Exposure to 835MHz RF-EMF induces hyperactivity and demyelination in mice (2017)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
We are basically big lumps of bio-electric mass, it shouldn't be surprising that spending 24 hours a day in a mist of all kinds of high-frequency, penetrating EM fields would have an effect on our biology.
And spare us the "so what's your solution, shut down all electrical gadgets?" type of replies. There are no immediate solutions, but it's still important to discuss the possible effects of EMR on living tissue.
It seems like an attempt to do an epidemiological study would be highly compromised by everyday use washing out the exposure levels in the control group.
Or even a controlled double blind study. How would you even set up a double blinded experiment "do cellphones cause cancer" today?
You could try recruiting your control cohort from the National Radio Quiet Zone. I believe it's quite thinly populated, though.
There's no way getting around the fact that electrically charged particles are affected by EM fields.
Radiant heat from a fireplace is infrared - also an EM field.
We know that UV light, which starts around 400 nm, causes damage beyond its heating effects, so yes, EM fields in general can be a problem.
But 835 MHz is about 30 cm wavelength - far larger than the size of the cells, much less the molecules in the cell.
With 25+ years of research, including epidemiological studies of people working with or living near high-power transmitters, there's very little evidence that RF causes problems beyond simple heating.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_device_radiation_and_...
>SAR value was estimated to be 4.0 W/kg by 0.0001°C resolution temperature sensor by measuring temperature changes of saline water of the mouse phantom exposed to 835 MHz of continuous wave (CW) without modulation.
Context:
I've experienced this and had a friend who experienced this as well. He told me and there was no power out yet that I could have used to ask other people about it. When I was digging for this through memory, it came up that this was always the case for me, during every power out.
Addition:
Contrary to what many people believe, electrosensibility is a real thing and when my mobile is too close to my head, down/uploading at high speeds (a few Mbit) I feel insane pressure in my head and trying this on other parts of my body the skin starts to feel like it's burning.
I had a friend who didn't believe me, so I've offered him to do a test. He holds the phone, I close my eyes, he initiates a speedtest. I could tell him every time when he did. It baffled him.
Normally your brain filters out that background noise. When it disappears, you can notice the change.
As for your test with your friend, it's hard to know if you had good test conditions. It could be that the subtle sounds of motion to initiate the test gives a confounding signal.
You should also measure the actual RF power generated by the phone during these tests. An FM transmitter can be at full power even when broadcasting silence. I don't know what phones are like ... do you?
> An FM transmitter can be at full power even when broadcasting silence. I don't know what phones are like ... do you?
I dunno about 3G, 4G and 5G, but I know that a GSM phone (2G) after a data transfer continued to transmit, and at consecutively smaller levels before stopping. The time interval for each level was set by the telco, not the phone.
The only pressure difference I feel when power is out is from the fear that my huge battery backup could fail to take over correctly. But that's mostly because it was a hand made, learn as you go type of system and I have very little confidence in my electronics skills. :').
I'd think that what you describe would be very easy to measure if it was more than a placebo effect. And there is a big corpus of research on the effects of EM noise. Wouldn't there be some sort of data on what you described by now?
One paper I read that makes me laugh, was one that showed that people who sleep next to their phones sleep less, which is apparently evidence that we should turn the 5G off apparently.
That’s a pretty high exposure?
At least that's what the back of the envelope calculations seem to suggest.
I've found a FCC limit of 1.6W/kg. That's a limit, not what is actually experienced.
Ok, so here is a list of mobile device figures: https://emfadvice.com/sar-ratings-radiation-levels-smartphon...
Highest listed is One plus 7t Pro at 1.394W/kg.
That's in the same order of magnitude as these as these NIH results. Perhaps if you need to use a mobile device for most of your waking hours try to keep it away from your head. Otherwise it's probably not a concern.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/10937646?hl=en
SAR is sort of a "maximum power density" measurement. It's not claiming to expose your entire head to that power density, just a small ~10 g measurement portion.
Yes. This is worrisome. The FCC limit is 1.6W/Kg.[1] Neural damage was observed in mice at 4W/Kg. Several high-end smartphones from Apple and Google get above 1W/Kg.
