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Comment by lizardactivist | Hacker News Reader

While the SAR is pretty high, and these are mice, that in itself doesn't imply that lower SARs have no effect on mice or other living beings, which some people seem to conclude.

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.

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Well no, but this study absolutely doesn’t imply that it does. There’s decent evidence that all radio does to human, animals, etc, is heat them up. Obviously heating people up a lot will do bad things to them, but there’s no evidence Wi-Fi, cellphones or anything else radio related is hurting people

> but there’s no evidence Wi-Fi, cellphones or anything else radio related is hurting people

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 put the control group in the United States National Radio Quiet Zone.

You'd also have to put the experimental group there, too.

You can't. The Zone exists to enable sensitive radio astronomy; if you radiate without authorization, they DF you and come tell you to stop.

At this point you can't even talk about "blind", not to mention "double blind".

You wouldn't need to blind an experiment like this, I'd think. Placebo won't prevent cancer, and nocebo won't cause it. (Besides, I don't see how you can blind it. Not like someone's not going to know whether their phone works or not!)

You could try recruiting your control cohort from the National Radio Quiet Zone. I believe it's quite thinly populated, though.

Radio energy drops off pretty quickly. If the question you hoped to answer was does RF at any level higher than the background from the Sun + cosmic background cause cancer then that would be difficult, but if the question was does holding a smartphone cause cancer it would be relatively easy. It would also be easy to give people a device that either transmitted rf or didn't with no outside indication. Also really easy to do this in mice or the like. So far all indicator are that for the sort of frequencies we use the only impacts are heating

I think it's less about the heating of body tissue, but how EM fields affect the body's own bio-electric functions.

There's no way getting around the fact that electrically charged particles are affected by EM fields.

At that level of generality you need to remember that light from a lamp is also an EM field.

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.

This seems over confident that what we see in terms of measures is all there is in terms of health.

Why does it not seem like reasonable confidence?

In this case mechanism was heating the tissue with 4 W/kg power.

>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.

Have you ever noticed how, during a power out, suddenly there's suddenly a lack of ... "pressure" (lack of a better word) ?

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.

This could be actual pressure, i.e. blood pressure related to the anxiety of your knowing your phone is emitting increased radiation.

I am not sure how you meant it, but this radiation should abso-fking-lutely not be mixed up with nuclear radiation.

When the power goes out there's also a drop in background noise. Your fridge motor stops. Your fans turn off. You can hear the 60Hz (or 50Hz depending on where you live) line frequency hum from, for example, some light sources. In the olden days of CRTs, the flyback transformer could give a high-frequency sound.

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?

Also, don't forget infrasound - sound at frequencies too low to be audible. They are known to cause low levels of anxiety in sensitive individuals even though they can't be heard.

> 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.

I mean...no? I sometimes even sleep in my very very very EM noisy homelab (don't ask why, I'm just bad at managing my time haha) and never experienced any change from even when I'm in the woods. And when I say noisy, it's everything from radios, chunky power ICs under heavy load, inverters for my 36U server rack and the custom powerwall UPS back up they have... Well the 1-2U servers sound like jet engines and can sound like a nightmare, so the rack/enclosure is soundproofed but that shouldn't have any effect on RF emissions.

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?

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