing things like WiFi, that's also pretty preposterous. WiFi operates at 2.4 or 5.8GHz. Your eyes start to get sensitive EM waves at about 4000000000GHz (lower end of what is commonly called visible spectrum). Even if you were at the ultra extreme low end of sensitivity, you still wouldn't really be anywhere near the frequency range required.
So for your example of standing in a fire or having a spotlight on your face, you'd need for it to be a practically room temperature fire or a millionth of a candle spotlight. The scales you're comparing to are just silly to the point of being meaningless.
They're all just whinging man. Not one of them ever hoped it was all in their head and they could think their way out of it.
Hacker News is a perfect subset of people lacking the perspective to consider exploring the possibility that electrosensitivity is a thing that occurs with declining health.
Why so much negativity about researching something so ubiquitous? Let's discuss inverse power laws and quadratic functions, maybe we can build a machine learning model with our deficient statistics instead of taking two hundred phones out of two billion and testing their electromagnetic radiation at multiple distances and angles so we actually have a reliable model.
There's nothing wrong with researching electrosensitivity to see if it's real, and to what extent. Heck, I've designed studies to test it (never carried out). The problem is not researching it, yet continuing to insist that it is the reason for people's "unexplainable" chronic pain / fatigue when there's currently zero non-anecdotal evidence for it.
But I'm not really seeing research from electrosensitivity proponents, and especially not double blind studies. Instead, I'm seeing requests for fairly massive accommodations (along the lines of eliminating all Wifi and Cell phone radiation within a certain radius of a person), backed by not a whole lot of scientific evidence (unless one counts "Rudolf Steiner would have said so" as scientific evidence).
And I'm not even seeing many reports of such accommodations working to the long term benefit of the sufferers. Instead, once the Wifi is gone, they seem to develop MCS, etc. To me, that would support the prior that the suffering (which itself is undoubtedly real) is likely to have endogenous rather than environmental causes.
Once the wifis gone the MCS patients spend more time sitting in front of wired digital display devices activating their central cortexes burning through their constrained glutamate supplies (which is also the most probable reason blind people don’t develop schizophrenia)which depletes their glutathione which increases their pathogenic load and inflammation while their spinal column is degenerating and inflaming from the sitting and those two things have a larger negative effect on them than the positive effect of the reduction in wifi exposure.
The disappointment at their failed remedy further aggravates their condition and nobody is interested in their next bright idea for alleviating their condition. So they live their life out labelled as a whinger and their negative emotions contribute further to their health decline.
They won't recover while exposed to er but because removing er won't cure them this is not a reason for not benefiting from minimising exposure.
Spinal function and glutathione production is as or more important for MCS suffers than a reduction in ER exposure which is important but nobody tells them that and I've no idea how to prove it but at least Im thinking about it while recovering from ME which has more utility than telling them to just get on with it.
The end of back pain book by surgeon Patrick Roth will gradually fix anyone's spinal function with a kettle bell and exercise ball.
Diet and sleep will gradually fix glutathione production.
No one will make money from researching this so Dr's are forced to ask patients to just harden up. There's a lot of benefit in hardening up as well but it won't recover spinal function or increase glutathione production or decrease er or chemical sensitivity.
Serum ferritin is an accute phase reactant that elevates due to inflammation from acute and sometimes chronic illness or heritable genetic mutation.
When someone is ill and inflamed and fatigued and they have excess serum ferritin circulating in their blood which contains 4500 iron atoms per molecule and absorbs electromagnetic radiation it interferes with their biochemistry.
Why people scoff at investigating the prevalence of electromagnetic radiation exposure when there is a causative mechanism for elevated risk in sick people is because of either arrogance or ignorance. Maybe if the doctors listened to patients instead of diagnosing hypochondria when dealing with edge cases health outcomes would begin to actually you know improve.
This is Iranian research. So what. They have brilliant scientists. Serum ferritin absorbs and is affected by electromagnetic radiation and is highly elevated in sick people. As my serum ferritin has reduced from 1200 to under 310 through venesection and lifestyle I have gradually been able tolerate exposure to electromagnetic radiation without being fatigued by it for extended periods. People running a daily energy budget become pretty adept at working out what burns through their energy and electromagnetic radiation exposure definitely does and bored sick people definitely want to use wireless devices but can't. The hypochondria diagnosis is illogical when it comes to electrosensititivity.
I’m not saying it causes an illness I’m saying if you have a certain subset of illness it increases your fatigue. It also hurts your hands but you aint never gonna believe that ha ha. Iphone 7s are the worst.