Those are worst-case numbers for smartphones, says the FCC. Average values are lower. Worst case for cumulative transmit energy would probably be sustained heavy upload traffic, such as streaming outgoing HD video. Transmit power is highest when near the range limit for a cell tower, since the handset increases power when more range is needed.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/specific-absorption-rate-sar-cel...
Yeah, in addition to the inverse square law, devices also have a higher noise floor from adjacent devices broadcasting at higher power.
This is why banning microcells to "stop the dangers of 4G from harming our children" just increases the Tx power and SAR by orders of magnitude. But you can't argue with these people.
In any case this is burst power during very high bitrate use such as 4k video, loading webpages, or pulling app/os updates. No ones phone is going to push a watt during voice calls. More like a few mW.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/10937646?hl=en-...
Phone manufacturers are required to follow regulation in most countries on emissions with limits set in W/kg.
Scaled up to an approximate human mass: 4 W/kg * 70kg = 280W.
Apparently an idling human burns very approximately about 80W ("basal metabolic rate").
For example, human eyeballs are really bad at it. Staring at a microwave that has been recklessly modified to run without door, or with a hole in the door, is most dangerous by turning the eye's inside which is similar to raw egg white into the cooked form: cooked egg white is unsuitable for a lens due to the very strong scattering from the coagulated proteins. I'm sure other temperature sensitive parts exist with poor cooling, as they're not naturally expected to be able to get dangerously hot without the surrounding tissue heating it.
The lack of thermal effects they mentioned where whole body temperature; while hard to actually measure, I'd suggest thinking of the temperature of the blood in the arterial venous heart half when it comes to potential overtemperature. Yes, if the body as a whole has cooling issues, this blood that is about to enter the lungs (after coming from all around the body) is going to be overly hot. But if the bottleneck is the lack of blood vessel density in e.g. the eyeball, this temperature issue won't show up when measuring in the heart.
The RF was probably too low power to produce readily measurable effects on temperature in the brain. I imagine that it could be a difficult piece of data to collect. However, you're undoubtedly correct that whole body temperature wouldn't be informative in such a study.
Makes sense, keeping some distance from running microwave ovens is a good policy. After an oven has been in service for some time what are the odds seals become leaky, etc. Probably not a great risk but no harm in minimizing one's exposure.
If the door mechanically seals properly like it's supposed to, all should be fine. If the mechanics make it not be as flush as it used to, get rid of it or measure the RF power at it's operating frequency near it while it's running, to check whether it still properly seals the RF.
> ... Whole body exposure was at a SAR value of 4.0 W/kg for 5 h daily for 12 weeks for six randomly allocated mice. The other six mice received sham treatment for 12 weeks. The sham treated control groups were kept under the identical environmental conditions and treated the same circular pattern as the RF-exposed groups without RF-EMF exposure. The sham-treated and RF-exposed mice could move freely in their cage....
So the exposure is definitely whole-body.
> In terms of a possible thermal effect, we confirmed that exposure to RF-EMF in our system could not affect mouse body temperature as shown in Fig. S2. … There are few reports resulting in thermal effect or thermal damage to anesthetized rats after magnetic field (MF) or RF exposure, respectively.
It was a worthwhile experiment, and the results aren't particularly surprising.
It's wrong to call it a mistake. It's not a mistake, it's a simplification. We understand that simplifications have limited explanatory power. That's the tradeoff--simplified models are easier to understand but less accurate. All models sacrifice some amount of accuracy.
Reducing the interaction between varying electromagnetic fields and the staggering dimensionality of health & living things to wattage is a mistake.
It was used well when Knuth said "goto considered harmful", but that is a clickbait title for an article which advocates structured programming. The title may get people to read the article, but the actual article is the interesting part, the "goto considered harmful" title itself is reductive and just gets copied as a meme into HN comments.
Beating normies over the head with physics 101 explanations--ones that don't even begin to address the complexity of the subject at hand--to silence perfectly reasonable lines of questioning, is harmful. Exceedingly harmful.
