6 ms·

High exposure to radio frequency radiation associated with cancer in male rats

82 points by swebs 8y ago

DiabloD3 8y ago
"RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice." So, they put them in a microwave.
- b1r6 8y ago
  That's an immense amount of RF. The cancer is likely happening because they are literally being slow-cooked.
- hu3 8y ago
  > "RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice.". So, they put them in a microwave. Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Microwave ovens often range from 600w to 1200w. So no, that's not anything close to that. Not to mention the animals would die quite quickly and there would be no experiment to be done.
  - hwillis 8y ago
    It's like a human in a microwave. 80 kg human * 10 W/kg = 800 watts.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - mbell 8y ago
    Some napkin math: It looks like mouse/rat weight varies widely, I'm going to be lazy and just pick 400g and from what I can tell, that also means about 400cm^2 body volume. Ultimately all that matters is the density though, which is unsurprisingly pretty close to water, close enough I'm not going to bother with it. microwave power density = 1200W * 0.75 (efficiency estimate) / 22500cm^3 (interior volume) = 0.04W/cm^3 So in this experiment we have 1.5w to 10w * 0.4kg = 0.6W to 4W In a 1200W microwave: 400cm^2 * 0.04W = 16W In an 600W microwave: 8W (tho a 600W microwave is probably smaller so this may be low) So a microwave would be 2-4 times more radiation than what they were exposed to in this experiment. Likely my power-to-rat-delivery estimate is a bit low for the microwave since I didn't take into account any sort of chamber resonance / reflection in the microwave enclosure, just it's baseline power density. Though, it would still get no where near dumping all it's power into something the size of a rat.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      You're assuming that the interior of the microwave behaves like an uniform field, so if you occupy 50 % of the volume, only 50 % of the power can be coupled to that object. This is not the case. There are some (big) losses in how power is coupled to the object in the microwave, but it's not 98 %. Also note that the power is coupled through the surface, so for power transfer it's mostly important that you have (1) big surface (2) surface depth exceeding penetration depth. The exact coupling is "dirty" (near field), so it doesn't just depend on surface area, but also surface structure, precise alignment etc. E.g. a ball of mashed potatoes takes longer to heat up than a ring/donut-shaped arrangement of the same mashed potatoes.
    - hu3 8y ago
      So your math is telling me that a mice (10w/kg in the experiment) would survive 25 days in a 600w microwave oven at full power? Because they survived in the experiment. My 600w microwave oven cooks eggs in 2 minutes. Pretty sure a mice wouldn't last an hour inside it even at 1/4 power.
- snaky 8y ago
  > In 2011, the Wireless Power Consortium began to extend the Qi specification to medium power. The low-power specification delivers up to 5 W (typically used to charge mobile devices), and the medium-power specification will deliver up to 120 W (typically used to power displays and laptops). In 2015, WPC demonstrated a high-power specification that will deliver up to 1 kW, allowing the powering of kitchen utensils among other high-power utilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_%28standard%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_%28standard%29 And wireless chargers for cars are on the way.
  - stormbrew 8y ago
    Qi doesn't use rf or microwave to transmit power. Inductive coupling is not at all the same as what was studied afaik.
jacquesm 8y ago
"He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde." Some well known Dutch soccer pro long ago observed that 'every downside has its upside', this seems to be one of those.
- superpermutat0r 8y ago
  Such a shame that hormesis is very visible in rats, yet nothing happens to humans.
  - EForEndeavour 8y ago
    Hormesis has been observed in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Ionizing_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Ionizing_radiation
carbocation 8y ago
I'm just skimming so I might have missed a better link, but this seems to be the biorxiv of the actual study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/055699 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/055699
mchannon 8y ago
The original Radarange (microwave) cooked at either 500 or 800 watts, the upper number of which is the upper range in the study (10W/kg), where a human might weigh 80kg, = 800 watts. My late uncle was in the US Army in Desert Storm. During that period, it was always hot, even at night, and the most comfortable place to sleep at night was on top of the humvee's hood. But one night the radar got left on overnight, and he literally got cooked from the inside out (when it's 100 degrees outside, it's hard to pick up on that sort of thing). He had health problems for the remainder of his life and died young (never found out how, but cancer would be my first guess). I really liked him.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Radar would be quite a lot of RF radiation!
