Cellphones Do Not Cause Brain Cancer, Says 29-Year Study (gizmodo.com) 234
A study from Australia reassures us that cellphones are reasonably safe, and do not cause brain cancer. Chris Mills writes from Gizmodo: "The study examines the incidence of brain cancer in the Australian population between 1982 to 2013. The study pitted the prevalence of mobile phones among the population -- starting at 0 percent -- against brain cancer rates, using data from national cancer registration data. The results showed a very slight increase in brain cancer rates among males, but a stable level among females. There were significant increases in over -70s, but began in 1982, before cellphones were even a thing." What makes the study in Australia so authentic compared to other studies conducted in other countries is the fact that all diagnosed cases of cancer have to be registered by law.
They can't (Score:5, Informative)
Photons from microwaves can't ionize matter. This is why ultraviolet photons are so dangerous: they can cause chemical changes in living tissue. Microwaves can't do that it it is silly to worry about it.
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Photons from microwaves can't ionize matter.
As I understood, the fear is not about ionization, but about the biological effect of modulated signals. Those are low frequency: you can hear them when the phone is near a high speaker. But I am not aware of a molecular model explaining why it would harm.
Re:They can't (Score:5, Informative)
As I understood, the fear is not about ionization, but about the biological effect of modulated signals.
Modulation doesn't matter. The frequency of the modulation doesn't matter. It would be like saying that, at the same volume, classical music is perfectly harmless but reggae will destroy your hearing. All that matters is the volume.
Other than that, the reason you can hear cell phone signals on a radio receiver is the cell signal is causing the radio receiver circuit to heterodyne. Unless the human body has some sort of natural frequency shifting circuit and amplifier, a cell signal isn't going to cause a low frequency harmonic in your organs.
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the cell signal is causing the radio receiver circuit to heterodyne
Is that why? With older cell phones I remember many times hearing speakers (not connected to radios; tv speakers, computer speakers, etc.) make distinctive beeping noises. It sounded like someone was sending a telegram. Specifically, this was when someone nearby was about to receive a text message.
I always assumed it was just the speaker coils picking up some of the signal, causing spurious noise.
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If you have a speaker embedded in your head, then you have something to worry about. Mostly from a speaker being embedded in your head.
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The other recent study that disagrees with this one says it's more to do with the pulsing nature of the signal and how it physically disrupts the repair of already damaged DNA rather the damaging it. It can't damage the DNA directly, but while it's being spliced and repaired, it can induce physical interruption. I don't know how much credibility to give it, but it makes more than no sense and less than a lot of sense. CDMA and GSM are both a very heavily pulsed signal (sharing time with other phones) and
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Thank you for....repeating me? A pulsed signal only helps if it's a high, constant ERP that could cause damage. Microwaves are non-ionizing, so intensity wouldn't be the concern.
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Very complex?
What's complex about it?
There are other ways to foul DNA than ionization (Score:5, Interesting)
Photons from microwaves can't ionize matter. ... it it is silly to worry about it.
There are other ways to foul DNA than ionization. For starters, it is a long molecule with charged regions. One way that you can detect electrocution is that the DNA in the cells has uncoiled and lined up in parallel along where the electric field was oriented. Since the folding and unfolding of DNA is part of the regulation of gene expression that could have non trivial effects. (On the other hand, that's an effect observed when the exposure to electrical activity is extreme, so any effect might be lost due to the death of the affected cells.)
BUT....
A very substantial effect of electrical (and changing magnetic) fields on cells HAS been detected. It is being used therapeutically - on brain cancer - with great success.
You may have noticed that the electrical activity in living cells is almost entirely confined to electrical potentials across membranes and fine-grained patterns of charge on molecules that affect their interactions at close range. There is very little involvement with, or sensitivity to, large-scale fields.
On the other hand, you may ALSO have noticed, in pictures or drawings of cell reproduction, that the mechanism for separating the DNA into two nuclei looks very much like field lines, or the patterns iron filings take up in the presence of a strong magnetic field.
This is apparently because the cells use gross electric fields as part of the mechanism for gene segregation. So any other use of large-scale electrical fields has a strong selection pressure against it - it must both avoid fouling cell reproduction and provide an extreme advantage to offset any problems it does cause. Very few mechanisms have made this cut. Similarly, any other sensitivity to large scale electrical fields must be small, to avoid being fouled in turn by the fields that occur during cell division.
