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Comment by skulk | Hacker News Reader

I had to scroll for a while to get past the politics or explanations of how the radiation is produced. Here's the only explanation I could find of what "harmful" entails:

> Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, opening up calcium channels, for example, and allowing calcium to flow into the cell and into the mitochondria within the cell, interfering with our natural cellular processes and leading to the creation of stress proteins and free radicals and, possibly, DNA damage. And, in other cases, it may lead to cell death.

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All very speculative, note that these findings never come from physicists or engineers working on wireless technologies.

If cell phones caused even a small increase in cancer rates we would be seeing a massive epidemic, what we see instead is a steady decline in overall cancer rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184566/deaths-by-cancer-...

I'm not a fan of the cell phone EM theories necessarily, but both of the reasons you gave aren't sound. First off, physicists will not be the ones conducting studies about the biological impact of EM waves. That is the wrong department. Secondly, an overall decline could be compatible with dangerous phone rays if there is a larger effect going on in the opposite direction, for example the decreasing environmental concentrations of carcinogens which were discovered and banned recently.

Wouldn't we have seen a massive spike in head / mouth / throat cancer, though, even if the overall cancer rates had gone down?

We might, if we weren't messing with the “proportion smokers” control variable.

> these findings never come from physicists or engineers working on wireless technologies

It's not hard to believe that there's pressure from the telecom industry to not find out these kinds of things. However, it seems quite feasible for a lab today to rigorously measure the effect of cellphone radiation on voltage-gated calcium channels to verify these claims.

>these findings never come from physicists or engineers working on wireless technologies

nor would I expect them to. if we are talking about cell damage, i'm not wanting to hear from an electrical engineer. i want to hear from a medical professional specializing in cellular activity. a cancer doctor, some sort of micro biologist, or something in that realm would be much more credible when discussing the damage of cells due to whatever cause.

Show me studies where these doctors are working with physicists to setup the RF in controlled environments to study the effects of the radio waves on cellular activity, then I'll be much more interested. There's just too much fringe people pushing this that my natrual inclinations is to not believe it. However, that's not to say that I am unwilling to change my mind if shown actual evidence versus what's there now. I'm just saying I haven't seen any.

A simple Ames test study I found after doing quick googling: https://journals.lww.com/eurjcancerprev/Abstract/2005/04000/.... No real mutagenic effect. Granted this does not exclude the ability for it to be carcinogenic in another manner, but I would doubt such a result.

Edit: some additional thoughts. There is a controversial treatment using EMF to treat glial blastomas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_electric_field_the...), the proposed mechanism is that it interrupts mitosis. This method is unlike the one put forward by Dr. Moskowitz which relies on an increase in necrosis/apoptosis.

But this comes from “electromagnetic field scientists”.

I'm an engineer working with the best physicists and engineers in wireless technology. None of us know anything about biology. Why would we?

The only time I have ever seen anyone consider biology has been work outsourcing modelling hands for antenna design for handsets.

More importantly, most 911 emergency calls (and subsequent saved lives) are now done on cell phones presumably in situations where there are no land lines. This increase in saved lives massively outweights any tiny effects from RF.

This is tangential to the subject discussed. I don't think it's about banning wireless technologies but rather more responsible use - if the negative influence actually exists, and if it's significant enough.

EM fields are constantly modulated in nature with each slightly different medium they pass through. A rainbow for example is basically an EM modulation.

Are they really claiming that cell-phone radiation is dangerous because it's like rainbows?

Wait until they hear about cosmic rays and neutron flux…

Nobody questions the negative effects of ionizing radiation. The issue in question is the influence of non-ionizing radiation beyond short-term thermal effects.

I think it's talking about time modulation, not space modulation.

I think you have to take into account the fact that your phone doesn't use the visible spectrum to communicate.

Below the visible spectrum, no?

Way, way below.

I'm communicatinng with my phone using the visible spectrum right now

How, exactly, would you take that into account?

The article doesn't mention the pulsed nature of wifi and 5G which I think can't be found in natural emf. Maybe this is what they mean by modulated.

Except that pulsars are a thing and they emit extremely strong rapidly pulsing EMF.

I don't see how this is relevant. Pulsars are also extremely far away, to the point we can barely detect them except with large directed telescopes.