The comment is about how "that's harmful" is a terrible comment. It's just such an awful, terrible type of comment that I've let some ad hominem in there.
humans can dissipate 360W easily, though not necessarily comfortably.
that being said, the power usage is high. assuming uniform absorption, 4w/kg works out to roughly 200mw in the brain. here's a neuro paper that sets an optimistic limit at 40mw.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807567/#B34
OTOH, we pump a lot more than that (relative to mass) into fly brains during imaging, although they're not expected to survive much longer than the imaging session. the laser in our lab is about 1w, after losses from the optics path and pulse picking, the power on the brain is usually around 20mw
Briefly put: Sunburns can be dangerous, but nobody gets a sunburn wearing SPF 250. Even if this experimental result is 100% correct, it does not prove any risk to normal cell phone users.
(It would be interesting to look for effects in cell tower maintenance workers, and others who've generally received far higher intensities / doses.)
Working in an office with ten other people that has installed a cell phone tower will likely provide substantial EMF (2 orders of magnitude). 5G bands require much higher density tower placement due to the reduced effective range of mm wave. These all have overlap and are not being tested in any way after installation.
There's clearly an effect. The question becomes how much of an effect are we currently living with and what are the limits that should be adopted.
Yes, there is health & safety research that needs to be done here. This particular study (mega-dose, low n, mice) is part of that. It's easily repeated at other frequencies, to compare effects. My prior comment suggested looking at a human population already receiving far-higher does of cell phone EMF. If you wanted a small control group, there's Green Bank ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank%2C_West_Virginia#Na... ).
Same with "we gave rats massive amounts of artificial sweeteners and they have all kinds of health conditions" ok so maybe don't?
People have been blasting mice with RF for decades and no consistent result like this is ever found upon replication. Of note: 6 mice in the experimental group is a very small sample size.
But I can't think what else could be involved other than thermal damage. Thinking about it, I also wonder how much thermal stress is required to produce damage. If only a small increment in thermal energy at a micro-level or at particular chemical bonds is what happens, it would be a challenge to detect and measure such tiny, localized changes. Then again if the effect (that is, RF agitating some chemical entity) is small enough maybe calling it "thermal" wouldn't be exactly right.
Will be very interesting to see how this line of research develops. In any case, a great question that requires a lot more work to decipher.
Contrast this with employees who worked closely with leaded gasoline, ionizing radiation, asbestos where the statistical signals are overwhelming.
For example, the mouse study showed alterations to myelin sheaths. Conceivably there could be long-term implications, as in leading to conditions like multiple sclerosis. Of course this sort of hypothesis remains to be tested. Late-appearing effects are notoriously difficult to establish as consequent to small insults years or decades before.
Remains to be seen where this line of research goes. I sure don't expect to see any outcome of it in the near future.
Could cell axons or other structures be acting like (very imperfect) antennas?
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09242...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/news/...
This sounds wrong. It's been decades since my last chemistry class, so I sure could be wrong. But IIRC organic covalent bonds aren't particularly weaker than say ionic bonds, which obviously would be subject to ionizing radiation.
No argument with the other referenced effects. But AFAIK the key argument about non-ionizing radiation is specifically that it can't break covalent bonds.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/covalent-bonds-crack-und...
And there's always good old oxidation-reduction, where adding a little heat (from non-ionizing radiation) pushes the reaction in one way instead of another. And since with RF this heat will penetrate and concentrate into the places that absorb the given wavelengths (i.e.: average vs max), it isn't quite the same thing as being "just a little warmer."
There's also denaturation, where primary structure is intact, but secondary/tertiary/... are altered--which can significantly effect function.
I'm not advocating for or against RF here, as much as I'm pointing out that life is complicated, and maybe we should approach it with humility instead of the physics 101 midwittery that plagues this horrible PR board.
And if that doesn't satisfy, maybe John von Neumann will get through:
“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
1) we know DNA is an electrical conductor. This is work by Jackie Barton, et. al, Caltech, she's been talking about it on the talks circuit for about 10 years but the papers are now coming out.
2) it seems like DNA error correcting enzymes use electrical potentials and current (or rather lack of current due to mutations causing geometric disruptions in DNA and "opening the circuit") to reduce the search space and make mutation repair more efficient.
3) high frequency RF can induce current in DNA.
4) it's important to note that this mechanism (RF can jam error correction) does not itself cause mutations so standard tests like the Ames test, blasting mice with RF, or related, will miss the mechanism, especially in well-controlled lab environments. An experiment would need to be set up to directly test error repair. Yeast might be a good model species since there is a comprehensive knockout library so you could see if the relative repair rate is unaffected in repair-deficuent strains.
