5 ms·

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 pr

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 strong theoretical reasons to believe it won't happen. I.e., if this effect is real, it'll require new physics to explain. Most likely 10^{-5} is a conservative prior on the likelihood that an experimental paper overturns quantum mechanics. Now, lets take their strongest result (p = 0.02) and do a Bayes update with it, assuming a complete absense of selection bias/etc (i.e. imagining this was a perfect RCT). P(effect false | experiment result) = P(experiment result | effect false) P(effect false) / P(experiment result) = 0.02 x (1-10^{-5}) / P(experiment result) We can compute the latter as P(experiment result | effect false) x (1 - 10^{-5}) + P(experiment result | effect real) x 10^{-5} \approx 0.02 x 1.0. Assuming optimistically that the statistical power - aka P(experiment result | effect real) - is 0.99, the bottom is 0.020009700000000002. Plugging and chugging yields: P(effect false | experiment result) = 0.9995052399586201 Or equivalently P(effect real | experiment result) = 0.000494760041379938. As a result, assuming you believe strongly in quantum physics (I do), this experiment provides wildly insufficient data to overturn QM and believe the effect is real. Note: I'm not explaining here why quantum mechanics says multiphoton ionization is a tiny effect, negligible in biological applications, I'm just going to argue by authority: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/publications.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/publications.html

