SAR Values of Commercially Available Mobile Phones | Hacker News Reader

SAR Values of Commercially Available Mobile Phones

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44 pointsbelter46 comments

TIL

SAR = Specific Absorption Rate

From the FCC's SAR testing page:

> SAR testing uses standardized models of the human head and body that are filled with liquids that simulate the RF absorption characteristics of different human tissues. In order to determine compliance, each cell phone is tested while operating at its highest power level in all the frequency bands in which it operates, and in various specific positions against the dummy head and body, to simulate the way different users’ typically hold a cell phone, including to each side of the head. To test cell phones for SAR compliance, the phone is precisely placed in various common positions next to the head and body, and a robotic probe takes a series of measurements of the electric field at specific pinpoint locations in a very precise, grid-like pattern within the dummy head and torso. All data for each phone placement are submitted as a part of the equipment approval test report for final authorization. However, only the highest SAR values for each frequency band are included in the final authorization to demonstrate compliance with the FCC’s RF guidelines.

SAR Values are useless because of what they measure and how they measure them.

First, they are only concerned about thermal changes and it is well know now that RF-EMFs have non-thermal effects on biology(1).

Second, the SAR levels were set using non-pulsed EMFs, and that makes a difference in the biology of RF-EMFs effects(2).

(1) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.1201/97810032...

(2) https://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/59/5/92

so, as you assume the existence of malvolent non-thermal effects: would you be so kind and point out their mechanism?

And also, if there is a mechanism: what do people do to verify that mechanism? There should be a way to verify that without self-selected human populations and crappy papermills as cited by you.

You're right. It's just that the only people who click to comment on stupid articles like this are the "electrosensitive" mentally ill and RF engineers. And there's more mentally ill than RF engineers. In the past they'd be obsessing over ghosts or something but now radio is the invisible thing people don't understand and latch on to.

There's no non-thermal mechanism confirmed in any reputable journal and the user above is not going to provide anything other than hand waving about two photon effects (laughable) or "gap junctions" and extracellular potential woo-woo.

Yes, I know the stories, I'm fighting a tiny faction in a micro-eco-party on it...

The worst thing is, how the community behind this (50/50 crooks and then some old, methodologically not up-to-date people...) essentially practices information laundering in an exemplary fashion: 1) start with crappy experiments in papermill annexes, 2) make a review on those leaving out any where replication was found to be "hard" and misinterpreting 0-results and go up a bit in credibility of your publisher, 3) go on spam on hackernews/with your local environmental group 4) don't answer questions 5) stop answering questions.

> It's just that the only people who click to comment on stupid articles like this are the "electrosensitive" mentally ill

What if EMFs are causing the mental illness? This will be relevant later in this comment.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089106181...

> There's no non-thermal mechanism confirmed in any reputable journal

Is Pubmed not reputable?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=EMFs+non-thermal+effec...

Is Elseveir not reputable?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13835...

The ideas behind how this happens seem to be solidifying around EMFs affecting Voltage Gated Ion Channels:

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ny...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01434...

And hey, regarding the mental illness, you know what the number one gene linked to mental illness effects? The Voltage Gated Calcium Ion Channel (CACNA1C)

https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/44/5/...

"Large-scale genome-wide association studies have consistently shown that genetic variation in CACNA1C, a gene that encodes calcium voltage-gated channel subunit alpha1C, increases risk for psychiatric disorders. "

Did you read some of those PubMed articles? Some of them have comments that really question the validity of their findings.

For example: I see Pall has written a bunch and this one in particular has quite a few "sus" comments: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29573716/

The article is a meta study but there are several comments from the authors of the original studies indicating that they believe Pall did not interpret their study correctly.

I never said there were no poor researchers, or any unanswered questions. I am merely pointing out the fact that the science is nowhere near settled.

But one thing you can’t do is deny my experience of electromagnetic, hyper sensitivity syndrome. And you also can’t deny my genetics.

Citing yourself

> First, they are only concerned about thermal changes and it is well know now that RF-EMFs have non-thermal effects on biology(1).

> Second, the SAR levels were set using non-pulsed EMFs, and that makes a difference in the biology of RF-EMFs effects(2).

