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Comment by space_fountain | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

> 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

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