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I think you are mistaken -- there is less penetration at 40GHz. The graphs show increased surface heating at 40GHz as a result of less penetration. Informative
by jjoonathan 5y ago
I think you are mistaken -- there is less penetration at 40GHz. The graphs show increased surface heating at 40GHz as a result of less penetration.
Informative exercise: put sunlight on that graph.
Note that the units (W/m^2*10^3) are such that F=1 roughly corresponds to the incident power of direct sunlight, 1kW/m^2. Results like 60 degree heating at the surface when it is illuminated with 15 times the intensity of direct sunlight suddenly don't quite seem so shocking. Yes, longer wavelengths were able to avoid absorption, but there had to be a frequency where it started behaving like visible light and shining on the surface instead, and 40GHz appears to be high enough. This is exactly what I would expect.
Is there a particular graph that had you worried that we could dig deeper into?
- oliv__ 5y ago> Informative exercise: put sunlight on that graph. Polarization: A Key Difference between Man-made and Natural Electromagnetic Fields, in regard to Biological Activity [0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914
- jjoonathan 5y agoA. Does that paper have anything to do with any of the graphs in TFA? The point of the exercise was to calibrate intuition for trends and intensities, not to talk about damage models. B. Has this line of research actually shown anything in a bulk setting at sane levels of incident RF or is it still "we built an antenna structure out of saline and showed that a neuron can respond to the resulting voltage if we really blast it?" Thermalization mechanisms like rovibrational absorption (small scale) and conventional currents (large scale -- the focus of these new studies) aren't the only supporting evidence for thermal damage models, though. There is also the dose/response curve. We can generate RF at many thousands of times the intensity that we find in cell phones and observe the consequences. Often unintentionally. Those consequences look a heck of a lot like thermal burns. If there is an alternative damage mechanism, it has to saturate at a very low level, so that there are no observable acute effects from a wild overdose.
- oliv__ 5y agoA. This is simply a rebuttal to the too easy dismissal that is comparing levels of man-made radiation to sunlight. B. I am not a researcher, but you can read the paper and see for yourself. It was published in Nature in case you haven't noticed, this is not some kooky youtuber
- jjoonathan 5y agoA. The point of the exercise was to calibrate intuition for trends and intensities, not to talk about damage models. B. I've read a large number of papers in this genre and this appears to be another. Just like I feel my time is wasted every time I read another mouse-in-a-microwave study, I feel my time is wasted every time I read another "we built an antenna out of bio parts" study. And no, it's not "published in Nature," it's published in Nature Scientific Reports. That's an important distinction. It puts the paper far above kooky youtubers, yes, but it doesn't really filter for impact in the way Nature would: for example, I would expect to be able to easily get a mouse-in-a-microwave study into Nature Scientific Reports, but not Nature.
- aetherspawn 5y agoPeople die of sun induced skin cancer all the time right? But there can be 100 mobile phones in a room, or 100,000 in a football stadium I guess. I know exposure distance is a factor...
- jjoonathan 5y agoSunlight is much, much higher intensity than a cell phone, its photons are much, much higher energy, and it doesn't fall off to a tiny fraction if it is more than a few feet away. I am not suggesting that 5G is anywhere near as bad as sunlight. I am suggesting using sunlight to understand the trend the parent post was concerned about and to understand that many of the intensities employed by this study are not at all typical of a cell phone.
- ofou 5y agoThe problem that I see, it's that gel simulants are ineffective as a proxy to estimate health hazards for regulating this subject.
- jjoonathan 5y agoWhat methodology would you prefer?
- ofou 5y agoA cross-validated one.
- mr_toad 5y ago> People die of sun induced skin cancer all the time right? It’s not the heat that causes skin cancer. UV radiation is intense enough induce chemical changes in DNA.
- Johnythree 5y agoSunlight contains Ionising radiation (Ultra Violet, etc) while mobile phone radiation does not.