Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality • Hacker News Board

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#41

Post by mohn » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

hellbanner wrote: post #8

codeshaman wrote: post #5

Good! There's too many of us already. 6.8 billion phones today means 6.8 billion pieces of high tech garbage a couple of years later, leaking all kinds of toxic shit into the water, plus 6.8 billion new devices manufactured while digging up all kinds of precious materials out of the ground and using oil to transport them all over the world, then burning coal, heating oil and natural gas to melt and glue shit together…

It really is disgusting how temporary cellphones are built. Where are the modular personal computers?

Europe [1]. I was very interested when I first saw some Fairphone 2 buzz online a couple months ago, but I'm a little apprehensive about water resistance and the price (525 EUR). Also, most people probably wouldn't have this problem, but I'd have to switch to a different cell provider to use an FP2.

[1] https://www.fairphone.com/phone/

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#42

Post by dekhn » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 3:24 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #38

dekhn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you're making a ton of assumptions about mechanisms. Saying low intensity RF has a negligible effect on chemistry belies the fact that cell receptors can be exquisitely sensitive and those receptors can cause large changes in cells via DNA transcription. The current most plausible mechanism is localized cell heating. We already know that RF can cause cell heating. There are a number of physical responses to ce…

Of course I'm making assumptions - the biggest one is that quantum chemistry works. If you are now retreating to thermal effects, they a) can be easily measured and b) are vastly smaller than effects like wearing tighty whities or walking past a radiator in winter. Is your sole claim that using a cell phone might have an effect 1/100th as large as blow drying one's balls after a shower? Let me reason by analogy, to e…

No, my sole claim is not that using a cell phone would have 1/100th the effect of blow drying ones testicles after a shower (why????)

After all, the phone stays around a lot longer (temporal effect) and I have certainly noticed that when the phone is using lots of bandwidth it stays warm for hours at a time. Many effects in biology can occur from extended exposure (cumulative dosage effects) when they don't have an effect from acute exposure. And vice versa, of course.

Anyway, reasoning from probabilistic intuition here is probably a mistake: the epi studies show stuff that doesn't agree with our intuition (this is common) and that leads theorists and experimentalists to go search for other causes. In the history of science, we have a long list of things that weren't intuitive but ultimately were figured out.

Finally falling back on "I assume QC works" isn't really informative in this case. I assume QC works to and I don't see why that negates the possibility that cell phones can have negative health effects caused by physical mechanisms.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#43

Post by dekhn » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 3:27 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #40

dekhn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many people, you're starting from assumption of the mechanism (ionization) and ignoring the fact that there are many other known physical mechanisms that are plausible. Also, if people detect a reliable signal without a plausible physical mechanism, best thing to do is determine what the cause of the signal is- rather than just assuming it's impossible. In grad school we were taught to do "back of the envelope"…

When it comes to weird results in human epidemiology and public health, my bet is always on hidden/unknown 3rd factors. You're right that the signal might be real, but it might have nothing at all to do with cell phones. Rather, cell phones might be independently correlated with whatever the real causes of the sperm problems are. Put in plain English: a group of men with similar cell phone habits probably have many o…

yes, I think it's always key to look at epi studies like this and make absolutely sure everybody agrees the protocol is designed to address bias. I'd say only about 10% of the studies I read do this adequately (it's one of the things that helped convince me Ionnides is right that nearly all studies are Just Wrong).

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#44

Post by 50CNT » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 3:39 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #26

dekhn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many people, you're starting from assumption of the mechanism (ionization) and ignoring the fact that there are many other known physical mechanisms that are plausible. Also, if people detect a reliable signal without a plausible physical mechanism, best thing to do is determine what the cause of the signal is- rather than just assuming it's impossible. In grad school we were taught to do "back of the envelope"…

What are the other plausible mechanisms? The effect of low intensity RF fields on chemistry is essentially negligible. For the most part, folks doing chemistry with non-ionizing radiation need intense lasers or microwave resonating cavities. The main exceptions (which in reality also mostly require intense radiation) are highly engineered scenarios where you finely tune a radiation source to excite an electron to a s…

This is probably silly speculation, but I'm neither good at testicle models nor the more squishy sciences.

So sperm virility is correlated with temperature. My phone gets very warm if I leave an app running. I keep my phone close to my testicles. The wikipedia page on "Semen quality" is now in my browser history.

I mean it's spurious, but I wouldn't be surprised if a running cellphone heats up the inside of your pants just enough for you to take a minor hit to semen quality. There's also a blood vessel that leads to the testicles that sits fairly close to where my phone sometimes goes. My browser history now contains anatomical diagrams of scrota. This could interfere with the thermoregulation of the testicle.

That or the tails act as tiny antenna. I'm sure glad that I'm nowhere near the field of Biology, and I'm sure Biology is glad too.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#45

Post by yummyfajitas » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 3:43 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #42

yummyfajitas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I'm making assumptions - the biggest one is that quantum chemistry works. If you are now retreating to thermal effects, they a) can be easily measured and b) are vastly smaller than effects like wearing tighty whities or walking past a radiator in winter. Is your sole claim that using a cell phone might have an effect 1/100th as large as blow drying one's balls after a shower? Let me reason by analogy, to e…

No, my sole claim is not that using a cell phone would have 1/100th the effect of blow drying ones testicles after a shower (why????) After all, the phone stays around a lot longer (temporal effect) and I have certainly noticed that when the phone is using lots of bandwidth it stays warm for hours at a time. Many effects in biology can occur from extended exposure (cumulative dosage effects) when they don't have an e…

QM rules out non-thermal effects. Once you retreat to thermal effects you have conceded that a cell phone is vastly less dangerous than turning the thermostat from 74 to 75 (if you want to think about extended exposure) or blow drying one's balls (if you want to think about acute exposure). Now those things probably do have some measurable effect - certainly temperature effects sperm count, which is why men are advised not to wear tighty whities.

