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Comment by landont | Hacker News Reader

> The SAR limit is primarily concerned with a phone’s thermal effects—essentially, the power is limited to 1.6 W/kg to ensure that no one is burned by using their phone.

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.

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Some people do believe that non ionizing radiation has effects other than those produced by the added thermal energy (or that the thermal effects are in some way significant). The actual scientific evidence for this is minimal though.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4676010/

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.

If your phone emits any non-trivial amounts of RF power at 100 kHz-1MHz frequencies, regardless of whether this comes from intermodulation products or something else, it doesn't pass existing EMC regulations and can't be legally sold to consumers.

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).

Not a given if said USB charger is cheaply produced in China.

Yes, you can debate how much imported (or for that matter, domestically produced) stuff is actually tested, but the fact remains that existing laws and regulations do cover this, even if enforcement is maybe lacking.

I'm an ham radio operator, and shortwave spectrum pollution is sadly a big problem despite very strict regulations.

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.

I think police cars should measure it.

It can take hours to pinpoint the location of a specific transmitter with skilled equipment operators.

Or cheaply produced in the US... Most tech I've bought from Shenzhen recently has been of better quality than domestically produced equivalents

But we're talking about what happens after that GHz RF is absorbed by the tissues/fluids in the body. That becomes much more complex. It's not unlike the laser attack on MEMS microphones or a crystal radio powering a speaker in the audio range after receiving AM RF at 1Mhz.

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.

Oh bull. There is no way to prove RF modifies microtubules.

This seems false on its face. Surely that would be a straightforward experiment.

It was

https://youtu.be/voVa7Pj2xUg

There’s definitely an effect. It’s in clinical trials right now.

> Some people do believe that non ionizing radiation has effects other than those produced by the added thermal energy

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)

"If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus."

Appears to contradict

"What is relevant is reproducible results."

Aren't reproducible results a form of consensus?

> 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...

I think this is a semantic argument... If 100 independent scientists reproduce results, those results themselves are a scientific consensus, are they not?

Insofar as it's a semantic argument, it's irrelevant.

> 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.

Yes, at that point the political consensus adopts the results of rigorous scientific testing as it's new bling

Maybe in some degenerate form of consensus, like consensus on raw observations. If one person sees a rise in temperature during a reaction, someone else can say "nuh-uh, la la la".

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.

Just as a counterpoint to what everyone seems to be saying here: there most definitely is science that points towards RF fields having negative health effects for humans, and it is plentiful.

The fact that no-one talks about any of this just goes to show the extent of the lobbying done by the telecom industry.

https://www.emfdata.org/en

> 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.

Exactly. Thank you for sharing that. I was wondering if there is a place that collects this. Not sure if you're related to the site, but when clicking through to an article the site shows german, even though Im visiting in English.

In scientific endeavours we only ever find what we were looking for. If we weren’t looking for non-thermal effects in cells we won’t see them, especially if our model of a cellular mass is a lump of ballistics gel, or a computer model of a skin surface in terms of resistive and capacitative networks.

The reason the scientific evidence is minimal is that we have been using simplistic models of human bodies for RF testing.

If you've ever been in an area where your phone is just barely connected to a tower, and is struggling to keep a connection (and has no better tower to switch to), you'll notice your phone will get quite hot—hotter than it would normally let itself get before thermal-throttling. (Because it's not the CPU getting that hot; it's the antenna+baseband.)

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.)

Sunlight shining on one side of a cube-shaped liter of flesh would be 10W/kg or so on average (and about 100W/kg if we consider the top 1cm).

1.6W/kg is a conservative limit.

Yeah, but it is important to consider the wavelength. Did our cells evolve to handle constant RF exposure?

It's not really relevant for non-ionizing radiation such as RF, as the primary impact on our cells from RF is just heat.

And the thing to know about evolution and life is that life evolved to be robust in the face of changes and different environments.

I'm not an expert but while less dramatic than ionizing radiation, it certainly has more effect than just heat. Think RF can induce potentials especially as it regards cells ion transport, gates. And yeah, my question is more oriented towards whether human life is adapted to RF, I'm sure some bacteria would

On the upper end of the RF spectrum, the thermal radiation given off by us and everything around is is ever present.

I'd sure hope the exposure is orders of magnitude less than sunlight, considering how clear the dangers of sunlight are.

Why? The danger of sunlight is ultraviolet. That's only about 4% of sunlight.

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).

You're absolutely right, different wavelengths of EMR have wildly different effects on humans, so the comparison falls short that way as well.

Most of them just heat, though. And in terms of heat, you don't need to be "orders of magnitude" below sunlight. It's not exactly hard to have two walls in the same room differ by 100 watts per square meter.

Radiowaves are non-ionizing radiation. Your DNA isn't going to be destroyed from anything below UV. Local heating from RF absorbtion might cause issues for certain biological functions but local heating can come from things like a warm laptop sitting above your crotch and reducing sperm count via heat. You need a lot of RF power to cause local heating though, think on the order of a microwave oven, not what a typical phone puts out.

Radio waves, like microwaves, are both infrared photon radiation.

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 total energy capacity of your phones battery is clearly the limit of the output of the device. It's not much.

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.

7 watt hours is an insanely damaging amount! Basically a 7 watt bulb next to you for an hour, or exposure to a 70 watt bulb (that would cause third degree burns in seconds) for six minutes. Yes the peak output of a phone is less than 70 watt but you can do a lot of damage with that much energy.

Please explain, how is the total energy capacity of the whole battery in any way relevant to this discussion?

Well, if you designed some custom electronics to transfer all of that energy at once, directly into your skull... Well that could be dangerous right?

> Basically a 7 watt bulb next to you for an hour, or exposure to a 70 watt bulb (that would cause third degree burns in seconds) for six minutes.

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.

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