  - jcims 8y ago
    I don’t know anything about the system in question but if it was mounted on a humvee it would have to be low power to avoid cooking people in the beam. Plus there will be so many reflections in an urban environment and the ranges are so short that you’d likely do better with a low power system. Maybe on the order of 5-25 watts. That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do serious damage.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      If you're literally sleeping on the radar antenna you're in the near field of the antenna. Meaning, the antenna doesn't work at all like it was designed and you can get "strange" couplings, e.g. very high power density in a few spots on the body, and almost no power coupled to other parts.
    - ac29 8y ago
      >That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do serious damage. Is it? Electric heating pads and electric blankets are certainly a thing, and they're around 10W (the one I have says 50W).
all2 8y ago
There is some indication that RF can alter cellular function. Function of Voltage Gated Calcium channels [0] (in ~human~ cells) has been shown to be altered by incident RF [1][2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage-gated_calcium_channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage-gated_calcium_channel [1] https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/09/03/electromagnetic-fields-harmful-effects.aspx https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/09/... [2] http://www.eurekaselect.com/141390 http://www.eurekaselect.com/141390 [edit] Got information wrong, not human cells, animal cells. [/edit]
hwillis 8y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680
smohare 8y ago
I’ve been following these studies for awhile. The biggest red flag for me is that the effect is constrained to male rates. This is exactly the sort of result you expect to see when not sufficiently controlling for multiple statistical analyses (i.e., unintentional p-hacking). I suspect a Bayesian approach with an appropriate prior on sex-sensitive biological cancer effects would not yield statistically significant results. Some other broad concerns are outlined here: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/that-rat-cellphone-study-im-still-not-impressed/ https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/that-rat-cellp...
- sathackr 8y ago
  Or that the rats, who were exposed to lower amounts of RF, were the ones that developed cancer attributable to the RF, but mice, who were exposed to higher levels of RF, did not show a statistically significant increase.
- buboard 8y ago
  clinical and research studies typically use male rats to control for the effects of hormonal changes etc.
  - learc83 8y ago
    They used female rats as well in this study. That's not what happened here.
- hwillis 8y ago
  Also, exposed rats happen to live longer -> rats die of old-age diseases, particularly cancer.
i_am_proteus 8y ago
Seemingly missing from the article, but present in the paper: the RF was at 900 MHz and 1900 MHz. Both frequencies are in the range in which water absorbs RF. Checks with "these scientists slow-cooked the mice with radio waves."
- etatoby 8y ago
  Both frequencies are also exactly the same used by cell phones and—more importantly—high power cell phone towers.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sathackr 8y ago
Here we go again. "The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling about nine hours each day. RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice." Even the lowest amount cited, 1.5w/kg, is far above what a human would receive standing directly in front of a cell tower transmitting antenna. They basically cooked(because RF does cause heating) the mice alive for two years, and they developed cancer. Interesting that the rats, who appear to have been exposed to lower amounts of RF, were the group identified as developing cancer. Would be nice if articles like this actually linked to the study.
- gruez 8y ago
  >1.5w/kg, is far below what a don't you mean "far above"?
  - sathackr 8y ago
    Yes...will fix
- phkahler 8y ago
  >> Even the lowest amount cited, 1.5w/kg, is far above what a human would receive standing directly in front of a cell tower transmitting antenna. It would be the one in peoples pockets they need to worry about. Sure the power is really low, but the range is under an inch.
foxhop 8y ago
Want to read some scary stuff, checkout how 5G "topology" works. Essentially everything (including living things) become antenna for the network. It is quiet different tech than 3 and 4G.
- sathackr 8y ago