So cells are very insensitive to large-scale electrical fields through them, EXCEPT during cell division. But it turns out that fields - especially those from changing magnetic fields, DO interfere with cell division:
- Sometimes they prevent gene segregation. After a while the cell passes the phase where it would divide, but without dividing - resulting in a diploid cell, which then commits suicide via the apoptosis mechanism.
- Sometimes they result in incorrect segregation, resulting in two progeny cells with the wrong compliment of chromosomes. Then both either die through missing genes or again commit suicide.
Brain nerve cells, along with most of the cells supporting them, are very long lived and rarely reproduce - to the point that for decades it was though that they didn't reproduce at all once the brain was mature. (In fact there is some new nerve growth, which may be involved in learning and mental plasticity. But it is very slow and mostly newly differentiated cells from stem cell lines rather than reproduction of existing nerves.) So the cells of the brain are almost never in the stage where electrical and changing magnetic fields would be an issue.
Cancer cells, on the other hand, reproduce a lot, and spend much of their time in the vulnerable state. So electrical fields that would cause them to die are particularly useful in treating brain cancer, selectively killing the cancer cells while almost never affecting the normal cells with which they are comingled. Electromagnetic coil devices to produce them have recently shown such excellent results in treating inoperable and rapidly fatal brain cancers that the FDA aborted the tests and fast-tracked an approval.
Yes, the individual photons of radio signals are too low energy to ionize most molecules. But they are coherent and their fields add up to enough to have major electromechanical effects. (They COULD also add to produce ionization, especially on structures appropriately sized or massed-and-sprung to resonate, but at the levels involved in a cellphone this
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We bathe ourselves in kilowatts of infrared radiation, and apart from heating, we don't worry about our chemistry or cells being changed, so it isn't really an argument about a few watts (at most) from mobile phones.
INCOHERENT infrared radiation. (Score:2)
We bathe ourselves in kilowatts of infrared radiation, and apart from heating, we don't worry about our chemistry or cells being changed, ...
That's INCOHERENT infrared radiation - the same incoherent stuff that has been bathing lifeforms since there were single cells exposed to sunlight.
Try it with a kilowatt infrared laser.
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Coherence has nothing to do with it. The output of a kilowatt laser spread over one square metre wouldn't be an issue at all.
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Coherence has a lot to do with it.
With incoherent radiation the individual photons are random in phase and minor frequency offsets. The fields add up only by a random walk - nearly cancelling out.
With coherent radiation all the photons are in phase. Billions in lockstep. The fields of many photons add up just fine, and the effects are not limited by the energy of a single photon. For starters, a bunch of coherent infrared photons will ionize molecules quite easily.
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Re: They can't (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, no. The relevant question for cancer is whether radiation can break atomic bonds (Molecular damage to DNA is the mechanism for causing cancer). Microwaves don't carry enough energy to do this. The quantity is irrelevant. What microwaves can do is excite molecules (cause them to accelerate, aka heat up). Meat in a microwave cooks because it gets hot just like if you steamed it. Microwaves cause the same amount of cancer as steam, they just sound scarier to people who don't know how they work.
https
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Cancer can be caused by many mechanisms other than breaking atomic bonds.
There is evidence that microwaves affect protein folding [nih.gov] and conformation, and that suggests a possible mechanism for carcinogenicity.
Re: They can't (Score:5, Informative)
There are dozens of other papers. Go look on Google Scholar.
It doesn't have to be "compelling evidence". The point is that people who say that there is no possibility that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer are wrong.
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people who say that there is no possibility that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer are wrong.
Similarly, people who say there is no possibility that asparagus causes cancer are wrong. The fact that no one has ever found evidence that links asparagus consumption to increased risk of cancer is irrelevant.
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You really have trouble reading, don't you?
Michael Smith: "Cell phones can't cause cancer because microwaves are non-ionizing. That's why it's silly to worry about it." [Implication: these studies are a waste of time.]
Me: "Science says otherwise: there are plausible mechanisms by which non-ionizing radiation could cause cancer. That is why we are conducting these studies."
