11 ms·
2450MHz radiation induces stress and anxiety like behavior in rats (2019)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nwallin 5y agoJust a reminder that if 20 interested things are studied, on average you should expect 1 of them to be a false positive with p<0.05. It's a bit like throwing darts: it helps if there exists a relationship, but it also helps to be lucky. relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- AussieWog93 5y agoIn theory, it's 1 in 20. In practice, it's much, much higher, closer to 2 out of 3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- throwaway803453 5y agoI have a small apartment and realized my WiFi router power levels are by default set to 100%. I dropped it to 25% with no meaningful reduction in bandwidth. It's a simple precaution and while I don't believe I am sensitive to RF fields maybe my neighbor's children are.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y agoThe issue that the ISP doesn't want complaints so those routers are always set to auto-hop at maximum speed. Since most apartment complexes use the same company, the hops are always around the same time so you basically have these routers screaming at maximum speed and moving between channels.
- blobbers 5y agoWhat are you talking about? Your wifi router isn't jumping channels unless you have something fairly sophisticated (read auto channel assignment that recalibrates periodically when nobody is connected).
- noselasd 5y agoDoesn't most consumer wifi routers do that by now by default ?
- foxfluff 5y agoI don't know if it hops when nobody is connected but I certainly found mine to hop while I'm connected. It'd hop around until it finds a channel where wifi doesn't work, and then stays there. I had to force a channel..
- justshowpost 5y agoScanning for least congested freq is very common, but it only performed right before upping of AP iface and no else. So sweeping the band with AP is very impractical.
- blobbers 5y agosome of the higher end routers have an extra radio specifically for scanning. Ie: see Cisco https://meraki.cisco.com/product/wi-fi/indoor-access-points/mr44/ https://meraki.cisco.com/product/wi-fi/indoor-access-points/... This thing will scan channels, as well as perform security operations.
- hansel_der 5y agoenthusiast (eg. vanilla-openwrt) and enterprise gear won't, but soho and consumer routers totally do, because in a high density, non-cooperative environments (apartment) it has some potential to make it suck less and ppl like and pay for them "smarts".
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoAlso, I thank you on behalf of your neighbors for reducing Wi-Fi interference. If only everyone would reduce power to the minimum needed to cover their living space, interference would be less and performance would be better.
- dmitrygr 5y ago100mW (19.8dBm, as per TFM) up close, delivered direct by a waveguide (as per TFM) is a whole lot of energy for something the size of a rat. Hardly a surprise that it would have an effect. Add more power and you can cook them.
- lifeplusplus 5y agoI have 30 wifi around me, to which I'm exposed 24/7. There is something to be said about long term effects even if they aren't as high power
- Taniwha 5y agobut .... inverse square law ..... before you worry about wifi worry about the one known source of EMR that makes bigger fatter photons that do provably cause cancer .... you know the one, in the the sky, go out when it's visible and you can actually feel the photons
- the_jeremy 5y agoI think there is a significant fraction of HN who would be worrying about their primary method of EM exposure if they worried about wifi instead of the sun (including myself until I got a dog).
- lifeplusplus 5y agoI also found out that brain cancer on right side has increased, likely due to cell phone use as most people are right handed. And that rats got brain cancer. And didn't california release health guidelines https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/EHIB/CDPH%20Document%20Library/Cell-Phone-Guidance.pdf https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/EHIB/CDPH%20Do... while radio freq wont cause ionizing radiation, it seems they are still capable of biological changes. I read they cause ions imbalance or something in cells. I'd like to really see a study done - have 50 kids take an SAT in faraday caged room and other 50 in general open space with routers, cell phone towers etc. I really wanna know if it affects your thinking.
- dosman33 5y agoMicrowave ovens, the other source of 2.4GHz. There's probably a reason they used 2450MHz as the test frequency, a magnetron from an oven is cheaper and easier to obtain. https://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/HowardCheung.shtml https://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/HowardCheung.shtml
- taneliv 5y agoThey also used 900 and 1800MHz.
- bb88 5y agoSome say Havana syndrome is caused by microwave radiation.
