Unless the topic is how TikTok can cause hemorrhoids from sitting too long on the can, I imagine the topic is specifically the effect of radio waves in the cellular bands on nervous tissue, not the general concept of mobile phones on general human health.
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.
>all it can do is oscillate matter in various ways
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.
Note that RF does not make everything oscillate violently - the energy is dissipated by inducing spin in water molecules, leaving little energy to budge huge macro structures like enzymes.
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.
(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.
It's not really reliance on wheels, but reduction of all mechanical work as one then goes to sit at a desk.
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.)
On the side of sensible caution when presented with unknown factors, yes.
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.
“Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded.”
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.
I haven't read the study but it appears to include studies as far back as 1994. Mobile phone technology has changed a lot in just the last few years (MIMO, 5G etc). Frequencies used are increasing meaning decreasing wavelengths and decreasing penetrating power. I would hope that means less effects on the human body...
Penetration power of a material, not energy. An arrow is going to have more penetrating power than a baseball bat despite the bat potentially imparting more total energy. Lower frequency waves tend to go through things more while higher frequencies tend to get attenuated and absorbed by materials.
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.
Not for nothing, but generally speaking the lower frequency transmissions haven't fallen out of use. Instead, they are deployed more in less populated areas. (Not saying these signals cause cancer, just that they are still in use).
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.
The other response to you is correct. It's about material blocking. Skin depth, how far electromagnetic waves can penetrate, is inversely proportional to the square root of the frequency.
How could it be? The radiation wavelength is far too high to cause any sort of chemistry. I know there are those that will still believe it does though.
> No evidence is needed. Tissue damage is damage and genetic stress. It can increase the risk of a local cancer.
"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.
The healing of repeated damage to the body is a vector for cancer. For example, mesothelioma caused by asbestos. The asbestos is continuously damaging tissue in the body, and the healing of said damage leads to calcification of tissue and potentially cancer.
It's certainly possible that other repeated tissue damage, such as those from burns, could also be cancer causing.
..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?
I guess we should consider heated seats dangerously carcinogenic then. They put out far more power than a cellphone. Same with heating bags and homes without air conditioning.
>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.
You're right! But also, it's effectively the same as ionizing:
"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."
I think it depends on the amount of the radiation. While non-ionizating radiation doesn't have the ability to remove electrons, it still can heat up surfaces. Microwave ovens for example use non-ionizing radiation to heat up food, but this amount of radiation could potentially be dangerous if exposed to, because it could destroy human tissue.
You're right, it is entirely possible to get RF burns at the UHF frequencies involved here. I wouldn't want to hang out near a 1kW UHF antenna!
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.
Wouldn’t it then hypothetically also kill the cancer cells? And due to increased water and blood flow, in an even higher rate compared to healthy cells?
Well, based upon some Googling, 2G's wavelength is ~33cm and 5G's is ~80mm, so that's a big increase, but the kicker is that ionizing radiation's wavelength starts at ~100nm, so we're still a huge distance away from dangerous. We're not even at visible light yet (~700nm). 5G has less potential for damage than your computer screen.
Well, at least the base station opposition usually has a point: these things are goddamn eyesores.
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.
Those towers still have ugly looking antennas on them; they're just too high to really be noticeable on the ground. [0]
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.
> Those towers still have ugly looking antennas on them; they're just too high to really be noticeable on the ground.
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.
> In ye olde times, back when we actually raised taxes to have money to build things, we built aesthetically pleasing radio towers
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 linked article is about mobile phones, not base stations. If you're interested in base station technology (huge multiple-input and multiple-output arrays with 10s to 100s Watts RF output) Ericsson publish a lot of papers.
Mostly yes, but the base stations are more complicated with complex arrays etc. Ericson actually have a good paper on modeling max power output in new massive MIMO 5G base stations: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8039290
The linked article is about a study of mobile phone use, not proximity to a base station. I don’t know anything about base station technology, so can’t comment on the risks there, but I would imagine that the risk profile of holding an antenna to your head is different than the risk profile of living near an antenna that transmits to hundreds of devices.
The number of devices doesn't really matter, but it does influence something like a duty cycle. It's all about power level, distance, and duty cycle. Sure, the cell phone antenna is going to transmit at something like 1kW, but its also significantly further away from you. Inverse-square law is a hell of a thing, so something being really close to you will end up imparting more effective energy than something far away.
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.
The WHO has argued that cell phone radiation is a potential human carcinogen for quite a while now. Whatever role they played during Covid is not necessarily relevant to their position on this issue.
Well, the WHO is also an advocate of the polio vaccine. What accurate conclusions are we supposed to make using this logic really. Unless you're saying it's in its interest to advocate the use of mobile phones. But people are already using their phones without the need for WHO pushing it down their throats?
They can be right on things, wrong on others. Its a big organization. This type of research will be cited in the future, which could negate interest/developments regarding tumors related to mobile phones. Why give a researcher $50k for a study on this subject when the WHO sponsored paper already said it has null effect?
That's why you should attack the study and not the org. If the study/analysis is exposed convincingly as garbage the org takes a hit anyway.
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.
edited for clarity