That is, people have been conducting these studies because they weren't the kind of simplistic and pseudo-scientific thinkers like you an
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what evidence are you offering for your assertion than non-ionizing radiation causes cancer ?
Skin cancer from too much exposure to sunlight for instance. UV light, as filtered by our atmosphere, does not have the energy required to free electrons (i.e. ionize), but it does have the energy to create free radicals.
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Microwave cooking primarily happens via heating and water molecules, but there isn't significant heating from cell phones. Effects on protein folding appear to be direct and not mediated via heating.
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Breaking bonds isn't the only way cancer could be caused. Microwaves heat water (or rather, anything with an O-H bond with a similar dipole or equivalent). Heat denatures proteins, that is it can cause irreversible changes in the conformation (folding) of protein molecules. Think in terms of boiling egg white. It changes irreversibly from soluble to insoluble on heating. Every cell is full of proteins which control cell death, proliferation, stasis, and other critical functions. Denaturing some of the
Re: They can't (Score:5, Insightful)
Every cell also experiences several K of temperature variance every day as a natural part of human circadian rythm. Cells near the edge of the body, especially at extremities like ears, are of course subjects to far greater and more frequent variance.
Your cell phone simply doesn't have the power output to matter. It's a rounding error on natural causes.
Better declare warm baths and hot meals carcinogenic too, then. They both heat your tissues far more effectively than your phone can.
I know it's fashionable to be scared of everything, but this is ridiculous.
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In terms of bulk heating, you're correct and the effects are completely harmless. And some cell types are used to natural heating and cooling, and have mechanisms to cope with that. But that's also a very simplistic way of looking at things. Consider for a moment about what's happening at smaller scales, both temporal and physical. That is to say transient heating of minute volumes. That could be sufficient to denature a small collection of molecules, and that could be enough to mess up critical cellul
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Better declare the radiation from warm baths and hot meals to be "microwave". And also better" heat your tissues "to be the same as" exposure to microwave radiation ".
I know it is fashionable to be an idiot, but this is ridiculous.
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I find it hard to believe that something in one quantity can cook meat, but doesn't destabilize tiny atoms when in a lower quantity. (And we are talking quantity here, right? Given that the frequency and amplitude are relatively constant?)
That's because the amount of energy needed to increase Brownian motion is orders of magnitude less than the amount of energy needed to pry atomic bonds apart.
Also, the amount of energy released by a microwave oven is orders of magnitude higher than a cell phone, and is directional (IE it's not omnidirectional like a cell phone antenna)
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It's also why he failed basic science classes 7 times. All of this is covered in high school physics.
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Microwaves do not "destabilize atoms". They heat water by agitating those specific molecules. The heated water in turn cooks food. The real problem is you think you know more than you actually do.
http://scitech.web.cern.ch/sci... [web.cern.ch]
Re:They can't (Score:5, Informative)
Erm, no, your whole thinking is completely off. For one thing, all alcohol that you're likely to have on hand has water in it (If not from the original solution it came in, at least from absorbing it from the atmosphere). Second, not *only* water is heated, many other molecules respond too (including alcohol, since it also has a dipole moment, 1.66, which is actualy pretty close to that of water, 1.87). Just look it up on wikipedia for FSM's sake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Principles
Many molecules (such as those of water) are electric dipoles, meaning that they have a partial positive charge at one end and a partial negative charge at the other, and therefore rotate as they try to align themselves with the alternating electric field of the microwaves. Rotating molecules hit other molecules and put them into motion, thus dispersing energy. This energy, when dispersed as molecular vibration in solids and liquids (i.e. as both potential energy and kinetic energy of atoms), is heat.
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The microwave does not know anything. And the microwave treats different materials exactly the same. It is the properties of the materials that cause them to absorb energy, reflect it, or transmit it.
You might as well ask how a helium balloon "knows" to rise instead of sink. It happens because of fundamental physical properties of materials.
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Anthropomorphization helps a lot with learning and understanding - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Learn from that instead of finding obvious useless faults in ways of expressing oneself.
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I agree that different methods of thinking about things is key to science. The best example is how some math is more easily handled in polar vs. rectangular coordinates.