  You're not an antenna, you're a reflector. Just like you are a reflector for RFR at much greater power levels and much higher frequencies (light), yet only the highest energy ones(UV and above) cause cancer, and that is because they are of a sufficiently high energy that they are able to knock electrons away from atoms, turning them into ions(ionizing radiation).
- henrikeh 8y ago
  Can you please provide a source to this?
jcims 8y ago
Whenever this topic comes up, there are inevitably scores of commenters shitting on the ‘scientifically ignorant’ because cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation and therefore are not carcinogenic. To me the important outcome of this study is to demonstrate that there is a spectrum (har har) of dosage and that there is now a fleck of evidence that non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer at higher levels. The fact that humans are 50-100x the body mass of a rat is important obviously, but if most of the RF is being absorbed by the first few inches of brain matter by your ear maybe the effective difference isn’t so great.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  Body mass isn't the only difference between humans and male rats. Humans are more different from male rats than female rats are, and these studies didn't produce evidence that RF causes cancer in female rats. It didn't produce this evidence in male or female mice either. They also only say that the evidence is clear for heart tissue. Human brains aren't made of male rat heart tissue, so we should be safe even if this conclusion is valid. More importantly, hundreds of millions of people have been using cell phones for decades now and no one has noticed a spike of brain cancer near the ears.
- nonbel 8y ago
  The most interesting part of this to me is that, even though this evidence is extremely weak, it is actually stronger than the evidence from animal studies that tobacco smoke can cause lung cancer. It is nearly impossible to devise a study in which breathing in the smoke increases lung cancer rates. Actually it took researchers half a century to figure out a way despite easily causing lung cancer with radioactive dust, etc. Eventually they discovered you need to expose a special strain of mice starting within hours of birth, and then simulate quitting smoking by stopping the exposure as adults. It is actually the healing from the smoke-induced damage that seems to cause cancer, which makes sense if you believe cancer is a disease caused by too many cell divisions. >"Strain A mice were exposed first to a comparatively high concentration of ETS, generated from the sidestream (89%) and mainstream (11%) smoke from burning Kentucky 1R4F cigarettes, as described before in detail [9]. After a 5-month exposure, the animals were allowed to recover in air for another 4 months before evaluation of the lung tumor response. The same protocol was eventually adopted by three other laboratories [10–12]. [...] The flat dose-response suggests that tobacco smoke is a comparatively weak carcinogen. A previous study in which a dose-response was conducted in one single experiment came to the same conclusion [13]. It may to some extent explain why most inhalation studies done with tobacco smoke in mice failed to give a positive tumor response [14, 15]. The fact that ‘‘only’’ 10% to 25% of all smokers develop lung cancer [16] might also be construed to indicate that tobacco smoke is not a very potent carcinogen in man." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15765916 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15765916 >"In spite of the dominant role of cigarette smoke (CS) in the epidemiology of lung tumors, tumors at other sites, and other chronic degenerative diseases [1, 2], it is very difficult to reproduce the noxious effects of this complex mixture in animal models. [...] During the last decade, we developed a novel murine model that convincingly reproduces the carcinogenicity of MCS [6] and its modulation under conditions mimicking interventions either in current smokers and/or ex-smokers. [...] Our model involves exposure of mice for 4 months, starting at birth, followed by a period of 3-4 months in filtered air in order to give enough time for the growth of histopathological lesions." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370344 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370344
ahmedyounes 8y ago
that's why you should ground yourself for good time on daily bases many youtube videos can explain how to ground your office space even your bed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPqh4DNfwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPqh4DNfwg
- anonuser123456 8y ago
  Don't forget to wrap your blanket in tinfoil.
  - Redoubts 8y ago
    You're thinking too small. Why not have a conductive blanket. http://www.lessemf.com/bedding.html http://www.lessemf.com/bedding.html Or just paint your walls and make your home a Faraday's cage? http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde. Excuse me, what? Their exposure to RFR prevented kidney problems? Won't anyone follow up on that?