Computing the size of cell phone effects, relative to things like moving from NY to slightly warmer DC is just a simple thermodynamic calculation. If the study is concerned about such tiny relative risks, they are both a) wildly underpowered to detect them and b) certainly aren't making that clear in the abstract.

Now, it's possible that our physics-based priors are wildly wrong. But as the calculation I did notes, this study is too underpowered to significantly change our views on that.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#46

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #39

maxerickson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people with low sperm concentrations tend to sit around using their cell phone while it is plugged in? The abstract doesn't really propose a mechanism, it just notes the correlation. Pushing people with certain usage patterns to get screening for low t (or whatever) can still be a useful outcome of the further research. Not that I think they really need to get funding to pursue it, but you are imputing the prop…

Right - I'm charitably assuming that their study supported causality with p=0.02. In reality it doesn't.

My statement above but you are imputing the proposal of a causative radiation mechanism. is poorly phrased. A better way to put what I was getting at is that they are not claiming that radiation effects are the only possible causative mechanism. They found some observation in some data and published it, probably in the service of a future grant proposal. Saying they didn't prove anything for this publication is like saying water is wet.

Should hn spend much time discussing the result (or really, observation)? Absolutely not. Should they get grant funding for this? I dunno, I hope there are better proposals out there, but really have no idea.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#47

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #43

snowwrestler wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to weird results in human epidemiology and public health, my bet is always on hidden/unknown 3rd factors. You're right that the signal might be real, but it might have nothing at all to do with cell phones. Rather, cell phones might be independently correlated with whatever the real causes of the sperm problems are. Put in plain English: a group of men with similar cell phone habits probably have many o…

yes, I think it's always key to look at epi studies like this and make absolutely sure everybody agrees the protocol is designed to address bias. I'd say only about 10% of the studies I read do this adequately (it's one of the things that helped convince me Ionnides is right that nearly all studies are Just Wrong).

It is impossible for an epidemiology study to elimate hidden factors, no matter how many statistical tests they run. Hidden factors are hidden, which means the statistics can't tell you about them. Information not available to the researchers cannot be evaluated by the researchers.

This is why the concept of a mechanism is important in science--it provides a framework for simplified experiments that exclude hidden factors by their design. For example if the hypothesis is that cell phone radiation causes sperm problems by damaging human cells, then human cells can be directly exposed to that type of radiation to see what happens.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#48

Post by zyxzevn » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:22 PM UTC

The problem is that we have a bad model to describe the effect of EM-waves on biological tissue. Currently the model defines biological bodies as containers of water. This is clearly wrong.

What I propose is standard antenna science. Something needs to resonate with the biological systems. In artificial antennas there are free electrons. In biological bodies there are ions and polar molecules. Most proteins are diamagnetic, except when they are in reaction. These are the things that we need to concentrate on.

There are also new discoveries that show that biology uses quantum super position states in some of the important proteins. This allows these proteins to be far more sensitive to electromagnetism. For example: the magnetic sense of birds depend on it. Another example is chlorophyll, which becomes more sensitive to light (which is an EM-wave) than usual. Other discoveries show that DNA might be a conductor. And in combination with EM-radiation the functioning of parts of the DNA can be reduced or enhanced. This is new science which clearly shows that we were wrong about the effect of electromagnetism and biology before.

Also interesting are processes in biology that have certain frequencies of themselves like the firing of neurons. And other repetitive processes like the transcoding of DNA to RNA and of RNA to proteins.

Note that all these antenna possibilities depend on certain frequencies. On some frequencies we might see no result at all, while on others it affects a certain process in a negative or even positive way. And looking a the actual research at http://www.microwavenews.com this seems to be the case. A lot of research show some kind of effect (negative and positive), while others don't.

Sadly many scientists do not know much about both biology and antennas. They usually talk about ionization and heat, which are not the problem at all. It is actually very stupid to see that as the problem.

I do not think that EM-radiation is totally bad. It is just something that is damaging on the long term due to stress and disturbance of the biological processes and systems (when they resonate with the specific frequencies of the signals).

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#49

Post by judofyr » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:22 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #20

I can't critique the article directly, since it's behind a paywall. But I can take the purported results and do some Bayesian analysis with it. Take first a prior - due to my knowledge of physics, my prior on microwave/RF/visual radiation having any biological effect is 10^{-5}. Multiphoton ionization has simply never been observed to happen except under extremely intense (read: it'll melt you) fields and there are s…

I'm not sure why you're so critical. This is how science works. No one wants to do (or pay for) a huge survey if you have no idea what the results will be. So you start out with a smaller survey and see if it's worth investigating more. Right now there's no consensus about the effects of RF-EMF on semen quality. The proper solution is to continue doing research, not ignoring it all together because "it can only harm us in a way that QM disproves".

But yes, this is not a "this will change your life"-paper, it's just "another data point which we should investigate"-paper.

Anyway, I found it interesting that their survey did discover another variable:

> A multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed a strong independent effect of two variables on the risk for abnormal sperm concentration: talking while the device is being charged and smoking.

There seems to be quite a consensus that smoking does indeed have a negative effect on sperm quality. Their survey did manage to pick that up.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#50

Post by dlsx » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:27 PM UTC

I don't use cellphone devices. I have a desktop computer, and my life is 100%.

Maybe we don't need cell phones?

I think they are generally overused and do not accomplish anything productive in comparison.

Mobile is the past. Rooms are the future.