Metaphorical frameworks can be of assistance, but mainly to introductory students to the sciences. They are actually an impediment to reaching a greater level of understanding. The high mental cost of abandoning them, once learned, might prevent someone from ever achieving that
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From your analogies you betray a 20 year old understanding of how learning works in humans. The world has moved on.
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The kinetic energy of molecules *is* heat (vibration, rotation, motion), absolute zero being the point at which no motion occurs. It's transferred by conduction (as the water collides with other water molecules, and other molecules in the food, such as sugars, proteins, fats, etc.). You'll also have some convection and radiation but these aren't of great significance. The energy transfer is no different than what happens in a pan of boiling water to the food you drop in it. Heat is transferred from the
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Water: H-O-H contains two O-H dipoles
Ethanol: CH3-CH-O-H contains one O-H dipole
Both molecules will be subject to heating by microwaves. It's not "horseshit", it's fairly basic chemistry. As for changing the frequency, yes it would have an effect since the frequency is related to rotation speed; it would have reduced efficiency.
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We could explain this stuff all day, but you simply don't have the theoretical background. It's just like having a discussion with people who believe in gods. Not worth other people's time.
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Your links are all broken.
Different materials have different absorption spectra, and will be excited optimally at different wavelengths. So for different applications you'll use a product with an optimal emission wavelength for that application. Industrial equipment is designed with specific applications in mind. I doubt that an industrial sealer is particularly good at cooking food, nor that a domestic microwave is as good for sealing, though it's likely you could use them both for inappropriate tasks b
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No, he didn't agree with you. You're basically just too ignorant to understand what is being said because you think you already understand how it works when you obviously don't.
My explanation was greatly simplified and geared towards basic understanding - the others here have done an excellent job expanding on what I said. My point was not "horseshit" - it simply wasn't as specific as the answer could get. I was right not to bother too - given your responses to the science lesson going on here it would h
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Wow you know nothing at all about electronics, RF, or physics. You should run for president or at least congress!
Re:They can't (Score:4)
Despite the hypothesis being wrong ( that cell phones cause brain cancer) and people ridiculing you for asking the question, the question is a good one.
You hear the claim (it's in this thread) that non ionizing radiation can't cause cancer. However organic chemicals look nothing like ionizing radiation but some of them certainly do cause brain cancer and some of them protect against it. So how did the "radiation has to be ionizing to cause cancer" thing become true or relevant to toxicity of cell phones? I don't know. We know ionizing radiation can cause cancer. That doesn't say anything about whether or not anything else causes cancer. Microwave radiation from leaky microwave ovens can cause cataracts. A smaller amount cannot. So in some ailments, the amount of radiation matters.
The reason we know cell phones don't cause cancer is because we have a massive amount of data of people using cell phones and the data doesn't show them getting cancer due to the phone. If phones did cause cancer, it would stick out like a sore thumb in the data.
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In which navy do the operators sit on the antenna?
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just to be pedantic ... (Score:3)
just as correlation do not prove causation, absence of correlation does not rule out causation. so this study proves nothing.
(however we must recognize that burden of proof is with people who claim causation; proof that cellphones cause cancer, of which there is none).
so heading here at present, "Cellphones Do Not Cause Brain Cancer, Says 29-Year Study ", is wrong. heading in linked article "no increase in brain cancer across 29 years of mobile use in Australia" is more correct.
it is inaccuracies like that which open the atmosphere to false claims; for instance, using same sort of fallacy people may claim, that increase in autism in recent years, it is due to cellphones.
one expects /. to be better and more pedantic at these sort of technicalities, we certainly do not expect editors to degrade from the sources, as in this case.
few other questions,
how did they adjust for other factors?
was that unspecified "very slight increase in brain cancer rates among males" due to any subgroup among males ( iow was that increase more than the vague "very slight", with any more specific group)?
Re:just to be pedantic ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The real problem with the study is the inherent lie in the presentation of the study ie the claim of a 29 year analysis. This because year one is no where near the same as year 29 of the study. Think of it as age over time of the people. So year 1 had a huge percentage of he population with zero exposure at the start and only limited exposure there on in. Towards year 29 those most a risk have only limited exposure over time with maximum exposure to that form of radiation ie they are still to young to get a real measure of impact ie consider starting from the year 2000 on, for more realistic exposure, in terms of degree of exposure and number of years being exposed from a young age (using US data http://hypertextbook.com/facts... [hypertextbook.com]).