rossdavidh 8y ago
So, I'm not saying they shouldn't be investigating this, but widespread cell phone usage has been here for a while now. Can't we just look at the actual rate of death from brain cancer (death rates not diagnosis rates since this reduces the bias from changes in how often it is detected), and see if there's been an increase in brain cancer? From what I've found, there has not. The frequency of people holding the cell phone right next to their head while talking on it has actually been going down in recent years, as texting and other ways of using the phone have replaced audio phone calls. If this was going to be a problem, it seems like we would have seen it by now?
- mherdeg 8y ago
  Another area to investigate would be fertility rates -- the blog headline summarizing the research findings would presumably say "Why are millennials having fewer children? Because they keep their cell phones in their pockets on the subway" regardless of the study results.
- swebs 8y ago
  There are too many other variables for that to be useful. For example, in the past decade we've almost completely phased out CRT displays, which were outputting measurable amounts of ionizing radiation.
- imcoconut 8y ago
  Devra Davis, an epedemiological cancer researcher[1], writes how it often takes decades for the same carcinogens to actually cause tumor growth in humans while it can take just years (or even much shorter) in mice. I dont know exacty when cell phone usage became widespread in the developed world, but if it was the 90s to mid 2000s we may still need another decade to start seeing the possible effects. https://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-War-Cancer/dp/0465015689 https://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-War-Cancer/dp/04650156...
- yk 8y ago
  No, outside of a laboratory everything influences such signals. First of all, changing medical practice changes how often and in which stages cancer is detected and treated. Dealing with that, you have then to deal with changing fashions (less smoking more sushi), and so on. Dealing with all of these is of course error prone and in the end, you can only see very strong effects in real life.
choot 8y ago
Why would it be surprising when proteins offer life form and function. If Radio frequency radiation can alter form of a protein then we might develop cancer? You only have to alter few proteins, so the duplication of cell become errrorneous and all subsequent cells are affected. You can prove this in testube, simply bombard a protein with Radio waves. Edit: i don't understand the downvotes, please educate.
idiocracy2016 8y ago
PROOF THAT DRUMP IS BAD
apo 8y ago
He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde. Looking at the source data in the report for male rate survival probability (https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/lt_rpts/tr595_508.pdf https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/lt_rpts/tr595_508.pdf, page 66), the increase in survival appears to be dose-dependent. In other words, the higher the dose of radiation, the better the survival rate after 76 weeks. This is what I'd expect to see for a real effect as opposed to an artifact. The lack of error bars makes it hard to give significance to the finding, though. The female group (second graph on page) show no clear difference. Looking at the table on the preceding page, the main effect appears to be reduction of moribund state. There might be multiple explanations here. For example, an animal that can't move can't feed itself properly and so will succumb to malnutrition sooner.
robocat 8y ago
A rat generates 2W per hour (total daily energy budget is 172kJ for a rat [1]). The highest level of radio-frequency-radiation was 3W per hour [2]. That seems like a significant extra load on their system, although obviously depends on cage temperature and ability to regulate internal temperature. [1] https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1113/eph8802521 https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1113/eph88... [2] From article: "The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling about nine hours each day. RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats".
nicodds 8y ago
When I was in academia, I was involved in experiments consisting in the exposure of flies (drosophila melanogaster) to 900 MHz controlled electromagnetic fields. I participated to the design of the exposure chamber, essentially a bi-planar transmission line, with a peak electric field near 220 V/m. We were able to find evidence of an effect only after 7 days of continuous exposure to the field. The effect was an up-regulation of the genes encoding for a stress-response protein (Hsp70, aka heat-shock protein). We tried also exposure to pulsed high intensity magnetic field (~1T for 2 usec) for 3 hours, 1 pulse per second. Same effect. My opinion is that, as long as fields are at low intensity and for short periods, we can consider such exposures as moderately safe

