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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

I'm just looking at some of these graphs and they seem a little concerning? Like the y-axis on 3G and 4G is 0.1degC ... no measurable health effects measured for a few decades, easy done and justified.

But then these 5G graphs are measured at a scale 200-300x higher on the y-axis and have like 20x the energy penetration deep in the body. That's real brave. Should my next phone be 5G or is this saying no?

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I think you are mistaken -- there is less penetration at 40GHz. The graphs show increased surface heating at 40GHz as a result of less penetration.

Informative exercise: put sunlight on that graph.

Note that the units (W/m^2*10^3) are such that F=1 roughly corresponds to the incident power of direct sunlight, 1kW/m^2. Results like 60 degree heating at the surface when it is illuminated with 15 times the intensity of direct sunlight suddenly don't quite seem so shocking. Yes, longer wavelengths were able to avoid absorption, but there had to be a frequency where it started behaving like visible light and shining on the surface instead, and 40GHz appears to be high enough. This is exactly what I would expect.

Is there a particular graph that had you worried that we could dig deeper into?

> Informative exercise: put sunlight on that graph.

Polarization: A Key Difference between Man-made and Natural Electromagnetic Fields, in regard to Biological Activity [0]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914

A. Does that paper have anything to do with any of the graphs in TFA? The point of the exercise was to calibrate intuition for trends and intensities, not to talk about damage models.

B. Has this line of research actually shown anything in a bulk setting at sane levels of incident RF or is it still "we built an antenna structure out of saline and showed that a neuron can respond to the resulting voltage if we really blast it?"

Thermalization mechanisms like rovibrational absorption (small scale) and conventional currents (large scale -- the focus of these new studies) aren't the only supporting evidence for thermal damage models, though. There is also the dose/response curve. We can generate RF at many thousands of times the intensity that we find in cell phones and observe the consequences. Often unintentionally. Those consequences look a heck of a lot like thermal burns. If there is an alternative damage mechanism, it has to saturate at a very low level, so that there are no observable acute effects from a wild overdose.

A. This is simply a rebuttal to the too easy dismissal that is comparing levels of man-made radiation to sunlight.

B. I am not a researcher, but you can read the paper and see for yourself. It was published in Nature in case you haven't noticed, this is not some kooky youtuber

A. The point of the exercise was to calibrate intuition for trends and intensities, not to talk about damage models.

B. I've read a large number of papers in this genre and this appears to be another. Just like I feel my time is wasted every time I read another mouse-in-a-microwave study, I feel my time is wasted every time I read another "we built an antenna out of bio parts" study. And no, it's not "published in Nature," it's published in Nature Scientific Reports. That's an important distinction. It puts the paper far above kooky youtubers, yes, but it doesn't really filter for impact in the way Nature would: for example, I would expect to be able to easily get a mouse-in-a-microwave study into Nature Scientific Reports, but not Nature.

People die of sun induced skin cancer all the time right?

But there can be 100 mobile phones in a room, or 100,000 in a football stadium I guess. I know exposure distance is a factor...

Sunlight is much, much higher intensity than a cell phone, its photons are much, much higher energy, and it doesn't fall off to a tiny fraction if it is more than a few feet away.

I am not suggesting that 5G is anywhere near as bad as sunlight. I am suggesting using sunlight to understand the trend the parent post was concerned about and to understand that many of the intensities employed by this study are not at all typical of a cell phone.

The problem that I see, it's that gel simulants are ineffective as a proxy to estimate health hazards for regulating this subject.

What methodology would you prefer?

A cross-validated one.

> People die of sun induced skin cancer all the time right?

It’s not the heat that causes skin cancer. UV radiation is intense enough induce chemical changes in DNA.

Sunlight contains Ionising radiation (Ultra Violet, etc) while mobile phone radiation does not.

“However, this study does not take into account the layers of skin, fat, muscle and skull containing the brain in a realistic head model”

Higher frequency radiation will be absorbed by the skin more easily and I think it will not reach the brain.

They reached the brain. [1]

[1]: https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/1059...

That study refers to GSM phones, though, which use a much lower frequency that's a lot better at penetrating things like walls and people's skulls.

Gamma radiation in-vivo cells have been shown to produce "a reduction in cell division; alteration in the ratio of the different phases of mitosis, and the appearance of degenerate cells in the germinative zone." [1] Also Le Pogam et al. [2019] found that "EM radiation in the 5G range affect cell permeability and metabolic profiles". [2] To me, that's not something to be discarded so easily, more research is needed. But there's already good one coming up. [3]

[1]: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1259/0007-1285-14-158-...

[2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45662-6

[3]: https://sci-hub.st/10.3390/ijerph16183406

Just turn it down to use 4G. Sometimes I'll use LTE for meetings or big downloads. 5G - hard no. I sleep with my phone and Wi-Fi off. Don't knock it till you try it. Get a meter if you are serious about it.

you turn off your wifi and phone before you sleep every night? why the meter?