Ah, the science is nowhere settled. I would recommend you start using the appropriate verbs in the future instead of making factual statements!

Those bits of the science are settled.

that is a lie, when these mechanisms defy both quantum mechanics and anything we know about chemistry.

Oxidative-stress and formation of free-radicals via erratic activation of voltage-gated cell-membrane ion channels. Pulsed and polarized fields most biologically active. The above linked papers give a good intro to this field of research.

So now you can start predicting outcomes of new experiments with your new physics? Right? Would you mind telling me about those too?

For those who read and understand these publishings, are there any indications of roughly what wattage (and distance from such transmitting antenna/panel) the EMF/EMR starts becoming a problem?

There’s a problem from looking at it from only a wattage perspective since whether the EMFs are pulse or not is also important.

Also, the effect on any individual might be related to several variables, including genetics, current load of oxidative stress, or other exogenous factors.

What they are trying to do is find people who truly have electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome and look at them for biological markers. They’re not solely interested in the power because they know there are variables that make people more sensitive than other people.

This was found true in leukemia studies and overhead powerlines in the 90s. They found people with certain genetics that were more susceptible to leukemia from those low frequency EMFs.

Really? Because IIRC, the relationship was more poverty related than actual EMF related. Living under powerlines is unattractive, so houses under powerlines attract people who can't afford to live elsewhere.

But, if you've got citations on that one, I'll happily read them.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.27542

Cheers, that makes sense.

It’s scary how in the news lately, there are some things brewing that we thought were safe that just might not be. Another one my family is watching is that Fluoride being potentially dangerous (a classic conspiracy theorist stereotype) is back in the news and a lawsuit against the EPA has been allowed to proceed.

https://www.salon.com/2023/03/16/health-officials-delayed-re...

Also clothes made out of synthetic fiber shed household dust, microplastics, which we breathe in, and which could be responsible for all kinds of illness. I'm a lot more concerned of getting cotton clothes (carpets, blankets) in the future.

I honestly don't want this comment to seem like another "all hail Apple", but it is somewhat reassuring that almost all recent iPhones are consistently in 0.95-0.99 range, emphasis on consistency.

Is there any evidence of actual harm correlated with high SAR values?

Independent of mobile phones and treating SAR as the electromagnetic phenomenon it actually is, hell yes. This is what ultimately limits certain types of MRI experiment -- you don't want to cook the patient. The details are complex and involve solving Maxwells equations, and optionally the bio heat equation to model blood flow.

There are plenty of examples of cooking things with large amounts of RF/mmWaves. The physics is very well understood. For some specific examples, have a look at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3469254/, which talks about fields burning the inside of brains, or https://www.ajnr.org/content/34/5/E47, in which an unfortunate girl was burnt by her (silver containing) bra.

Are there any documented cases of a mobile phone causing problems? I don't know of any offhand, but SAR is real and the models that predict it very well validated.

Obviously sticking your head in a running microwave oven or something like that would be bad for you. But using that to say the SAR values from cell phones are dangerous would be like saying that warm water is more dangerous than cold water since boiling water is known to be dangerous. So let me clarify my original question: is there any evidence of actual harm at the highest SAR values of any cell phone?

Using your analogy, it's more like saying that we know water above 40 degrees will be progressively more likely to cause a burn, so the limit of average heating of a cellphone is 20 degrees.

> So let me clarify my original question: is there any evidence of actual harm at the highest SAR values of any cell phone?

I don't think there is any.

Yep, high power RF can cook you, it's why radio engineers try not to expose their crotch or head to focused microwave transmitters when climbing a tower. But these are signal sources of a far higher power output than a cellphone.

Speaking of Germany, whenever I visit my phone battery drains much faster than elsewhere

This is likely due to the poor reception, which would mean my handset has to send a stronger signal to the base station -> more exposure to non-harmful RF, but given this German institute they do seem to care?

Would this be an example of someone shooting themselves in the foot by somehow limiting the transmission power from the cell sites? Or am I mistaken?