Reality is the most likely period of measure would be when children highly exposed hit their twenties and thirties, so large changes in occurrence would not logically occur until somewhere between the 2020s and 2040s. So the study is really disingenuous. Reality is the countdown for impact is only really starting now and would still be considered early for a population based study. So come back in the year 2030 and see how people feel about his study whether they are acknowledge for the efforts in a positive fashion of whether the population wants them hung, drawn and quartered for spreading false information.
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Bullshit. Did you say that because it sounds nice or clever to you? BY DEFINITION there can be no causation without correlation.
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there can be causation without correlation, due to other factors, known and unknown.
that is true with data like this in general, and in this particular case since we do not definitely know all the other causes of cancer some of which may have gone down.
as i wrote "how did they adjust for other factors?", given that in this case most of the other factors are far from definite or quantifiable.
btw as i said "burden of proof is with people who claim causation; proof that cellphones cause cancer, of which there
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So does inability to use the shift key make you look like a retard, or is it just a coincidence?
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always glad get a reply that admit bankruptcy in rational responses to my arguments, by focusing on my lack of capitalization.
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Even if they don't observe a correlation between brain cancer and mobile phone use, it could be the case that mobile phones cause cancer, and some other cause of cancer was removed from society that caused an equal drop in cancer rates. So it's technically true; the absence of correlation in this study does not rule out causation.
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So if I measured the number of times people fell over (or some other indicator of inebriation, like posting utter tosh on teh intarwebs) and plotted it against the amount of tea consumed, I'd see a random scatter - and yet you'd conclude that tea makes you drunk?
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i said "just as correlation do not prove causation, absence of correlation does not rule out causation".
so why do you irrationally jump to false conclusion, in your absurd example about tea drinking, that i said absence of correlation proves causation?
born idiocy? if so troll your parents, not me.
but there's plenty enough anecdotal evidence (Score:2)
that they sometimes cause stupidity.
I expect this study to be "debunked" soon (Score:3)
There are people that simply do not understand science and will claim "evidence" to the contrary much like how people will show "evidence" that the moon landings were faked. I don't know what drives people to do these things but it just seems that some people don't want to learn.
A few examples of how people that should know better do not understand radiation. My aunt was a school teacher, someone that people would hope have been educated in some basic science. At a family gathering I was talking with her about my work. I mentioned that my desk is in the same room as the servers and much of the networking equipment for the facility. She asked me if I was worried about the radiation that the equipment gave off.
My sister has an insulin pump to treat her diabetes, this is a very sensitive, expensive, and vital piece of equipment. She is also an educated person and knows with some degree what kinds of equipment might damage this device. She had to go through a TSA checkpoint to board a plane and she asked the agent what kind of radiation the scanner emitted. The agent said there was no radiation. Of course this scanner emitted radiation but my sister knew that one kind of scanner would not harm her insulin pump but another kind just might. She ended up getting in the scanner and the pump survived. Although I saw in the news recently that another diabetic with an insulin pump was not as fortunate. The young lady had her very expensive insulin pump destroyed by the scanner because the agent assured her the scanner was harmless.
We would hope that the people that operate the scanners at airports would be trained by the TSA on how those scanners work and what kind of hazards they pose and do not pose. Which brings to mind something else I read recently, some of these scanners emit X-rays but the people operating them do not take the precautions common to people that operate medical X-ray machines. At a dentists office the technician will leave the room before a very short burst of X-rays are emitted into someone's head. They also take the precaution of putting a lead lined apron on the patient to protect vital organs. I'd like to see the cancer rates of TSA agents after 29 years of operating these X-ray scanners. It is quite possible the X-rays do not penetrate the skin like those used to look at bones and teeth but even so the skin is still exposed since the whole point of these machines is their ability to penetrate clothing. Their skin is still being exposed.
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It is quite possible the X-rays do not penetrate the skin like those used to look at bones and teeth but even so the skin is still exposed since the whole point of these machines is their ability to penetrate clothing. Their skin is still being exposed.
