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

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#51

Post by dlsx » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:28 PM UTC

50CNT wrote: post #44

yummyfajitas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pant…

Are you a fuckongfucking retardeded???

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#52

Post by yummyfajitas » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

judofyr wrote: post #49

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…

That's fine, but this study (or the effect it measured) is vastly too small for us to significantly raise our prior estimate of an effect.

There is consensus (among physicists who know QM) that non-thermal effects of RF radiation on the body are negligible. Simple calculations and easy experiments show that thermal effects are tiny, vastly smaller than turning up the thermostat by one degree or walking out in the sun.

The fact is that the results of this study are not even particularly suggestive of being worth of investigation.

Concretely, based on this study and my prior knowledge, I'm willing to offer bets at 1000:1 that a sufficiently large study [1] will show that cell phones have a smaller effect than turning the thermostat up 1 degree.

[1] This number assumes a perfect study; adjust this drastically downward for small studies with high p-value cutoffs like 5%. If the study is underpowered, then offering 1000:1 odds on outcomes is like offering 1000:1 odds on`if (Math.random() < 0.05)`.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#53

Post by drostie » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:37 PM UTC

Please note that they were not able to prove that having your cell phone near your groin correlated with abnormal sperm. Rather, they found a correlation with being very chatty and being chatty while charging.

Correlations, of course, are also not causation. For example, there is no control in this study which rules out an effect like "some men have less testosterone, and this causes them to both be more glued to their phones (using while charging), more social on their phones (talking for over an hour a day), and to have a higher incidence of abnormal sperm." It's sort of like a headline: "If you're shorter, you may be a better parent: a study found an inverse correlation between height and how much time you spend with your kids." You'd be tempted to disbelieve me until I tell you that on average, women are shorter and also spend more time with their kids. If in this case we know the causes, how much more difficult is it when we don't to isolate the confounding variables?

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#54

Post by tokenadult » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:49 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…

Thanks for this helpful comment. The back-and-forth that is going on in the subthread below your comment illustrates the difference between "evidence-based medicine" (medicine studied through randomized, controlled trials, which by the way we don't have here) and "science-based medicine" (medicine studied not just through randomized, controlled trials but also through careful consideration of fundamental science). Science-based medicine is rare but important[1] because even clinical trials, if done with small enough sample size and enough researcher degrees of freedom, can produce spurious results, which are all the more convincing because they appear to be backed up by good methodology.

But of course here we don't even have a randomized controlled trial, but only a very poorly conducted observational study in an obscure journal that is implausible on scientific grounds. If there is any association here, likely it results from some coincidental lifestyle association between cell phone use (wherever the cell phones are put) and sperm quality. (P.S. I'm a father of four children, but three of those four were born before I became a regular cell phone user. I'm not worried about this issue for my personal life, at my current age.)

[1] https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/about-science-based-med...

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#55

Post by Retric » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:49 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…

Indirect, People carry cellphones in there pants pockets. Said pants are going to be tighter which hampers sperm production.

Posture, people that sit differently during a phone conversation which may be constricting airflow / blood flow / heating.

Direct heating, phones get fairly hot during charging which may cause other issues.

Related behaviors, people that use there phone a lot may also use-laptops in there lap which case heat issues.

PS: Sure, the study may just be random statistical noise. But, your better off investigating things that don't seem reasonable than assuming your world view covers everything.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#56

Post by dekhn » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:55 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #47

dekhn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

Like I said, a carefully designed study can eliminate many biases. I didn't claim it could eliminate hidden factors.

Anyway the problem with finding something in an epi study then trying to reproduce it in a minimal environment (isolated cells exposed directly to radiation) is unlikely to uncover any complex mechanism. Cells on their own don't behave like tissue, and tissue on its own doesn't behave like an organism.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#57

Post by drostie » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 4:58 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52

judofyr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's fine, but this study (or the effect it measured) is vastly too small for us to significantly raise our prior estimate of an effect. There is consensus (among physicists who know QM) that non-thermal effects of RF radiation on the body are negligible. Simple calculations and easy experiments show that thermal effects are tiny, vastly smaller than turning up the thermostat by one degree or walking out in the sun…

Speaking as a physicist who knows QM, this is almost-correct.

More precisely, the chemical effects of microwave photons are restricted to being the sort of effects that routinely happen within your body all the time due to the thermal jiggle of atoms. Obviously this is not "nothing", because your body does a lot of cool stuff with all of that jiggling.

Obviously, chemical effects can also happen due to accumulated electric potential, as when a metal fork causes sparks in a microwave, but cell phones only have one hundredth or thousandth of that much power going through them at any given time, and the most visible effects of this in the human body seem to be negligible. (These effects do exist -- witness what tasers do to people, or what a 9V battery feels like on the tongue -- but nobody really reports these feelings when holding a transmitting cell phone near their tongue.)

So the possibilities are certainly there but it does seem like if cell phones caused the calamities that are sometimes attributed to them, it would probably change our understanding of one of these two spaces.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#58

Post by Retric » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #45

dekhn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 advis…

Outside temperature is less important than you might assume we can lower or pull back our boys to regulate temperature. Airflow and being physically pushed back into the body is a major factor so your boys can overheat when it's 55 or be fine when it's 95.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#59

Post by nickpsecurity » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:21 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…

"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 strong theoretical reasons to believe it won't happen."

He we go again. The assumption that microwaves won't have biological effects because it would have to be at a melt you level. Or focusing on one aspect where this might be true. That's despite plenty of work in the past showing otherwise. Example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

Did Frey's subjects all die? No? QED.

Now, since microwaves can affect us, what effects do they have and how? This piece of research claims one. So, the question becomes: is it producing good data from good methodology? If so, then we duplicate that data from a few groups unlikely to collude to forge it. If it checks out, especially eliminating other variables, then cell radiation is probably killing sperm and we find out why.

"if this effect is real, it'll require new physics to explain."

Another common line of nonsense dropped often when people push the envelope in science. Most of the time, we find that existing physics explains a new phenomenon but scientists were just looking at the problem wrong. My favorite example is always how gecko's cling to walls: neither suction nor sticky hands but van der Walls force. We knew it existed but people's existing beliefs delayed understanding the truth.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#60

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

From the abstract: Some studies have shown a continuous decline in semen quality since the beginning of the 20th century. One postulated contributing factor is radio frequency electromagnetic radiation emitted from cell phones.

If the decline is since the start of the 20th century (1901), cell phones are unlikely to be a primary cause. The first cell phone was in 1973 and they didn't become commonplace until the end of the 20th or start of the 21st century. Unclear if the premise is wrongly stated or if the authors are confusing the 20th and 21st century.