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This is an interesting counterpoint to an article/thread from earlier today: "Why Cell Phones Can’t Cause Cancer, But Bananas Can" http://mitchkirby.com/2015/04/22/why-cell-phones-cant-cause-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9446505
If it acts as a (relatively good) antenna to emf, then won't emf cause a mechanical stress on the strand?
As a HAM radio operator, you could literally hang a copper wire between two trees and pump 1 kW into it. No mechanical stress whatsoever - the EMF frequency is too high to generate elastic waves in the wire.
The title could perhaps mislead people into believing that DNA is some kind of communication device for extraterrestrial beings rather than the intention of this article which is to point out that EM radiation like that from your cellphone in your pocket can cause cancer.
How different is it from the public concerns about microwaves/cellphones from the last decade ?
This is an interesting counterpoint to an article/thread from earlier today: "Why Cell Phones Can’t Cause Cancer, But Bananas Can" http://mitchkirby.com/2015/04/22/why-cell-phones-cant-cause-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9446505
Evidence trumps theory. A theory can be as clever as you like, but if it disagrees with the evidence, the theory is wrong.
I've also stumbled to this:
http://www.febsletters.org/article/S0014-5793%2800%2901822-6...
Here was how it was described when she was awarded the National Medal of Science: "For discovery of a new property of the DNA helix, long-range electron transfer, and for showing that electron transfer depends upon stacking of the base pairs and DNA dynamics. Her experiments reveal a strategy for how DNA repair proteins locate DNA lesions and demonstrate a biological role for DNA-mediated charge transfer".
If it turns out that the cell does locate damage by looking for sections of DNA that do not conduct when they should, then having the DNA acting as an antenna could interfere with that. The induced currents in the separate strands on both sides of a break could make it look like there is no break.
I'd guess that this would not be as bad as getting hit with ionizing radiation, which can actually break bonds. Non-ionizing radiation inducing currents would not break bonds--it would just interfere with repairing bonds that were broken by some other mechanism.
Still not something I want to encourage, so I'm going to avoid dumping large amounts of non-ionizing radiation into my body just to be on the safe side [2].
[1] http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jkbgrp/
[2] ...says the man who just ordered a handheld ham radio transceiver that puts out 5 watts at 144/220/440 MHz, which is several times what a cell phone puts out.
The title could perhaps mislead people into believing that DNA is some kind of communication device for extraterrestrial beings rather than the intention of this article which is to point out that EM radiation like that from your cellphone in your pocket can cause cancer.
Perhaps we should use spread spectrum techniques instead of a single prominent carrier frequency. That way, the signal will look mostly like noise and will not trigger any biological mechanisms that resonate at certain frequencies.
Perhaps we should use spread spectrum techniques instead of a single prominent carrier frequency. That way, the signal will look mostly like noise and will not trigger any biological mechanisms that resonate at certain frequencies.
We do use spread spectrum technologies a lot. I don't know about cell phones though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_division_multiple_access
This is an interesting counterpoint to an article/thread from earlier today: "Why Cell Phones Can’t Cause Cancer, But Bananas Can" http://mitchkirby.com/2015/04/22/why-cell-phones-cant-cause-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9446505
There are a lot of papers which have failed to reproduce these effects. Granted fractal antennas are weird in and of themselves but cellular ones fail to pass the sniff test.