- drjasonharrison 5y agoAnd some say that it might be caused by very loud crickets. Because none of the electronics in the area died.
- pajko 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon#Microwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon#Microwa...
- TeMPOraL 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuse_reflection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuse_reflection
- karlkloss 5y agoThe sun also emits microwaves, so stay out of the sun.
- oefrha 5y agoAs someone with sun allergy, yes, I do stay out of the sun. Being exposed without ample sunscreen for even three minutes can have a pretty immediate effect. Of course, that’s due to UV, not microwave.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoThis is a 2019 study. Would be more interesting if anyone else had managed to replicate it. Reading the study doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in their methods. They make a lot of basic errors like listing dB figures (a relative term) when I think they mean dBmw (an absolute measurement). They tested multiple frequencies but for some reason only 2450MHz showed significant effects. 900MHz and 1800MHz showed no effects, despite 1800MHz being relatively close to 2450MHz. They also didn’t use very many rats for each group. Only n=6 per frequency, which were further divided into n=3 for some of their measurements because they couldn’t use the same rat for both tests. They also chose a lot of stress-related measures which are known to be heavily influenced by mishandling the rats (e.g. if a researcher accidentally dropped one during handling) Unless someone can replicate these results and do it with more rats, I suspect the results are likely from one or maybe two rats having abnormal baseline results and that being amplified by the ultra-small sample size. As for relevance: Unless you’re standing in close proximity to a high-gain, directional antenna emitting continuous wave tones (not intermittent modulated WiFi packets) then your WiFi exposure won’t come anywhere near what they used for these experiments. Inverse square law and omnidirectional antennas mean that very little WiFi energy even makes it to people near a WiFi router.
- strstr 5y agoWater has a strong absorption peak at 2450 MHz (it’s what kitchen microwaves use).
- google234123 5y agoA microwave oven is 10000 times more powerful than a typical WiFi signal and is focused on an object less than a foot away.
- wtallis 5y agoFrom what I can find, it looks like the nearest absorption peak is around 20GHz, and while it is temperature-dependent, that peak doesn't shift all the way down to 2.45GHz.
- radioactivist 5y ago
- 0xFreebie 5y agoThere are also the reports about Wifi affecting plants. https://www.eurekaselect.com/141391/article https://www.eurekaselect.com/141391/article But "Wifi allergies" seem like a myth. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bem.20536 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bem.20536
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- blobbers 5y agoJust switched my wifi channel! 6 and below are rat safe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels
- iszomer 5y agoRat Lives Matter (more)?
- hansel_der 5y agoobviously Rat Lives Matter Most
- a-dub 5y agobluetooth operates at ~2400mhz. i wonder if any animal studies were done before wireless earbuds were made commercially available.
- cies 5y agosure. may not have been published though.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- m0zg 5y agoA fancy way of saying that microwaving rats makes them warmer and more comfortable. Now where's my $100K research grant?
- dangs_nutsac 5y agoYou’re an idiot..
- antiSingularity 5y agoOddly enough, microwaving frozen mice was one of the very first non-radar applications of the microwave magnetron. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y
- m0zg 5y agoMy father used to serve in the Russian strategic rocket forces in the 70s (the nukes basically, which, ironically, would then be pointed straight where I sit today in the US, since we have some decommissioned ICBM shafts straight in the middle of the neighborhood), and they did a much cruder version of these experiments for "fun". They'd kill rats by throwing them into the path of a particularly powerful and massive radar beam. I doubt rats felt comfortable or particularly non-anxious, however, seeing how they'd be dead before hitting the ground after that.
- coldtea 5y agoEven if it was proved beyond doubt that it adversely affected people, nobody would want to hear it. It took half a century to make the case for smoking - and here it's even less immediate cause/effect, and with far larger industries and conveniences assosiated.
- justshowpost 5y agoAs network engineer I can reliably state what rats are showing no discrimination when chewing twisted-pair cable segments, should it connect 2.4 or 5 GHz APs, should it run Fast or Gigabit signalling, is it inline-powered or not. I wish 802.11bg had any vermin repellent capability, but its not.
- luxuryballs 5y agoMaybe they’re attacking to make it stop.