I’m getting better and so is my tolerance to er so I’m not overly concerned about myself.
It’s the millions of other edge cases wrongly labelled as whingers by the medical system that I feel for.
ER doesn’t cause fatigue it exacerbates it in certain people. I better look at those hundreds of studies to figure out why I’m so wrong about this.
I don’t want to sell anyone a tinfoil hat or phone case and reducing exposure to er at night is great for sleep and CO2 emissions so why wouldn’t you.
Its not even funny how ignorant people are but let me rub it in: that one doesnt want to know there are biological effects has no more than placebo level effect. It is still an effect tho.
The "I'm not aware of any such research" should rule out any conclusion. Unawareness is only evidence of it self.
Personally im more worried about having my attentionspan cut into small chunks by endless notifications and having my sleep interupted.
I actually own the fancy rf measurment toys. Odly the most comfortable spot to sleep in the house also has the lowest measurments. Its sohh anecdotal, i know, i know..
This needs to be a blind test, e.g. you track your sleep quality over a longer period of time while a script turns wifi off on random nights.
Of course, that adds to the BOM and manufacturers love shaving off fractions of a penny. Asking them to add an extra 50 cents of parts for something consumers don't think about prior to purchase is a lost cause.
I approximate that by using a pin to poke a hole in the electrical or gaffer tape that I use to cover the lights.
I don't mind having a nightlight on when I sleep, I think it helps me fall asleep quicker rather than pitch black but bright blue lights that fill the fucking room with light are the devil. I have much less electronics in my bedroom now since I now have personal space other than my bedroom to put stuff.
I eventually got fed up that I broke the LED with some fingernail clippers. The device never turned on again.
I'm a pretty easy going person in life but learned how mad I could get over time at a pointlessly bright light and the people who put it there.
A healthy person can endure a toxic environment. An unhealthy person becomes more unhealthy from increased toxicity.
I’m not saying electromagnetic radiation makes a healthy person unwell i’m saying it delays or worsens recovery of some unhealthy people and there are million different subsets of unhealthy people so which subset are you going to run the double blind placebo on before you decide reduce electromagnetic radiation while you sleep.
It’s a simple experiment anyone can try. Two weeks of camping is an effective insomnia treatment as per research which eliminates electromagnetic radiation from the equation. I think its a zeitgeber in subsets sick people but there’s no profit in researching that so the only tools you have are existing research, intuition, self observation and logic.
People figure out how to sex chickens without a causative mechanism. It isn’t a placebo effect or a double blind trial. Electrochemical gradients as per Michael Levins research affect genetic expression. Much like hedging one’s bet by believing in a creator just in case reducing your exposure to RF at zero cost is the smartest thing someone can do with the available evidence.
> Two weeks of camping is an effective insomnia treatment
Or two weeks away from the grind reduces stress. Or getting away from artificial lights/schedules reduces stress. Or it selects for people+times with less stressed. Or more healthy. Or higher SES. Or you're getting away from pollution. Or you need temperature variation to feel healthy. Or any two of those. Or three! Many plausible explanatory factors compete with RF, and you'd have to control for them in order to point the finger at RF. That's not impossible, and not even particularly difficult, but it does mean that you can't go on a camping trip, get better sleep, and then use that as proof that RF was to blame for your insomnia.
> People figure out how to sex chickens without a causative mechanism. It isn’t a placebo effect or a double blind trial.
The double blind trial is how you establish whether or not something is a placebo.
> Electrochemical gradients as per Michael Levins research affect genetic expression.
You need to blind you studies whether or not you have a plausible mechanistic explanation. You don't need a plausible mechanistic explanation to blind your studies.
> Much like hedging one’s bet by believing in a creator just in case
Which one(s)?
> reducing your exposure to RF at zero cost
Foregoing the advantages of technology is not zero cost. If you mean that turning your router off at night is zero cost, go ahead! I don't take issue with that.
I do take issue with spreading unblinded anecdata, because whether or not RF-induced-insomnia is real, RF-anxiety-induced-insomnia is definitely real, and anecdata like your own definetly spread it. If RF-induced-insomnia is real, that's for the best, but if what you experienced was a placebo (and I'd bet a substantial sum of money that it was), then unblinded anecdata literally are the problem. And that's not cool.
In the privacy of your own home: do what works and ignore the haters!
In society: please apply good experimental technique before causing anxiety in others. It's only polite.
What I've stated is that I experienced increased fatigue from exposure to ER while I was seriously ill and had elevated serum ferritin.