dekhn 11y ago
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" calculations to rule out improbably hypotheses, but I often found the physics people convinced (I think they used the term "proved impossible") themselves things wouldn't work, then after 5-7 years of grad school, managed to come up with actual physical data that showed they had made a false assumption.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  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 specific level that's far from the continuous spectrum, but useful for some other chemical to interact with. To detect low frequency radiation, these usually require very specific materials with nearly continuous energy bands (think carefully doped semiconductors or possibly photoreceptor proteins). These are also highly unlikely to occur - again, unless you've engineered it to happen, 10^{-5} is probably an extreme overestimate on the probability. But if you know a plausible mechanism, I'd love to hear it. Feel free to provide references or go into physical detail.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    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 proposal of a causative radiation mechanism.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      Right - I'm charitably assuming that their study supported causality with p=0.02. In reality it doesn't.
      - maxerickson 11y ago
        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.
rubidium 11y ago
Another former academic physicist here, but with very little understanding of biological tissue+radiation interactions. You state multi-photon ionization is not a possible pathway for biological effects in this case (and I believe that). But are there other pathways? I googled "protein response at 1000 mhz" and got a book "RF / Microwave Interaction with Biological Tissues" that mentioned effects on ATP production at frequencies in the 1-1000 MHz band. Do you or anyone know more about potential other pathways?
- lvs 11y ago
  There are a number of excitation pathways for organic molecules in water across the spectrum. These resonances will, generally speaking, relax thermally. Of course, the medium is salt water, so dielectric heating is the dominant effect of kHz - GHz RF irradiation, far above and beyond whatever heat is dissipated by the absorbance of distinct molecular resonances.
ideonexus 11y ago
I appreciate this analysis (and I agree with commenter who notes that there may be another element at work here and not just ionization/radiation). But concerning radiation, Shawn Otto has a great breakdown of why cellphones cannot cause cancer because the microwaves in cellphone transmission don't have enough energy to break DNA chains. It's a great, enlightening passage from his book "Fool Me Twice." I love how down-to-earth it is: Physics explains why no links were found. The microwaves used in cell phone transmissions do not have enough energy to break the chemical bonds of DNA, which is how cell mutations occur and cause cancer. How do we know this? Light and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, including microwaves, radio waves, infrared waves, and ultraviolet light waves, are all forms of radiation. A single unit of radiation is called a photon. A photon can be thought of either as a particle or as a wave. A century ago, Albert Einstein showed that the energy (E) of a photon can be calculated as Planck's constant (h) times the frequency (v) of its wave form, or E = hv This formula was set out in one of his early papers, among his most famous, which was published in 1905 and is one of the reasons for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. Photons with low frequencies are at the red end of the spectrum. They include radio photons, whose waves can be as long as a football field and thus fly past us with low frequency and low energy. Microwaves are slightly stronger, followed by infrared radiation and then visible light waves. Waves at the high end of the spectrum fly past us at much faster frequencies (and thus have more energy) and appear more blue. This part of the spectrum includes ultraviolet light, followed by the even more energetic X-rays, followed by gamma rays, whose waves can be shorter than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom and thus very high frequency and very highly energetic. Microwaves are slightly more energetic than radio waves, but far less energetic than even the infrared radiation that our skin gives off, which is how we can be seen by someone wearing infrared night vision goggles. Both visible light and microwaves can be used to cook food and heat up your coffee by concentrating them in very large amounts, such as in a solar oven or a microwave oven. The concentrated waves excite the molecules in a way that increases their vibration, and the friction H that produces increases their temperature, but they still don't have anywhere near enough energy to break chemical bonds. If they did, the food would turn into goop. Microwaves are much weaker than visible light, though, so it takes a lot more of them to make an oven work than it does to make a solar oven work, which is why microwave ovens are such electricity hogs. It'st's not until you travel into the red end of the visible light photons, then on to the yellow emitted by incandescent bulbs, then to the blue that illuminates many fluorescent bulbs, and then on past the visible spectrum: into ultraviolet light that you get photons that have a high enough frequency and thus enough energy to break DNA bonds. These photons have about million times more energy than microwave photons, enough that they can act like cue balls and knock electrons out of atoms, ionizing the atoms and changing their chemical nature. This is what Einstein's 1905 paper showed. Just imagine the force of a wave the length of a football field being concentrated into a wave the length of a molecule and then flashing past you over and over and over, and you can get a sense of the vast difference in the power of the two. That is what can break the bond between two carbon atoms, damaging DNA and causing cancer. Bi these ultraviolet photons still don't have enough energy to penetrate us very deeply, so they can only give us skin cancer. Electromagnetic radiation above this level grows increasingly dangerous. X-rays are sometimes stopped by our skin, but if we are bombarded by enough of them they have enough energy to penetrate through us, a few of them being absorbed by skin and muscle, many more by our bones. which are denser, and many shooting that cue ball of a photon clear through us, which is why we can use them to make images of the inside of our bodies. X-rays can and do cause cancer, but our bodies can almost always stop them if the exposure is low enough. Gamma rays are so energetic that they can penetrate us, kill cells, and cause cancer very easily, and in high exposures they cause radiation poisoning, which kills much more quickly by damaging our bone marrow and gastrointestinal tract. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=6pMqCjVynG0C&dq=shawn+lawrence+otto&ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en https://books.google.com/books?id=6pMqCjVynG0C&dq=shawn+lawr...
judofyr 11y ago
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.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  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)`.
  - drostie 11y ago
    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.
tokenadult 11y ago
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-medicine/ https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/about-science-based-med...
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  ""science-based medicine" (medicine studied not just through randomized, controlled trials but also through careful consideration of fundamental science)." Medical science seems like it's wrong as much as it's right. Careful experiments are how we learned most of what we learned that's useful. Science can certainly inform those experiments. Yet, the solution to the problems of evidence-based medicine is usually better evidence gathering and review. Filters out the major issue of scientists own models or assumptions screwing up their results because they didn't reflect reality. Fixing that can take a long time, too, depending on the sub-field.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
"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 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.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  That's not multiphoton ionization or any chemical effect at all. The microwave auditory effect is caused directly by inducing thermal expansion in the skull due to rapidly heating tissue from extremely intense microwave pulses. I've never disputed that a microwave oven can heat you up. Microwave heating is also well understood. So the question now is "how much energy can be deposited into testicles from a cell phone?" This is an easy question to answer, either theoretically or experimentally. The answer is "not much". As retric noted, it's far more likely that if any effect exists it's caused by the cell phone making your pants tighter.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    No, the question is, "Can heat cause any effects on any aspect of our machinery for sperm production or maintenance that reduce sperm quality? Or the same for the sperm itself?" See how that broadens one's perspective above "Can heat produced by X microwave energy do damage with Y effect?" This is what I'm talking about with assumptions making people think too narrow. You know enough about one phenomenon that you're casting the entire problem in that light. This may turn out to be justified here but it's also one of top sources of scientific mistakes or delays in understanding. So, I have to call it immediately as an unnecessary risk to force people to clarify their own position and make their own assumptions explicit. Unfortunately, my knowledge of biology is too limited to help past noticing you were dismissing a broad phenomenon or range of possibility based on a narrow set of data or theory. A pattern that exists in many claims that are dismissed later. I wish I could do more than spot the problem here as it's an important research area. But I'm out of my depth if we start talking the molecular or cellular machinery itself. (shrugs)
lvs 11y ago
The article may be hogwash, but this "analysis" was worse.