82 points by swebs 8y ago

"RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice." So, they put them in a microwave.

b1r6 8y ago
That's an immense amount of RF. The cancer is likely happening because they are literally being slow-cooked.
hu3 8y ago
> "RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice.". So, they put them in a microwave. Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Microwave ovens often range from 600w to 1200w. So no, that's not anything close to that. Not to mention the animals would die quite quickly and there would be no experiment to be done.
- hwillis 8y ago
  It's like a human in a microwave. 80 kg human * 10 W/kg = 800 watts.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- mbell 8y ago
  Some napkin math: It looks like mouse/rat weight varies widely, I'm going to be lazy and just pick 400g and from what I can tell, that also means about 400cm^2 body volume. Ultimately all that matters is the density though, which is unsurprisingly pretty close to water, close enough I'm not going to bother with it. microwave power density = 1200W * 0.75 (efficiency estimate) / 22500cm^3 (interior volume) = 0.04W/cm^3 So in this experiment we have 1.5w to 10w * 0.4kg = 0.6W to 4W In a 1200W microwave: 400cm^2 * 0.04W = 16W In an 600W microwave: 8W (tho a 600W microwave is probably smaller so this may be low) So a microwave would be 2-4 times more radiation than what they were exposed to in this experiment. Likely my power-to-rat-delivery estimate is a bit low for the microwave since I didn't take into account any sort of chamber resonance / reflection in the microwave enclosure, just it's baseline power density. Though, it would still get no where near dumping all it's power into something the size of a rat.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    You're assuming that the interior of the microwave behaves like an uniform field, so if you occupy 50 % of the volume, only 50 % of the power can be coupled to that object. This is not the case. There are some (big) losses in how power is coupled to the object in the microwave, but it's not 98 %. Also note that the power is coupled through the surface, so for power transfer it's mostly important that you have (1) big surface (2) surface depth exceeding penetration depth. The exact coupling is "dirty" (near field), so it doesn't just depend on surface area, but also surface structure, precise alignment etc. E.g. a ball of mashed potatoes takes longer to heat up than a ring/donut-shaped arrangement of the same mashed potatoes.
  - hu3 8y ago
    So your math is telling me that a mice (10w/kg in the experiment) would survive 25 days in a 600w microwave oven at full power? Because they survived in the experiment. My 600w microwave oven cooks eggs in 2 minutes. Pretty sure a mice wouldn't last an hour inside it even at 1/4 power.
snaky 8y ago
> In 2011, the Wireless Power Consortium began to extend the Qi specification to medium power. The low-power specification delivers up to 5 W (typically used to charge mobile devices), and the medium-power specification will deliver up to 120 W (typically used to power displays and laptops). In 2015, WPC demonstrated a high-power specification that will deliver up to 1 kW, allowing the powering of kitchen utensils among other high-power utilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_%28standard%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_%28standard%29 And wireless chargers for cars are on the way.
- stormbrew 8y ago
  Qi doesn't use rf or microwave to transmit power. Inductive coupling is not at all the same as what was studied afaik.

jacquesm 8y ago

"He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde." Some well known Dutch soccer pro long ago observed that 'every downside has its upside', this seems to be one of those.

superpermutat0r 8y ago
Such a shame that hormesis is very visible in rats, yet nothing happens to humans.
- EForEndeavour 8y ago
  Hormesis has been observed in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Ionizing_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Ionizing_radiation

carbocation 8y ago

I'm just skimming so I might have missed a better link, but this seems to be the biorxiv of the actual study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/055699 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/055699

mchannon 8y ago

The original Radarange (microwave) cooked at either 500 or 800 watts, the upper number of which is the upper range in the study (10W/kg), where a human might weigh 80kg, = 800 watts. My late uncle was in the US Army in Desert Storm. During that period, it was always hot, even at night, and the most comfortable place to sleep at night was on top of the humvee's hood. But one night the radar got left on overnight, and he literally got cooked from the inside out (when it's 100 degrees outside, it's hard to pick up on that sort of thing). He had health problems for the remainder of his life and died young (never found out how, but cancer would be my first guess). I really liked him.