Each ferritin molecule has 4500 iron atoms and serrin ferritin increases with acute or chronic viral infections. A healthy level is less than fifty. So a 1150 times increase in iron atoms in someone's blood could plausibly cause fatigue when it absorbs er.
Who does this cause anxiety in exactly?
How is turning off electronic devices going to cause anxiety?
People can turn them off. If it helps great. If it doesn't don't bother.
No anxiety necessary.
You might be better educated than me, better connected than me and more intelligent but there's something to be said for original thought. I'd love to take you up on your bet where you impolitely just called me a whinger. I think I'm smarter than you are just sayin there wasn't one insightful thing in your comment as you tried to apply a method that doesn't really fit the situation. How do we do this? Let's bet our hacker News anonymous reputations on it.
If you truly cared about this topic, I assume you would want to know if the effect is real, or just your mind playing a trick on you.
Perhaps somewhat bizarrely, maybe even if they know it's only placebo:
> In these four studies patients were randomised to receive open label placebo (pills described as "inert placebos containing no medication") plus usual treatment or usual treatment[...]
> The consistency and magnitude of symptomatic relief across these studies—performed in hospitals on two continents—suggest that open label placebo may have a real therapeutic benefit.
It's also frequently incorrect.
These are different things. A blinded test would eliminate the peace of mind component and allow you to determine if there's a physical effect from the wi-fi being on or not.
I should be worried about the heat generated from my phone? I thought maybe there was some issue with RF and my cells, but this seems like a complete nonissue to me. Am I being foolish for writing this off? The only time my phone is going to burn me is if the battery explodes, which doesn't seem to be a pervasive issue. So probably not. As someone else pointed out this is a marketing ploy.
Essentially EM fields alternating in the low to medium frequency bands (~100khz-1mhz) can disrupt cell processes by physically jiggling the polar molecules that make up portions of miotic spindles/microtubules. Among presumably other things this effect is being investigated as a cancer fighting mechanism called 'tumor treating fields'.
The carrier frequency of mobile phones is obviously far beyond the range in question, but there could be signal modulation components that alternate RF power levels in this frequency range.
This is something that is already (or should be, in theory) rigorously tested for everything that's put on the consumer market (from your cheapest USB charger to your iPhone).
Realistically we've been beaming our brains for decades now without a glut of brain tumors, but we might just be getting lucky, and if we don't know what to look for it could bite us later.
The unfortunate reality is that the market is flooded with noisy devices, often cheaply produces overseas, that vastly exceed legal limits (chargers and other rectifiers, plasma televisions, powerline adapters, and much more).
Enforcement is difficult due to how widespread these devices are.
In many places, the noise floor is to high that long-range shortwave radio communications all but impossible.
There’s definitely an effect. It’s in clinical trials right now.
The fact that no-one talks about any of this just goes to show the extent of the lobbying done by the telecom industry.
If monsanto could do it, then others can too. I'm impressed by how quickly everyone decided that the scientific cover-up monsanto pulled off was a one-time event that couldn't possibly happen anywhere else.
Some people believe vaccines cause Down's Syndrome.
"Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period." - Michael Crichton (https://tinyurl.com/vcxj2ex)
Appears to contradict
"What is relevant is reproducible results."
Aren't reproducible results a form of consensus?
Not in the least. "Reproducible results" represents the technical and methodological ability to confirm that an effect is real. "Consensus" is whether a political body is willing to admit that the effect is real.
And we all know politics finds truth to be...
> If 100 independent scientists reproduce results, those results themselves are a scientific consensus
Not in any sense that's relevant to the discovery of new information or its verification.
Other forms of scientific disagreement happen, but those disagreements imply different predictions, and can be resolved with more experiments.
Science is a process that bootstraps broad agreements (scientific laws) from very tiny agreements (observations). The fact that a broad agreement (consensus) exists carries no weight if one lone wacky scientist can show reproducible observations that contradict it.
The reason the scientific evidence is minimal is that we have been using simplistic models of human bodies for RF testing.
Often, this heat will be localized to where the antenna is located—I've noticed that my iPhone 8 will sometimes feel burning hot along its right edge, for example, and no amount of closing applications or disabling radios will cool it down. The only thing for it, usually, is to turn it off entirely, such that the baseband stops receiving power. (For some reason, upon turning it back on, it doesn't heat back up, even if I haven't moved—perhaps because the baseband's criteria for connecting to towers is stricter than its criteria for staying connected to towers.)
1.6W/kg is a conservative limit.