dekhn 11y ago

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" calculations to rule out improbably hypotheses, but I often found the physics people convinced (I think they used the term "proved impossible") themselves things wouldn't work, then after 5-7 years of grad school, managed to come up with actual physical data that showed they had made a false assumption.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
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 specific level that's far from the continuous spectrum, but useful for some other chemical to interact with. To detect low frequency radiation, these usually require very specific materials with nearly continuous energy bands (think carefully doped semiconductors or possibly photoreceptor proteins). These are also highly unlikely to occur - again, unless you've engineered it to happen, 10^{-5} is probably an extreme overestimate on the probability. But if you know a plausible mechanism, I'd love to hear it. Feel free to provide references or go into physical detail.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  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 proposal of a causative radiation mechanism.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Right - I'm charitably assuming that their study supported causality with p=0.02. In reality it doesn't.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      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.

rubidium 11y ago

Another former academic physicist here, but with very little understanding of biological tissue+radiation interactions. You state multi-photon ionization is not a possible pathway for biological effects in this case (and I believe that). But are there other pathways? I googled "protein response at 1000 mhz" and got a book "RF / Microwave Interaction with Biological Tissues" that mentioned effects on ATP production at frequencies in the 1-1000 MHz band. Do you or anyone know more about potential other pathways?

lvs 11y ago
There are a number of excitation pathways for organic molecules in water across the spectrum. These resonances will, generally speaking, relax thermally. Of course, the medium is salt water, so dielectric heating is the dominant effect of kHz - GHz RF irradiation, far above and beyond whatever heat is dissipated by the absorbance of distinct molecular resonances.