Near the beginning the article states:

> After reading many animal toxicology studies that found that this radiation could increase oxidative stress — free radicals, stress proteins and DNA damage

Not knowing enough about chemistry, I could imagine the radiation being able to affect some of the weaker bonds in certain chemicals, breaking them, and creating more energetic new compounds. This could be damaging to among other things, DNA.

I know the photo-voltaic effect means there is a certain threshold frequency needed to be able to affect such bonds. I have no idea whether there are any chemical bonds that can be affected by say 5.8Ghz radiation. (Highest frequency non 5G phones should be emitting)

> I could imagine the radiation being able to affect some of the weaker bonds in certain chemicals, breaking them,

Nope. Unless those bonds could break due to localised heating, that's not going to happen. Radio waves have lower per-photon energies than are required to break bonds (except really really weak ones, but those can barely be called bonds in the first place).

> I could imagine the radiation being able to affect some of the weaker bonds in certain chemicals

What you are describing is ionizing radiation, which RF and microwave is not.

Not really. Ionizing radiation can knock electrons out of atoms. This sounds like knocking atoms out of molecules. But the wavelength these radio waves is several cm, so it's dubious that they would affect individual atoms, or even individual cells.

Indeed, a mumbojumbo word soup.

Light from the sun is more powerful than cell phone radiation. Being outside, or by a window, is far more dangerous.

The concern is not the power. Look: maybe it's baseless. Misrepresenting the claims and calling them "mumbojumbo" isn't a good way of determining that.

> electromagnetic field scientists

> modulation of wireless devices

> makes the energy more biologically active

> our cellular mechanisms

> natural cellular processes

> stress proteins and free radicals

Define any of the above, and point to a reputable source when any of the above phrases are used. It's a collection of phrases which are all "off", like a foreign person with broken english.

• No clue.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulation

• No clue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_activity doesn't apply. (This is a crank warning sign.)

• This is too generic to answer out of context.

• Same as the above, perhaps with the naturalistic fallacy thrown in (also a crank warning sign).

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_hormone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-radical_theory_of_aging

Of your six quotes, only two (maybe three) of them are crank warning signs, and two have clear, well-defined meanings.

Two crank warning signs is a massive number for someone purporting to be a scientist or expert...

And there were a few others not quoted. But just because a crank is saying something, that doesn't mean it's wrong; this person seems inclined to complain about phones causing cancer independently of whether it's true, so his view shouldn't really affect what you think either way.

I doubt he's right, but I'm not confident enough to laugh at him. Even relatively low-intensity radio waves affect neurons, so it's not like they have no effect on the body.

RE: #2 It's not about any single word, it's about the use of words together. ex. "modulation of wireless devices" is not just modulation, what does the phrase as a whole mean and what is it's actual relevance to the matter at hand? In this specific case why would they not cite references for that claim?

Free radicals: It's very difficult to create free radicals with photons that has less energy than UV rays. And the photons of cell phones has a few order of magnitude less energy. The term is well defined, but it's almost impossible that it's relevant.

Stress hormone: Your link is about hormones produced by glands, and in the sentence it looks like some modification of each cell. Again, the term is well defined, but I'm not sure they are talking about the same thing, and it's not very probable that it's relevant.

The concern isn't the power now, after people point out that your cell phone is emitting less power than a single christmas tree light. Power absolutely was the concern, it was beaming energy right into your brain! Boiling your precious fluids! But power was shot down, so now it's not the power, it's the modulation!

Except the Sun generates a tremendous mish-mash of modulated EM radiation, so "modulation" is also a nonsense argument.

What's next for the Gish gallop crowd?

The problem is, the sun is more powerful, but the wavelength of the visible/UV light means it can't get past our skin. Radio waves obviously can penetrate much farther and get to the areas that you would want to be concerned about.

The sun also produces radio-waves, it generates very broad spectrum radiation, as do other natural celestial events.

I'm not sure about the specifics, but the sun is a blackbody radiator. As visible light is orders of magnitude higher frequency than regular radio waves (say, AWS which uses 1.9/2GHz), the amount of radio-level RF emitted by the sun isn't as high as you'd think. Also, if it did emit high enough levels of RF, we wouldn't be able to use any radios here in earth because the SNR could never be high enough.