Yeah I do. The meter checks that all the other emf from other sources is low too. I live rural so it's easier, neighbors are far away.

Inverse square law. You would have no reasons to worry even if the closest neighbors would put a 5G tower on each of their houses. Your body would be exposed to a lot more power from your cellphone rather than any tower. That would mean if there is a real danger, we should be already counting several millions of deaths among all those people carrying a cellphone in their pocket every day. It is something that simply cannot go undetected.

Those technologies would either need extremely high power, and/or use much much higher frequencies (beyond visible light) then fall into ionizing radiations (which are dangerous indeed) to have any health effects.

The 4G tower about 500m puts out about 5x what my phone does. I shielded my bedroom with the paint and its close to zero now. I'm not really thinking much about 5 yet, too early for my area. I do agree with your statements.

if you agree with the statements its not dangerous, why paint the room?

How did you come to the conclusion it disrupts sleep?

I slept really well at my parents cabin over the years but not in the city where I lived. I could never figure out why. Then one summer they got Wi-Fi and I no longer had great sleeps there. Did some research and started experimenting with shielded clothing. Noticed much deeper rem sleep, dreams and all that again. I realize there's very poor research and low quality studies that support this. It's almost impossible to fund and find a group of people that can actually be shielded for a study.

But hey it works for me, enough that I invested significant time, effort and a bit of money to get a decently shielded sleeping area.

I have better concentration during the day in these same low emf conditions too.

The claim that paint can suppress 4G radiation is nonsense.

Did you also paint the doors, windows, ceiling and floor?

If you want further information, talk to the people who build shielded rooms. Cutting down EM radiation by more than a few db is incredibly difficult.

Just slapping on a coat of the stuff would not work, but doing it correctly absolutely does work. It takes a few coats and you have to ground it. Done correctly, you won't be able to use Wifi or make a phone call. Yes you will get some leakage from windows, but that can be attenuated with metal screens or use steel roll-down shutters that have the benefit of improving the R/U insulation rating of the windows at night and improving physical security. I have tested this in two houses. I will also be adding the paint to a property I recently acquired. If you bookmark this thread, I will circle back in about six months after the snow to test the attenuation.

I think I do get leakage through the one window that has the film and the metal bug screen. The paint when grounded is very good shielding. You are describing all the right aspects of this!

If you don't block all the holes, it can't possibly work.

Plus you can't effectively earth something when your earth leads is multiple wavelengths long (eg at UHF)

Yes everything except the floor. The tower is above the floor. For widows I used the film and a metal bug screen on top of that. I did three coats of the YSheild HSF54 paint. The before and after ratings on my meter prove to me that it worked. I register less than background now in that room.I used the copper grounding strips that wire into my outlets and attach to the house ground circuit.

Certainly you can get a few db attenuation, but it's absolutely not possible to block all EM radiation with a cheap layer of paint.

Regarding "not treating the the floor", how to you prevent reflections? If there's any metal beneath the floor it will reflect the signals into the room.

Whatever, if your meter is reading "less than background" then it is clearly misleading you.

Agree the 4G towers are more dangerous especially at close range less than 200m, very difficult to shield and very unnatural for the body to live shielded in my own experience.

> counting several millions of deaths

I don't think this is what the 5G conspiracy theorists claim, at all. Nobody is claiming people are going to drop dead from 5G.

The last 50 years have seen a dramatic rise in incidents of various less-than-lethal health issues: low sperm counts, autism, fibromyalgia, early puberty in girls, Chron's Disease, IBS, certain specific rare-but-treatable cancers, etc.

These are all very real and well-documented. And everybody has their pet explanation that happens to correlate with environmental increases of other things: sugar, seed oils, microplastics, glyphosate, vaccination, VOCs, birth control, and yes, mobile phone usage or HF exposure in general.

5G conspiracy theorists just happened to pick one of the possible correlates. You'll find anti-glyphosate crusaders on this very site who don't get nearly the vitriol that anti-5G people, or, god forbid, anti-vaxxers do.

But in the end, people are pattern-matchers, and evidenced-be-damned, this one particular pattern they spotted is the one they're going to go with.

Conspiracy theories of the pattern-matching type are kind of a built-in human problem, I think we're wired for it. I don't understand why we can't be more charitable towards them.

We are wired for these instincts is because it's what got us through millions of years of evolution.

Would be silly to discard such a nicely tuned learning model.

Make an external antenna as a sticky throw ball

If all else fails, you can move to:

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

I'm against 5G for now, just because I don't see what I need it for, and I resent being forced to pay even if it's not harmful.

These aareas of West Virginia and Virginia are exceptionally beautiful and serene places to visit, if you ever get a chance to drive by the Green Bank telescope it is Massive! In fact the dish of the telescope has a diameter of around 300 feet.

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