Mobile phones not linked to brain cancer, biggest study to date finds
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
edited for clarity
Non-ionizing radiation (in the range of frequencies used by mobile phones) has been used for wireless communication for more than 75 years.
Larger scales like 50k years are to be considered. Evolutionary scale.
Integrated circuits? Electric lighting? Gasp! Those are way too modern. Better switch to caves and campfires for housing and lighting.
Even cutting out walking and jogging in favour of *human-powered* bikes or wheelchairs will lead to bone density loss and muscular dystrophy.
Walking a 60km commute every day wouldn't be good for your knees either though.
> will lead to bone density loss and muscular dystrophy.
It's not right to call this bone and muscle distrophy. Not playing squash, probably the sport leading to the highest bone density by far, does not mean you suffer from or muscle distrophy.
Rather, whenever you change any habits, your bone density and muscle mass adjusts to prioritize things relevant. Pick up tennis? Your right arm will be heavily prioritized. Change to running? Your arms will no longer be prioritized.
It's mainly an issue when you drop below a healthy limit - that doesn't really happen from changing your exercise, but from a complete lack or physical disorders.
(Suggesting one is "cutting out" walking or jogging once they get tied to a wheelchair might also not be the best way to phrase things.)
The context of this thread is the effect of mobile phones on human health. That's a timescale of a human lifespan, not 50k years.
But if you want to avoid all new technology for 50k years, enjoy:
- seeing no doctors, taking no medication, receiving no surgery
- walking everywhere
- hunting/gathering for all food
Radio waves has been studied since the 19th century - around the same time a doctor realized that maybe one should wash their hands after an autopsy before delivering a child, although no one really believed him for decades - and we have been exposed to them since the beginning of life itself. Peaks in history have happened as kilo- and megawatt transmitters for point-to-point and broadcast transmissions came and (almost) went. Lightning strikes and solar storms still bombard us though.
We have studied the effect on tissue within these frequencies extensively - all it can do is oscillate matter in various ways (in case of water, it causes the molecules to spin), depending on the power level and resonant frequencies - and every household is now comfortable having a kilowatt transmitter to cook food with despite leakage. Even with that transmitter right up against your food, the food only cooks at the standing wave anti-nodes - where constructive interference from reflections in the small closed space boosts the signal further (a necessary mechanism, as the food would otherwise only cook at the surface).
Cellphones transmitters usually operate in tens to hundreds of milliwatts as they will aggressively throttle output to save power when it is not needed (the closer you are to the tower, the lower your exposure!). The power at the surface of the phone is far too low to matter, and the power once it has gone through your skin, bones and cerebral fluid to get to your brain is much, much lower.
Phones even need to be certified for their maximum energy absorption, at their maximum transmit power across all bands of operation. Take an iPhone for example: https://regulatoryinfo.apple.com/rfexposure/iphone14,5/en
That is not a trivial effect. A variety of hormones, enzymes etc. in the body are fine tuned to oscillate at their optimum frequencies and that get disrupted by man made EM waves. Note that we are by virtue of evolution (somewhat but not always) immune to natural EM waves. ( sun, cosmic rays etc.). You will have to look into the work of Prof. Trevor Marshall for details. Not surprising, he is generally not takes seriously, so again depends on who you choose to trust.
Enzymatic oscillations are also to my knowledge on the scale of minutes, not nanoseconds. Even if it could cause measurable motion, I see no reason to suspect that a weak gigahertz carrier wave would form any meaningful interference with a .001 Hz motion.
There is a big difference between being unaffected by EM like us and having protection against it. It’s also very silly to classify things as “man made” here - what we work with is a small subset of what nature throws at us all the time (ever seen the RF spectrum of a lightning strike?). The main “concern” (pardon the quotes) would be exposure time, as neither energy nor frequency sticks out.
