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Comment by jrapdx3 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW the researchers argued against the RF-induced damage being due to thermal effects. However, if not thermally-induced, how RF damages cells apparently is unknown and remains to be determined.

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.

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We have plenty of real-world experiments. Military radio operators, research station personnel, air-traffic controllers. Even food-service personnel that work near a frequently in-use Microwave. They all have orders of magnitude more RF exposure than the average person and yet no statistically significant difference in health outcomes has been found.

Contrast this with employees who worked closely with leaded gasoline, ionizing radiation, asbestos where the statistical signals are overwhelming.

True that lead, radioactive materials and asbestos are orders of magnitude more hazardous than moderate RF exposure. I think an issue raised by the research is the amount/frequency of RF needed to cause subtle injury to brain neurons and potential delayed effects that could emanate from exposure.

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.

I believe that with the abundance of people who worked very closely with RF mentioned by OP for a century now, we would see a statistical correspondence at least if the effect would be big enough, and given the MS and alia are quite well researched I think the default assumption of it not having a huge effect is a safe bet.

> But I can't think what else could be involved other than thermal damage.

Could cell axons or other structures be acting like (very imperfect) antennas?

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