Part of it can be that, yes, and you can somewhat confirm it by taking note of whether or not your phone constantly has fewer bars of reception. But what affects this more are domestic cellular grid configurations telling phones how often they should announce their presence to base stations. With the advent of 3G the beacon rate of handsets in the grid is vastly higher than during the 2G era. What you're noticing is that your phone is "checking in" with the grid - turning its transmitter portion on and letting the grid know it's online and available - a lot more often than back home.

As another datapoint to this I've visited Malta several times the past 3 years, and on every visit I notice that my phone (compared to in Sweden) drains notably less battery.

The site itself contains this quote: "Among other things, this means that – in contrast to X-radiation – their energy is too low to cause direct damage to genetic material and for being directly involved in the development of cancer."

Isn't it about time to stop pretending thay there might be something hazardous about athermal levels of RF radiation? After 100 years I think we'd have seen consistent biological effects in the population if there were any to be observed.

I don't know if that's the best argument.

People used lead for pipes, drinking glasses, and other things for thousands of years before realizing the negative effects.

On the contrary, that lead was poison was recognised as far back as ancient Roman times. It was obvious even without a detailed scientific study.

The whole mobile phone radiation thing is just absurd. There's an imagined health concern that the most sensitive studies have failed to uncover. Hence, clearly, the radio waves are somehow insidious and even more evil! Sneaky radio cancer is the worst kind, don't you know!? It's evading detection! It's so subtle you don't even know you have cancer, but you must, because there's the word "radiation" in "electromagnetic radiation".

Is there any reason to suspects it’s any different from standing outside on a sunny day?

Yes. The difference between man-made EMFs and natural EMFs are that man made are polarized and natural EMFs or unpolarized.

Also, the wave lengths of man-made EMFs are nonexistent in the natural world, and for the majority of human evolution.

Never mind "not even wrong," that's not even right.

I am tired of these comments. What is not right, this?

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914

I'm genuinely poleaxed that Nature would publish that. What next, a horoscope column?

You have to be careful with Nature. The root journal is top quality, but there's some sort of ancillary pipeline within the "Nature" umbrella where articles look very superficially like a Nature article, but are NOT published in the root journal and are NOT held to the same standard at all. It can be a bit confusing.

I'm not sure if the cited article falls into that category or not, because I can't quite recall how it works, but I just know I have been burned by that one in the past when I submitted something to be reviewed and it turned out one really surprising result was garbage tier.

Yeah, apparently I missed the mark when I predicted a horoscope column. It's phrenology that's the new hotness at Nature. Connectome, shemectome: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01495-y

They are evidently running a cross-sectional, longitudinal, inter-dimensional study on how to hose a prestigious 150-year-old brand.

You sound like the Catholic Church commenting about Copernicus.

Careful, irony at that level has been found to cause cancer in laboratory animals.

In science you start with observed effects, then look for causes that explain, predict, or model the effects. You don't start with tin-foil hat theories with no physical basis (Polarization at wavelengths a million times longer than the structures supposedly being affected? Really?) and cast about looking for effects that your pet theories might explain.

These authors are looking for a smoking gun and they don't even have a corpse.

Yes, before the scientific method (and trial lawyers) were things. We've been paying more attention lately, in case you haven't noticed. There's no 'there' there.

> After 100 years I think we'd have seen consistent biological effects

Does ionizing radiation have only consistent biological effects? If not, why RF must have only consistent effects?

Effects may be varied, just like stochastic effects of ionizing radiation.

After 100 years, the burden of proof is on your side of the fence. No one can prove a negative.

its blindingly obvious that there is no somewhat immediate BIG problems, but who knows?

But as a thought experiment, what would realistically happen if irrefutable evidence came on the table that RF to the levels of what phonetowers, other peoples cellphones within say... 5 meters distance etc, had negative health effects.

Would people be able to demand all RF to that level be stopped? could they sue those who do it? (tv stations, phone towers, regular cellphone owners)

if those working as regulators saw the reports, and had a chance to suppress or recommend we cease all modern communication, what do we realistically expect them to do?

I think its beyond naive to think that anything would be changed before a solution/fix were to exist, and it also seems very naive to think that anyone who presents evidence of substantial negative effects would be allowed to publish anywhere of consequence.

Really? No one in cities can sleep properly - and the headaches.

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