ideonexus 11y ago

I appreciate this analysis (and I agree with commenter who notes that there may be another element at work here and not just ionization/radiation). But concerning radiation, Shawn Otto has a great breakdown of why cellphones cannot cause cancer because the microwaves in cellphone transmission don't have enough energy to break DNA chains. It's a great, enlightening passage from his book "Fool Me Twice." I love how down-to-earth it is: Physics explains why no links were found. The microwaves used in cell phone transmissions do not have enough energy to break the chemical bonds of DNA, which is how cell mutations occur and cause cancer. How do we know this? Light and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, including microwaves, radio waves, infrared waves, and ultraviolet light waves, are all forms of radiation. A single unit of radiation is called a photon. A photon can be thought of either as a particle or as a wave. A century ago, Albert Einstein showed that the energy (E) of a photon can be calculated as Planck's constant (h) times the frequency (v) of its wave form, or E = hv This formula was set out in one of his early papers, among his most famous, which was published in 1905 and is one of the reasons for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. Photons with low frequencies are at the red end of the spectrum. They include radio photons, whose waves can be as long as a football field and thus fly past us with low frequency and low energy. Microwaves are slightly stronger, followed by infrared radiation and then visible light waves. Waves at the high end of the spectrum fly past us at much faster frequencies (and thus have more energy) and appear more blue. This part of the spectrum includes ultraviolet light, followed by the even more energetic X-rays, followed by gamma rays, whose waves can be shorter than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom and thus very high frequency and very highly energetic. Microwaves are slightly more energetic than radio waves, but far less energetic than even the infrared radiation that our skin gives off, which is how we can be seen by someone wearing infrared night vision goggles. Both visible light and microwaves can be used to cook food and heat up your coffee by concentrating them in very large amounts, such as in a solar oven or a microwave oven. The concentrated waves excite the molecules in a way that increases their vibration, and the friction H that produces increases their temperature, but they still don't have anywhere near enough energy to break chemical bonds. If they did, the food would turn into goop. Microwaves are much weaker than visible light, though, so it takes a lot more of them to make an oven work than it does to make a solar oven work, which is why microwave ovens are such electricity hogs. It'st's not until you travel into the red end of the visible light photons, then on to the yellow emitted by incandescent bulbs, then to the blue that illuminates many fluorescent bulbs, and then on past the visible spectrum: into ultraviolet light that you get photons that have a high enough frequency and thus enough energy to break DNA bonds. These photons have about million times more energy than microwave photons, enough that they can act like cue balls and knock electrons out of atoms, ionizing the atoms and changing their chemical nature. This is what Einstein's 1905 paper showed. Just imagine the force of a wave the length of a football field being concentrated into a wave the length of a molecule and then flashing past you over and over and over, and you can get a sense of the vast difference in the power of the two. That is what can break the bond between two carbon atoms, damaging DNA and causing cancer. Bi these ultraviolet photons still don't have enough energy to penetrate us very deeply, so they can only give us skin cancer. Electromagnetic radiation above this level grows increasingly dangerous. X-rays are sometimes stopped by our skin, but if we are bombarded by enough of them they have enough energy to penetrate through us, a few of them being absorbed by skin and muscle, many more by our bones. which are denser, and many shooting that cue ball of a photon clear through us, which is why we can use them to make images of the inside of our bodies. X-rays can and do cause cancer, but our bodies can almost always stop them if the exposure is low enough. Gamma rays are so energetic that they can penetrate us, kill cells, and cause cancer very easily, and in high exposures they cause radiation poisoning, which kills much more quickly by damaging our bone marrow and gastrointestinal tract. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=6pMqCjVynG0C&dq=shawn+lawrence+otto&ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en https://books.google.com/books?id=6pMqCjVynG0C&dq=shawn+lawr...

judofyr 11y ago

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.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
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)`.
- drostie 11y ago
  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.

tokenadult 11y ago

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-medicine/ https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/about-science-based-med...

nickpsecurity 11y ago
""science-based medicine" (medicine studied not just through randomized, controlled trials but also through careful consideration of fundamental science)." Medical science seems like it's wrong as much as it's right. Careful experiments are how we learned most of what we learned that's useful. Science can certainly inform those experiments. Yet, the solution to the problems of evidence-based medicine is usually better evidence gathering and review. Filters out the major issue of scientists own models or assumptions screwing up their results because they didn't reflect reality. Fixing that can take a long time, too, depending on the sub-field.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

"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 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.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
That's not multiphoton ionization or any chemical effect at all. The microwave auditory effect is caused directly by inducing thermal expansion in the skull due to rapidly heating tissue from extremely intense microwave pulses. I've never disputed that a microwave oven can heat you up. Microwave heating is also well understood. So the question now is "how much energy can be deposited into testicles from a cell phone?" This is an easy question to answer, either theoretically or experimentally. The answer is "not much". As retric noted, it's far more likely that if any effect exists it's caused by the cell phone making your pants tighter.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  No, the question is, "Can heat cause any effects on any aspect of our machinery for sperm production or maintenance that reduce sperm quality? Or the same for the sperm itself?" See how that broadens one's perspective above "Can heat produced by X microwave energy do damage with Y effect?" This is what I'm talking about with assumptions making people think too narrow. You know enough about one phenomenon that you're casting the entire problem in that light. This may turn out to be justified here but it's also one of top sources of scientific mistakes or delays in understanding. So, I have to call it immediately as an unnecessary risk to force people to clarify their own position and make their own assumptions explicit. Unfortunately, my knowledge of biology is too limited to help past noticing you were dismissing a broad phenomenon or range of possibility based on a narrow set of data or theory. A pattern that exists in many claims that are dismissed later. I wish I could do more than spot the problem here as it's an important research area. But I'm out of my depth if we start talking the molecular or cellular machinery itself. (shrugs)

lvs 11y ago

The article may be hogwash, but this "analysis" was worse.