The body is constantly SHEDDING the outer layers of skin, so if the soft X-rays are doing any damage, the damaged cells are being sloughed off before they can develop into cancer?
Battery Composition safety? (Score:2)
I'm concerned that in some dodgy situations, the batteries could be carcinogenic, because the batteries might have Colbalt, or other dangerous heavy metals. This seems rather series in situations where the battery comes from a place where maybe the safety and environmental laws are not enforced? The danger from the battery leaking or exploding from over charge?
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I'm not even going to try to resist... (Score:2)
After enduring 30 years of ads where the guy is a whiny moron who gets all his problems fixed by the smart, beautiful woman who for some mysterious reason has decided to make him the father of her children, I have no difficulty with dispensing one on the other side:
Perhaps the study would have shown the same slight increase for women, if they had enough grey matter to be affected.
Yes, I've already taken cover. ;-)
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>> Yes, I've already taken cover
Why? You're actually correct in that female brains have less mass than male brains.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/02... [www.nhs.uk]
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Interesting. I wonder if usage patterns were different, too.
Frequencies, brands, telcos (Score:3)
Then you get all kinds of trends. For instance heavy users of cellphones often switched to earpieces of one sort or another, then there are cultural trends such as holding the phone like a blowing on a bowl of soup.
The only way I would begin to accept such a study would be if they kept exposing animals to various types of cellphone transmissions with all the usual control groups and whatnot.
All this study tells me is that the vast majority of cellphone technologies over the years probably don't cause much cancer.
Ob (Score:2)
Isn't it a bit like searching for ovarian cancer in men?
You'll forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical. (Score:2)
When I was till a student, waiting for a teacher in a lab, I stumbled upon a paper that was showing the changes in the brain with the usage of a cell phone.
Three measurements where showing a cut before, while and after the use of a GSM (I don't recall all the details, it was 15 years ago). It was clear there was an increase in temperature slowly decreasing after use.
In the same period of time, there was this student that was always on the phone. He ended up with a patch of grey hair just around where he p
Re:Hypothesis, Analog versus Digital not considere (Score:4, Informative)
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CMDA is designed to work with a worse signal to noise ratio than other radio encodings, so it can use less power.
Re:Hypothesis, Analog versus Digital not considere (Score:5, Informative)
Digital means that you ignore all signal level below a threshold. Something like -55dB/decade.
This is how computers measure digital signals but it is not how digital RF systems work. You are right in that digital RF is fundamentally analogue but they do so by measuring differences in a continuously transmitter carrier signal at a specific frequency.
In the early days of mobile phones they were incredibly simple. They used frequency modulation of the carrier where the frequency change from the true carrier was related to the analogue signal on that carrier. Dead simple to decode.
These days RF signals still have the same carrier and they still operate the same fundamental way by altering the phase, frequency or amplitude of the carrier in relation to what is being sent across. The only difference is now this change in carrier is related to zeros and ones rather an analogue audio waveform.
All of this ignores the fact that even early analogue cellphones had a "digital" component which was used to communicate with the base stations. How else would the provider know to which base station to route the phone conversation, and how else would the individual phone itself know the call was for it, and not someone else.
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The little tiny human inside it would make a secret cellphone call to the tower saying ,"this is phone 4347-43-112-11141-96A, can you please authorize me? Oh hi Charles, how is the family... yeah still working as a cellphone authorization manager, I'll be moving soon this guy is constantly late on his bill so I am guessing he will not need me much longer."
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This is how computers measure digital signals but it is not how digital RF systems work.
Except that is exactly how digital RF systems work.
Regardless of how the information is encoded the broadcast RF signal is analog. The "digital" data signal is encoded within the amplitude and frequency of said analog signal.
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Re-read the GP's post. He said digital means you ignore a signal below a threshold. That's only how a very small portion of the possible modulation techniques work, and only one of 3 possible ways of encoding RF data.
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That is untrue. The signal is digital; it's simply encoded in an analog medium.
If I call your mother fat, what is the actual message: the air pressure plotted against time, amplitude of air vibrations plotted against frequency domain, the idea that your ma
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There is no such thing as digital, unless you are talking about quantum mechanics. All digital phones, even digital computers, are fundamentally analog systems. Digital means that you ignore all signal level below a threshold. Something like -55dB/decade.