Feel free to share a link to some of his work that you find relevant - even if I end up disagreeing with the conclusion or methodologies, reading different perspectives do not hurt.
https://www.trevormarshall.com/ should be a good _starting_ point.
(Side note: don't you think experimental evidence should override all speculation of how things should work or not work? I believe that Prof TM has done some of those experiments, and referencing a fair amount of literature on the subject)
That's not a starting point, that's just his web page. Works that were relevant would be e.g. specific papers on the topic that gained traction.
> Side note: don't you think experimental evidence should override all speculation of how things should work or not work?
Well, that depends. Once you have sufficient experiments from several parties that hold up to scrutiny and meta-analysis, then you have the basis for building a theory to describe it, and build further experiments to attempt to disprove it or its competing theories. At some point, the results and underlying theory becomes agreed upon knowledge - even if temporary.
Before that, experiments are interesting anecdotes to pique interest and build further research on. Most results, however, fail to get that far as most experiments are based on flawed test methodologies with conclusions not following the data, often driven unintentionally by a selection bias for a theory one set out to prove. Science is chock full of non-reproducible work and wrong conclusions (remember the recent superconductor scandal? most of these never make the news), which is why the power of science (like all of human knowledge) must always be in numbers.
Yes, this does sometimes lead to understudied subjects lacking conclusions as it requires extensive interest and funding from multiple parties. For example, the focus on "alternative medicine" has been to debunk its claims of resolving medical conditions (the majority being quackery predating even basic understanding of biology), but as a result alternative chronic pain management regimes within these fields which some individuals find temporary relief within lack any useful data - an area modern medicine handles poorly. But this cannot be used as argument to relax the requirement of numbers.
So yeah, "depends".
> Prof TM
I can't help but read this as Prof™.
That does not apply when there is neither practical evidence nor any room for justified suspicion. At that point it might at best be silly, even if not harmful.
Depending on the subject at hand, acting out and advising caution on things that are well understood to be harmless can be very harmful. Not using a cellphone oneself is fine. Advising others to not have cellphones can lead to them not having access to emergency services when they need them. Protesting against and burning down cellphone towers takes out emergency services for an entire local population.
Non-ionizing radiation is a very well-understood topic, and we also know very well what energies are required to do harm, and what harm it does.
I guess those who misread my comment agree with it because both sides think the other side is ignoring evidence
Now, believing something with zero supporting evidence or arguments, and plenty against it, is of course silly - but you still believe either/or. :)
This is not a new study. It’s a review and meta-analysis of existing studies.
It is always hard for me to believe that the decisions on which studies to exclude can be done in an unbiased way.
So, if you're worried about the waves going deep through your tissues and into your brain, its less likely those waves will end up reaching very deep and will tend to be absorbed on the surface of your skin.
But yes, 700ishMHz and up is still plenty used in modern 4/5G deployments.
I mean, for context, basically all EMF that we are talking about for communications are sub-visible spectrum by a long shot. Visible light operates in the Terahertz range (400->790THz) while all communications are 1000x (or 100,000x) lower frequencies, with the highest being around 20GHz.
Ionizing radiation happens at even higher frequencies than the visible spectrum.
That's why I see it as silly to worry about the higher energy of higher frequencies. We are talking about much lower frequencies and exposure vs what you get hit with everyday by turning on a lamp or walking in the sun.
But let's look at the scale of emissions here. A microwave oven is going to be radiating anywhere from 800 to 1600 watts of energy into a box designed to focus most of the energy where the food is. A phone is going to emit maybe 2W of power at its peak transmission power omnidirectionally. Meaning a lot of that 2W isn't going anywhere near your head.
I use shorter or higher wavelengths (depends on the channel in question) to cook my food every day but my phone sure doesn't emit 700W
..let’s assume that a specific area of our inner body is “micro-cooked” constantly, the body will certainly try to repair that area with higher frequency and therefore there would be a higher risk of cancer, wouldn’t it?
