In a similar vein, don't even think of questioning GMOs. You even just hint that you wanna see more studies on their safety you will be torn limb from limb, even if you admit to trusting them and eating them yourself.
That's because there already have been many many studies, and regulations require that each new food GMO be studied as well. If you don't mention all those, I'm guess the "tearing limb from limb" is actually annoyance at your ignorance.
Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
131–140 of 163 posts
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#132>Where to begin? I didn’t see any sample size calculation, nor any discussion of what they expected to see. One of the reviewers did a power calculation for them (page 37) and found that based on 90 rats per group, the power was about 14%. This means that false positives are very likely. The cancer difference was only seen in females, not males. The incidence of brain cancer in the exposed groups was well within the historical range. There’s no clear dose response. Why schwannomas? Schwannomas in other locations than the heart were not significantly different. These are rats. I don’t know how this compares to real world exposure. And one more thing – the survival of male rats in the control group was relatively low, and if these tumors developed later in life, this could be the whole reason for the difference.
>Cell phones are UBIQUITOUS in the United States. If they were causing cancer, we would expect to see rates of [brain] cancer going up, right? That’s not what we’re seeing. They’ve been decreasing since the late 1980’s. At least when we talk about vaccines and autism, the rates of the latter went up as we increased the former. With cell phones, there’s an inverse relationship. What’s going on?
I suggest reading the whole post.
Personally, I am unconcerned by this single study of rats, in groups of only 90, that found barely significant correlations out of many possible correlations looked for.
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/none-of-you-can-...
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conjecture: There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions. Another way to think…
It's been a while since I took chemistry and physics so I could be wrong, but I think you may be incorrect due to quantum effects. Specifically, the quantum in quantum mechanics refers to various phenomena which are quantized, a very common example of which is an electron moving to a different energy level. It's entirely discrete what energy levels an electron may orbit an atomic nucleus at, it's not a continuum, and…
Take for example a single water molecule in vacuum: If you calculate the QM vibrational (motion of the nuclei) and electronic frequencies you would conclude that there is no way that microwave radiation can excite a water molecule. This is because the nuclei interact with three discrete (quantized) frequencies in the infrared (IR light), whereas the electronic degrees of freedom only interact with much higher energy photons (UV and above).
However, if you now move into the bulk, you will notice that there are is also an interaction energy between the water molecules which causes rapid changes in the water conformation at room temperature. From the quantum mechanical perspective, you now get an explosion of possible states including states which excite the hydrogen bond network between the water molecules. You can now induce translation and rotation of water with respect to each other. This is why water absorbs across a large spectrum of frequencies including radiation in the microwave region.
For DNA, the situation is similar. You will also find a continuous broadening of states. BUT how well you absorb energy at a given frequency still varies. Cell phone bands do not carry enough energy to break electronic bonds directly (unlike UV light). Instead, you can only induce thermal motions of the nuclei (heat). Luckily, our DNA transfers excess heat very rapidly (~picoseconds) to its environment, so no danger of local heating to the point of bond breaking if you don't climb up a massive cell phone tower.
In the end, its very unlikely that cell phone radiation alters chemical bonds in our DNA. However, beware of the sun while talking on the phone! I would guess that outdoor usage of cell phone significantly increases the dangers of cell phone usage. ;-)
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#134Sigh, this isn't going to help the (mentally ill?) people who believe cellphones / wifi are making them sick. I wish this study wasn't paywalled, it needs some careful reading to determine actual risk. And then, if phones are causing cancer? Do you think everyone will stop using them? Do you think Apple will go bankrupt?
> I wish this study wasn't paywalled, it needs some careful reading to determine actual risk. It's not paywalled. It's linked in the article as well as in other articles. Take a look here: http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055699.f... > And then, if phones are causing cancer? Do you think everyone will stop using them? Do you think Apple will go bankrupt? Everything comes with a risk. If phones real…
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#135Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced. We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study hav…
I've always been curious: I understand that h.nu from cell phone radiation isn't big enough to ionize (say) DNA, but since the molecules in our body are in thermal equilibrium, can't h.nu + kT get it done every once in a while? [edited because using an asterisk to denote multiplication was a bad idea]
[0] http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jcp/128/10/10.1...
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a photon doesn't have enough energy to knock an electron out of it's orbital, then it won't. This is not a probabilistic thing. Do you have a source for the blood-brain barrier thing?
It is a probabilistic thing. If your photon arrives at the same time as another photon, then you can have two-photon absorption (which wouldn't have occurred without your photon). Ditto if your photon arrives at the same time as a thermal vibration or any other carrier of energy. This is why semiconductors can still occasionally absorb photons with energy below their bandgap. Anything in a thermal environment has som…
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#137It's important to note that according to official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer. I've heard my own concerns about non-ionising radiation dismissed (even belittled) so many times that I've lost count. Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered. But one should und…
You also setup a straw man. Any scientist or thoughtful person says "there isn't a known/proven" link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer and so far most evidence seems negative.
Of course there is a lot we don't know. That doesn't mean we are incapable of making any statements about anything at all. If cell phones caused a significant risk in the rise of cancer (say 1-10%) we'd have easily seen that by now. We haven't. This study didn't see it either... In fact the rats exposed to radiation lived longer than the ones not exposed!
So what we can confidently say is that if cell phone radiation causes cancer, it is an extremely minor contributor. In all likelihood it's contribution is zero, but that is also unproven and should be further studied.
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cancer is a very broad church. There have been a lot of lifestyle changes over the last twenty years, very difficult to specify control groups ....
You could possibly use the Amish as a control group. They are probably exposed less than almost any other group to these types of radiation due to their distance in proximity. They, of course, do come into contact with it in minor ways when interacting in public, but far far less than the general population.
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#139I know these are real words, but you gotta admit they sound strikingly fictitious.
Re: Cellphone-Cancer Link Found in Government Study
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a photon doesn't have enough energy to knock an electron out of it's orbital, then it won't. This is not a probabilistic thing. Do you have a source for the blood-brain barrier thing?
It is a probabilistic thing. If your photon arrives at the same time as another photon, then you can have two-photon absorption (which wouldn't have occurred without your photon). Ditto if your photon arrives at the same time as a thermal vibration or any other carrier of energy. This is why semiconductors can still occasionally absorb photons with energy below their bandgap. Anything in a thermal environment has som…
Two-photon absorption becomes an important effect at high intensities (if I understand the wikipedia article). How do "high intensities" compare to the intensity of radiation from a phone?