That's true, but it's irrelevant to the discussion, and you're being pedantic. The cellular companies themselves provided the digital / analog nomenclature to differentiate between the two systems. And in the context of the current discussion, the difference is important.
The average transmitted power of handsets on the old analog cellular networks was far higher than that on handsets using a digital network. And I can attest to the difference. The first cell phone I ever used was analog. When I held it to o
Re: Hypothesis, Analog versus Digital not consider (Score:3)
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Analog phones had higher peak power (TDMA vs. CDMA anyway), but even digital modulation looks very analog after all the filtering done to stay inside the frequency mask specs.
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You know causes brain cancer? Reading texts from people who claim that cell phone surely must cause brain cancer!
The whole "brain cancer" thing was just using the scariest thing they could dig up. And since UHF radio is not ionizing radiation, it simply wasn't going to cause brain cancer.
That being said, it is possible to have some effects from placing your head in the near field of an RF device. Otherwise microwaves and diathermy wouldn't work. Just not brain cancer - some folks think it might make people temporarily stupid - that's a joke there son....
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Just not brain cancer - some folks think it might make people temporarily stupid - that's a joke there son....
And I was ready to make the "Correlation Causation" statement. ;)
Indeed. Smartphones don't make people stupid - they just allow stupid people to have access to technology where they can showcase their dumbnitude.
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Oh just realize that sometimes innovation doesn't mean it is going to be toxic or net bad to the population.
For every DDT they are hundreds of of safe and helpful inventions out there.
Re: Hypothesis, Analog versus Digital not consider (Score:2)
Re:stats nerd question (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither TFA nor the researchers make the claim that "cell phones don't cause cancer". That was made up by whoever wrote the Slashdot summary.
O RLY? I disagree. I believe TFA really does say that cellphones don't cause cancer. They provide a bunch of supporting arguments and evidence of such, and then conclude with "We have had mobiles in Australia since 1987. Some 90% of the population use them today and many of these have used them for a lot longer than 20 years. But we are seeing no rise in the incidence of brain cancer against the background rate." What message do you think they want us to take away?
Re:stats nerd question (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'm more worried about the localized heating caused by taking a hot shower. That is much more EM radiation than my cell phone and more deadly type of radiation, and it dries out my skin. A hot tub is right-out, along with exercising, and almost anything else that warms up your body more than a cell phone. The only thing more deadly is a lightbulb, of any kind. Very high frequency EM radiation compared to microwave, and much higher amounts of total radiation. Even possibly localized heating if you sit near an incandescent bulb.
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To be fair, if the study had concluded that cell phones were no more damaging than sunlight, I'd be terrified of putting it next to my head :)
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That is not how science works. Real science always tries to disprove its own default assumption
Even the article, let alone the study, shows that this is what they did. So why are you still complaining?
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"They don't cause cancer" takes a hell of a lot less effort than the bullshit you regurgitated. IF it could be stated so conclusively, then fucking say it already.
Ladies and gentlemen. I present a person who has never read a scientific paper.
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Pinky
Narf!
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But feelz can melt steel beams! And there's so many kinds out there these days.
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Sure, according to your so-called "scientific consensus".
scientific consensus? you can test it yourself in your backyard if you really wish or go to look at any building that has suffered from a sufficiently large enough fire.
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I was joking.
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No man. I'm just playing. Making fun of you.
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In my nearly half-century on this planet, I have *never* heard that interpretation of "yak". When it's not the animal, it's always meant talking.
Oh god, maybe it's an age thing, and no one talks like I used to anymore. No one says "daddy-o" anymore, do they???
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Nah, 'yak' meaning to vomit is a common one here in Australia. It also means to talk as well, so things can get interesting, but hey, that is why context matters so much.
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Or I need to move to Australia. I guarantee that in Canada among the pot-bellied, yak means to talk.
Re:Let me be the first... (Score:5, Funny)
Oblig SMBC http://smbc-comics.com/index.p... [smbc-comics.com]
Yup, autism causes vaccines (and probably better cell phones too).
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Do you mean the thin veiled marketing machine?
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I was expecting this one: https://xkcd.com/552/ [xkcd.com]