prolikewh0a 8y ago
Radar would be quite a lot of RF radiation!
- jcims 8y ago
  I don’t know anything about the system in question but if it was mounted on a humvee it would have to be low power to avoid cooking people in the beam. Plus there will be so many reflections in an urban environment and the ranges are so short that you’d likely do better with a low power system. Maybe on the order of 5-25 watts. That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do serious damage.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    If you're literally sleeping on the radar antenna you're in the near field of the antenna. Meaning, the antenna doesn't work at all like it was designed and you can get "strange" couplings, e.g. very high power density in a few spots on the body, and almost no power coupled to other parts.
  - ac29 8y ago
    >That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do serious damage. Is it? Electric heating pads and electric blankets are certainly a thing, and they're around 10W (the one I have says 50W).

all2 8y ago

There is some indication that RF can alter cellular function. Function of Voltage Gated Calcium channels [0] (in ~human~ cells) has been shown to be altered by incident RF [1][2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage-gated_calcium_channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage-gated_calcium_channel [1] https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/09/03/electromagnetic-fields-harmful-effects.aspx https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/09/... [2] http://www.eurekaselect.com/141390 http://www.eurekaselect.com/141390 [edit] Got information wrong, not human cells, animal cells. [/edit]

hwillis 8y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680

smohare 8y ago

I’ve been following these studies for awhile. The biggest red flag for me is that the effect is constrained to male rates. This is exactly the sort of result you expect to see when not sufficiently controlling for multiple statistical analyses (i.e., unintentional p-hacking). I suspect a Bayesian approach with an appropriate prior on sex-sensitive biological cancer effects would not yield statistically significant results. Some other broad concerns are outlined here: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/that-rat-cellphone-study-im-still-not-impressed/ https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/that-rat-cellp...

sathackr 8y ago
Or that the rats, who were exposed to lower amounts of RF, were the ones that developed cancer attributable to the RF, but mice, who were exposed to higher levels of RF, did not show a statistically significant increase.
buboard 8y ago
clinical and research studies typically use male rats to control for the effects of hormonal changes etc.
- learc83 8y ago
  They used female rats as well in this study. That's not what happened here.
hwillis 8y ago
Also, exposed rats happen to live longer -> rats die of old-age diseases, particularly cancer.

i_am_proteus 8y ago

Seemingly missing from the article, but present in the paper: the RF was at 900 MHz and 1900 MHz. Both frequencies are in the range in which water absorbs RF. Checks with "these scientists slow-cooked the mice with radio waves."

etatoby 8y ago
Both frequencies are also exactly the same used by cell phones and—more importantly—high power cell phone towers.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

sathackr 8y ago

Here we go again. "The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling about nine hours each day. RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice." Even the lowest amount cited, 1.5w/kg, is far above what a human would receive standing directly in front of a cell tower transmitting antenna. They basically cooked(because RF does cause heating) the mice alive for two years, and they developed cancer. Interesting that the rats, who appear to have been exposed to lower amounts of RF, were the group identified as developing cancer. Would be nice if articles like this actually linked to the study.

gruez 8y ago
>1.5w/kg, is far below what a don't you mean "far above"?
- sathackr 8y ago
  Yes...will fix
phkahler 8y ago
>> Even the lowest amount cited, 1.5w/kg, is far above what a human would receive standing directly in front of a cell tower transmitting antenna. It would be the one in peoples pockets they need to worry about. Sure the power is really low, but the range is under an inch.

foxhop 8y ago

Want to read some scary stuff, checkout how 5G "topology" works. Essentially everything (including living things) become antenna for the network. It is quiet different tech than 3 and 4G.