The sun is a blackbody radiator and does exactly what you think. However, RF from the sun basically only arrives at exactly one angle from the sky (or not at all, if it is night time). It does exactly what you describe, degrading SNR from signals in the same direction to the point of uselessness. If you've ever used satellite based services like television then you've probably experienced it. There is a long explanation here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-03-20/how-can-the-s...

> The period in which the Sun passes behind a geostationary satellite is brief — about 10 minutes at most according to Dr Carter — but the noise is enough to degrade or completely disrupt radio and television broadcasts, as well as satellite internet.

I would have thought the signals from the sun would bounce around on ground terrain, making things like WiFi useless. Does this also mean I should try to shield my outdoor wireless devices from sunlight?

No, it shouldn't be an issue. Visible and RF don't reflect identically off all materials.

Sure, but these radio waves don't get very far in atmosphere. So the sun's radio waves barely reach us.

>Radio waves obviously can penetrate much farther and get to the areas that you would want to be concerned about.

Is this correct? I'm not much more than a layman in physics, but I thought RF, being below the visible spectrum, is non-ionizing thus unable to cause any cell damage.

Edit: Besides from microwaves or similar oscillating fields.

Anything can cause damage if it is intense enough (intensity is a separate quantity from photon energy). You do not want to put your hand into a microwave oven. But a cellphone's level of radiant intensity is absolutely harmless.

Being non-ionizing is definitely a perk of regular radio, but it doesn't necessarily mean it can't create cell damage.

I find it hard to imagine a realistic mechanism for HOW non-ionizing radiation at low energies would be causing cellular damage.

There could be a case if the magnetic fields created interfered with some molecular function, but I'm not up to date on that.

I am no expert here, but there seem to be many pathways for damage other than ionization. The mention of calcium channels etc. shows a concern for unexpected triggering of normal cellular functions rather than direct molecular damage.

Remember that cells are stateful biochemical machines, so it's not just instantaneous damage from radiation as the only possible pathway. If the authors are right and the cells are in some way receptive to the modulated emissions, some bio-structures might be like antenna and demodulators, stimulating the cells at many lower frequency scales. An analogy here could be a crystal radio which demodulates AM broadcasts into an audible frequency, or the way old GSM call negotiation patterns would induce an audible pattern in computer speakers.

This summary of occupational safety concerns for mechanical vibration covers a topic I found interesting when it first appeared as a news item years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6415671/

I know you might say this is vastly different scales of energy between whole body vibration from an industrial job and emissions from a battery-powered cell phone. My observation is merely that there are many ways that we might naively think that our bodies are robust, while with repeated exposure to seemingly harmless conditions, subtle damage accumulates.

> Is this correct?

Yes. Otherwise a microwave oven would just sear stuff. Radio frequency penetrates meat. It doesn't do it well, because meat has high impedance, but it does penetrate.

Disclaimer: I don't believe cell phones are causing cancer; there just isn't enough power involved. It's all bunk.

It's non-ionising, thus unable to liberate electrons from their atoms. It can still do stuff like heat water up (though low-power signals have correspondingly low heating power) or communicate with electronics (e.g. firmware update your smartwatch to short the battery), though, so it's not unconditionally safe.

I'm sceptical that low levels of non-ionising radiation can do damage, but it's not physically impossible. (I know of no biological mechanism by which it could cause harm, but I'm no biologist.)

Two possible concerns with "radiation":

a) individual rays/particles have enough energy to knock electrons off ("ionizing radiation"). This is dependent on wavelength/frequency, not the amount of radiation, so even small amounts can be possibly problematic.

b) quantity of radiation brings enough energy to heat things up, cause damage through heating.

Cell phones have neither problem.

Well this can be easily measured empirically. Oxidative stress, byproducts, biomarkers and damages are trivial to identify so no one care to do the study or what?

Do you know that nobody's done the study? The article makes it sound like this is the results of a study.

Where are you going to find a control group that hasn't had exposure to man made emf? This really can't be studied now days.

This isn't vampires. If there's a biological effect, it'll be visible even if someone attempts to induce it in an “impure” individual – unless you claim there's a one-shot permanent harmful effect that everybody in the world now has, that we've completely failed to notice.

I'm saying it will be extremely difficult to find human candidates that haven't been constantly exposed to man made pulsed emf fields that could serve as a control. So how do you study this now without controls?

Less exposure and more exposure? That's not “no controls”.

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