Anyways. It should be a relatively easy Nobel prize if someone wants it. I'm not a scientist anymore, so I don't really have access to what I need to do this.
Whether or not someone wants it is not the big question. The big question is if the theory verifies.
Sadly they are not giving out Nobel prizes for carefully and painstakingly disproving theories proposed in anonymous HN comments. So whoever embarks on such a series of experiments has to judge the probability of the theory being true in their decision making.
Besides it sounds like you are proposing a new and unknown chemistry effect. Why wouldn’t you go and try to investigate that proposed effect in a test tube first? Living things are super complicated. If you can find a chemical reaction which goes differently in the presence of non-ionizing radiation that alone could be interesting. (Of course the experiment better show that the difference is not due to simple heating.)
changes to reaction kinetics and equilibria;
unfolding and denaturing of proteins;
unwinding of DNA and RNA in localised regions ("bubbles");
displacement of inter- and intra-molecular associations through hydrogen bonding and van der Waals forces
As an example, the unfolding or denaturing of a protein may be transient or permanent, and it will often not have an obvious adverse effect. But if it's e.g. a critical regulatory protein, it may result in a cascade of events which might end up causing cancer.
DNA structure is tightly-controlled and is wound up to varying degrees to enable or prevent access to it. If it's transiently unwound by localised heating, it exposes it to the transcription machinery as well as other regulatory proteins. Again, it could have wide-ranging effects.
The probability of any one photon doing damage is low, but it penetrates deep and the heating would be very localised. The cumulative effect of exposure could well cause significant problems.
Biological systems are very complex, and many of the interactions do not involve bond breaking. The proteins and other molecules interacting within each cell exist in a delicate balance which often involves far weaker forces, including hydrogen bonding and van der Waals forces. These are easily disturbed by heating.
It's still a big regulatory deal.
It's not just that it heats up, I think it's a different feeling than say holding a hot coffee cup for a long time, and can't quite rule out it's just the battery that powers it either, or that I'm practically holding the wifi chip very close while it's transmitting. But come on, it's such a tiny device!
It also seems to be a common complaint among buyers: newer generations (like some Bebird devices) advertise a "non-heating chip" on Alibaba.
Just commented in case anyone out there tried one of these devices, they are usually not SAR rated at all and don't seek to meet industry standards, plus Wi-fi is a bigger deal than Bluetooth, otherwise everyone would be complaining about their bluetooth in-ear headsets.
Do you think a multimeter or oscilloscope would be able to pick up the potential between the device and ground?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BA5bw1EV5I
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59703523
That youtube channel has the guy testing numerous objects with a geiger counter, it's esp. interesting when some 19th century tableware and other daily use objects used to contain this stuff in the past.
The sheer amount of people with likely no symptoms (i.e. people are looking for them, where are they) means that the harm per unit of exposure must be absolutely tiny.
The obvious example is that UV is ionizing, but visible light is non-ionizing. Spend an hour in a tanning bed and there's obvious skin damage. Spend a day under office lights and there isn't.
Not to contradict your point but rater as a “did you know?”: typical office neon lights actually also emit UV and it can be a problem for artwork that hasn’t been framed using UV filtering glass as they turn this washed out blue shade over time as a result. I don’t think it damages skin anywhere near as much as actual sun rays but I was surprised to learn it anyway.
Several years ago, I read a study that had done animal testing to find that there could be a link between cell phone-type radiation and a weakened immune response against cancer. (all rats had cancer, but the radiated rats were worse off) But since then I have not seen any follow-up.
The field is ... tainted, because of all the charlatans at the fringe. It is difficult to get funding for a serious study, and if you do conduct a study, people will not look at you with a mild eye no matter what: it could be a career-killer.
Over the previous two centuries, there have been ongoing rapid changes to our home, work and other environments, the way we live and the products we consume and are exposed to. As a result, the number of confounding factors may mask any deleterious effects of RF at a population level.
RF is clearly not acutely harmful at normally experienced levels. But are there lesser morbidities or long-term cancer risks which are directly due to RF, but are currently lost in the noise? We might not have seen it already, but it is worth questioning the basic assumption that it's completely safe, and identifying how, why and when it could cause harm.