sathackr 8y ago
You're not an antenna, you're a reflector. Just like you are a reflector for RFR at much greater power levels and much higher frequencies (light), yet only the highest energy ones(UV and above) cause cancer, and that is because they are of a sufficiently high energy that they are able to knock electrons away from atoms, turning them into ions(ionizing radiation).
henrikeh 8y ago
Can you please provide a source to this?

jcims 8y ago

Whenever this topic comes up, there are inevitably scores of commenters shitting on the ‘scientifically ignorant’ because cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation and therefore are not carcinogenic. To me the important outcome of this study is to demonstrate that there is a spectrum (har har) of dosage and that there is now a fleck of evidence that non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer at higher levels. The fact that humans are 50-100x the body mass of a rat is important obviously, but if most of the RF is being absorbed by the first few inches of brain matter by your ear maybe the effective difference isn’t so great.

daveFNbuck 8y ago
Body mass isn't the only difference between humans and male rats. Humans are more different from male rats than female rats are, and these studies didn't produce evidence that RF causes cancer in female rats. It didn't produce this evidence in male or female mice either. They also only say that the evidence is clear for heart tissue. Human brains aren't made of male rat heart tissue, so we should be safe even if this conclusion is valid. More importantly, hundreds of millions of people have been using cell phones for decades now and no one has noticed a spike of brain cancer near the ears.
nonbel 8y ago
The most interesting part of this to me is that, even though this evidence is extremely weak, it is actually stronger than the evidence from animal studies that tobacco smoke can cause lung cancer. It is nearly impossible to devise a study in which breathing in the smoke increases lung cancer rates. Actually it took researchers half a century to figure out a way despite easily causing lung cancer with radioactive dust, etc. Eventually they discovered you need to expose a special strain of mice starting within hours of birth, and then simulate quitting smoking by stopping the exposure as adults. It is actually the healing from the smoke-induced damage that seems to cause cancer, which makes sense if you believe cancer is a disease caused by too many cell divisions. >"Strain A mice were exposed first to a comparatively high concentration of ETS, generated from the sidestream (89%) and mainstream (11%) smoke from burning Kentucky 1R4F cigarettes, as described before in detail [9]. After a 5-month exposure, the animals were allowed to recover in air for another 4 months before evaluation of the lung tumor response. The same protocol was eventually adopted by three other laboratories [10–12]. [...] The flat dose-response suggests that tobacco smoke is a comparatively weak carcinogen. A previous study in which a dose-response was conducted in one single experiment came to the same conclusion [13]. It may to some extent explain why most inhalation studies done with tobacco smoke in mice failed to give a positive tumor response [14, 15]. The fact that ‘‘only’’ 10% to 25% of all smokers develop lung cancer [16] might also be construed to indicate that tobacco smoke is not a very potent carcinogen in man." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15765916 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15765916 >"In spite of the dominant role of cigarette smoke (CS) in the epidemiology of lung tumors, tumors at other sites, and other chronic degenerative diseases [1, 2], it is very difficult to reproduce the noxious effects of this complex mixture in animal models. [...] During the last decade, we developed a novel murine model that convincingly reproduces the carcinogenicity of MCS [6] and its modulation under conditions mimicking interventions either in current smokers and/or ex-smokers. [...] Our model involves exposure of mice for 4 months, starting at birth, followed by a period of 3-4 months in filtered air in order to give enough time for the growth of histopathological lesions." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370344 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370344

ahmedyounes 8y ago

that's why you should ground yourself for good time on daily bases many youtube videos can explain how to ground your office space even your bed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPqh4DNfwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPqh4DNfwg

anonuser123456 8y ago
Don't forget to wrap your blanket in tinfoil.
- Redoubts 8y ago
  You're thinking too small. Why not have a conductive blanket. http://www.lessemf.com/bedding.html http://www.lessemf.com/bedding.html Or just paint your walls and make your home a Faraday's cage? http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde. Excuse me, what? Their exposure to RFR prevented kidney problems? Won't anyone follow up on that?