In fact, when the healing occurs, keloid scars can form, which is a benign growth.
"No evidence needed" works if you want to be an astrologer.
Then everything causes cancer (and death really) by means of break, bruise, bump, burn, cut, prick, sprain, tear, etc.
Where evidence is needed is if you want to show a statistically significant result of your analysis that something indeed causes injury, and does it often enough to cause cancer within a person's lifetime.
Why doesn't the same damage occur when you're being blasted with 600 THz radiation (ie. visible light from your lightbulb)?
It's certainly possible that other repeated tissue damage, such as those from burns, could also be cancer causing.
>Exposure to ionizing radiation causes cell damage to living tissue and organ damage.
>Gamma rays, X-rays, and the higher energy ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum are ionizing radiation, whereas the lower energy ultraviolet, visible light, nearly all types of laser light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves are non-ionizing radiation
In other words, the UV causes cancer because it's in the ionizing range of the spectrum. Radio waves don't because they're not.
"UV-A and UV-B are technically non-ionizing, but all UV wavelengths can cause photochemical reactions that to some extent mimic ionization. For example, ultraviolet light, even in the non-ionizing range, can produce free radicals that induce cellular damage and can cause skin cancer."
https://radiation.ncdhhs.gov/NonIonizing/UVRad.htm#:~:text=U....
In ye olde times, back when we actually raised taxes to have money to build things, we built aesthetically pleasing radio towers [1] [2] (my grandpa actually worked in construction of the latter as a crane operator) that have become a beloved part of our city landscapes. No one complained about RF despite the old analog emitters running multiple megawatts of power.
Nowadays? It's usually eyesores on already ugly roofs in urban areas or metal towers looking about as pleasing as a high-voltage transmission lines.
My two cents: Maybe if we would actually invest money into making things look good, we'd get less opposition. And that is valid for a looooot of other NIMBY-plagued infrastructure as well.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldeturm_N%C3%BCrnberg
But for modern cell networks, you don't really want very tall towers. Taller towers mean they pick up the UHF radios from further and further away. You can realistically only carry the same number of subscribers per cell, so to support more users you're going to want to have more but smaller cells. In even medium density areas, you want your antenna elements closer to the ground to have smaller cells.
Giant tall towers make sense when you're trying to broadcast or receive signals in a large area. They make sense for television or commercial radio or emergency services VHF/UHF radios. However, that's totally unlike modern cell networks today. And even then a lot of emergency services radio systems are going for more of a distributed network of antennas throughout the city instead of just a single giant tower.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Ol...
Yup, and unless you're standing right next to them you have absolutely no idea how huge these antennas are - but visually, they drown like flies in a swimming pool, you can't make them out any more, and that's the point.
Small cell towers can be visually hidden. Even if it's just a sheet of drywall or a fully plastic wrap/enclosure that's printed on to look like wall bricks or roof tiles, I don't care, it doesn't need to be a full fake facade like in NYC [1].
All I want is for the telcos that are robbing us dry here in Germany to have to respect the people whose space they want to use.
[1] https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/new-york-fake-facades/
People still build this kind of stuff, it's just less common because it's way more expensive (it's labor intensive, so it doesn't get cheaper over time).
Most companies have turned to the other way of doing this, they just offer money to the buildings, and if they consider it an eyesore, they can pay for the "beautification". Most building managers won't do it though.
The funniest thing of this whole business is that a lot of residential buildings oppose the installation arguing "health issues", which ends up with the antennas built on another building. They not only don't get the cash, but most times their actual exposure goes up.
The WHO was a huge advocate for contact tracing during COVID. Many countries simply accept their guidelines for public health standards. Given how corrupt the funding of medical/scientijfic studies are, this is not to be trusted.
If someone bothered to check that the main opiod supporting citation was actually some random letter to the editor someone wrote and not an actual study perhaps they would have saved a bunch of people a lot of grief early on.
Didn't you just nullify your original point?