Oh and it's worth mentioning that everything around you at room temperature is emitting 400 watts per square meter of infrared. That's almost as much infrared as you get from the sun (1kW total, roughly 4% ultraviolet, 53% infrared, 43% visible).
And the thing to know about evolution and life is that life evolved to be robust in the face of changes and different environments.
They both carry energy that is turned into heat when absorbed by your body.
https://cdn.instructables.com/FF5/5DDL/GLL4ZIC0/FF55DDLGLL4Z...
This is in contrast with ionizing radiation, which causes chemical changes to the materials of your body when it hits you. That kind of radiation is above the visible spectrum when made of photons, or made of different atomic particles
The iPhone 11 is 7 watt hours, so 25 kilojoule. Wolfram alpha helpfully tells me this is about the same energy as burning 0.64 grams of coal or 0.66 grams of human fat.
I downvoted you because this is incorrect. You're ignoring the skin's ability to dissipate heat. Brief exposure to high heat does not have the same effect as extended exposure to low heat.
This is on ieee.org. The article mentioned this[1] other test by the Chicago Tribune. This isn't purely an advertisement though it serves that purpose a bit.
It's disputed because they only tested 2 iPhones.
> There are reasons to take the results with a grain of salt, however. McCaughey clarified that Penumbra supplied RF Exposure Labs with one iPhone 7 and one iPhone 11 Pro for the tests—phones the company had purchased off the shelf. He attributed not testing more phones to the cost of purchasing multiple iPhones
This is also important:
> More notably, when the FCC conducted a follow-up investigation after the Tribune published its story, the agency did not find evidence that any of the phones exceeded SAR limits. That said, while the Tribune and Penumbra both used off-the-shelf phones, the FCC largely tested phones supplied by the manufacturers, including Apple.
It raises the question whether Apple and others supplied the FCC with phones that are different from what they sell.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-cell-phone-...
That weasel word “largely” isn’t helpful. They either only tested supplied phones, which may raise suspicions; or they also tested phones sourced from other channels, however insignificantly, suggesting problems with the third-party tests, or they would have noticed the anomaly. “Largely” ostensibly points to the latter, but it could also mean “we don’t know”.
What weirds me out is that they’ll send them to these third party labs and repeatedly test some small number (possibly one) of devices until it’s right up against what’s allowed. That feels less than scientific and probably wrong although I’m not sure what I’d change.
Such behavior has already been shown by automobile manufacturers during the "diesel-gate" incidents.
Remember that this is fundamentally a legal/social thing that involves engineering/science and not the other way around.
Before the tin-foil crowd calls regulators stupid, I'd like to point out that in the absence of cheating this allows hardware engineers to do a better job & design a system that is robust to software shenanigans. That's a nice thing. Maybe we cannot have nice things, but if so, let's prove it rather than presuppose it.
I'd estimate the likelihood of cheating by looking to see if people are choosing phones on the basis of EIRP the way they choose cars based on MPG. I don't see that happening, so I estimate that the likelihood of cheating is low, and would vote to keep the cooperative model around.
“Double the energy limit” sounds a lot, but for a lot of these labs that’s inside of the error range of their equipment.
> Penumbra was conducting the test, which also included testing an iPhone 7, to study its Alara phone cases, which the company says are designed to reduce RF exposure in a person
This speaks to a method that can be used to game the system. What prevents manufacturers from providing phones that are somehow different from the off the shelf versions? I'm not suggesting that's happening here. Just that the testing process is easily hacked.
There is nothing stopping the FCC from confirming their test results with retail units. Plus, the risk from cheating is enormous. It’s a lot easier in the long run to just design properly working phones.
Designing to the test is different than carefully selecting (or altering) a sample that passes the test.
I guess it could be theoretically possible for Apple to software cheat the FCC but it really does seem easier to just make a phone that meets the specifications.
Nothing, I imagine. The only certain foil for this is random sampling of retail products. No reliance on manufacturer probity required. Post VW dieselgate the need for this is self evident. At least to anyone that isn't a lawyer in a government bureaucracy.
1. saying something is impossible is not a scientific statement
2. RF is capable of specifically affecting enzyme reactions, random example: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/nr/c4nr0...
Risk management is more than just universal risk aversion.
[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-cell-phone-...
Probably the least common scenario is for a phone to be transmitting at full power when it's not in close contact with a human.
How do you convert to watts/kilogram?
Maybe measure the surface of my cross-section, multiply by mW/m², divide by my weight?
I have a Cornet ED88T, a GQ-390, and a Tenmars on order.