rossdavidh 8y ago

So, I'm not saying they shouldn't be investigating this, but widespread cell phone usage has been here for a while now. Can't we just look at the actual rate of death from brain cancer (death rates not diagnosis rates since this reduces the bias from changes in how often it is detected), and see if there's been an increase in brain cancer? From what I've found, there has not. The frequency of people holding the cell phone right next to their head while talking on it has actually been going down in recent years, as texting and other ways of using the phone have replaced audio phone calls. If this was going to be a problem, it seems like we would have seen it by now?

mherdeg 8y ago
Another area to investigate would be fertility rates -- the blog headline summarizing the research findings would presumably say "Why are millennials having fewer children? Because they keep their cell phones in their pockets on the subway" regardless of the study results.
swebs 8y ago
There are too many other variables for that to be useful. For example, in the past decade we've almost completely phased out CRT displays, which were outputting measurable amounts of ionizing radiation.
imcoconut 8y ago
Devra Davis, an epedemiological cancer researcher[1], writes how it often takes decades for the same carcinogens to actually cause tumor growth in humans while it can take just years (or even much shorter) in mice. I dont know exacty when cell phone usage became widespread in the developed world, but if it was the 90s to mid 2000s we may still need another decade to start seeing the possible effects. https://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-War-Cancer/dp/0465015689 https://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-War-Cancer/dp/04650156...
yk 8y ago
No, outside of a laboratory everything influences such signals. First of all, changing medical practice changes how often and in which stages cancer is detected and treated. Dealing with that, you have then to deal with changing fashions (less smoking more sushi), and so on. Dealing with all of these is of course error prone and in the end, you can only see very strong effects in real life.

choot 8y ago

Why would it be surprising when proteins offer life form and function. If Radio frequency radiation can alter form of a protein then we might develop cancer? You only have to alter few proteins, so the duplication of cell become errrorneous and all subsequent cells are affected. You can prove this in testube, simply bombard a protein with Radio waves. Edit: i don't understand the downvotes, please educate.

idiocracy2016 8y ago

PROOF THAT DRUMP IS BAD

apo 8y ago

He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde. Looking at the source data in the report for male rate survival probability (https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/lt_rpts/tr595_508.pdf https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/lt_rpts/tr595_508.pdf, page 66), the increase in survival appears to be dose-dependent. In other words, the higher the dose of radiation, the better the survival rate after 76 weeks. This is what I'd expect to see for a real effect as opposed to an artifact. The lack of error bars makes it hard to give significance to the finding, though. The female group (second graph on page) show no clear difference. Looking at the table on the preceding page, the main effect appears to be reduction of moribund state. There might be multiple explanations here. For example, an animal that can't move can't feed itself properly and so will succumb to malnutrition sooner.

robocat 8y ago

A rat generates 2W per hour (total daily energy budget is 172kJ for a rat [1]). The highest level of radio-frequency-radiation was 3W per hour [2]. That seems like a significant extra load on their system, although obviously depends on cage temperature and ability to regulate internal temperature. [1] https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1113/eph8802521 https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1113/eph88... [2] From article: "The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling about nine hours each day. RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats".

nicodds 8y ago

When I was in academia, I was involved in experiments consisting in the exposure of flies (drosophila melanogaster) to 900 MHz controlled electromagnetic fields. I participated to the design of the exposure chamber, essentially a bi-planar transmission line, with a peak electric field near 220 V/m. We were able to find evidence of an effect only after 7 days of continuous exposure to the field. The effect was an up-regulation of the genes encoding for a stress-response protein (Hsp70, aka heat-shock protein). We tried also exposure to pulsed high intensity magnetic field (~1T for 2 usec) for 3 hours, 1 pulse per second. Same effect. My opinion is that, as long as fields are at low intensity and for short periods, we can consider such exposures as moderately safe