7 ms·

Mobile phones not linked to brain cancer, biggest study to date finds

55 points by mindracer 2y ago

jeffbee 2y ago
I'll let the NIMBYs know. We're still arguing about base stations.
- janice1999 2y ago
  The linked article is about mobile phones, not base stations. If you're interested in base station technology (huge multiple-input and multiple-output arrays with 10s to 100s Watts RF output) Ericsson publish a lot of papers.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    The inverse square law has entered the chat.
    - janice1999 2y ago
      Mostly yes, but the base stations are more complicated with complex arrays etc. Ericson actually have a good paper on modeling max power output in new massive MIMO 5G base stations: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8039290 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8039290
- mschuster91 2y ago
  Well, at least the base station opposition usually has a point: these things are goddamn eyesores. In ye olde times, back when we actually raised taxes to have money to build things, we built aesthetically pleasing radio towers [1] [2] (my grandpa actually worked in construction of the latter as a crane operator) that have become a beloved part of our city landscapes. No one complained about RF despite the old analog emitters running multiple megawatts of power. Nowadays? It's usually eyesores on already ugly roofs in urban areas or metal towers looking about as pleasing as a high-voltage transmission lines. My two cents: Maybe if we would actually invest money into making things look good, we'd get less opposition. And that is valid for a looooot of other NIMBY-plagued infrastructure as well. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldeturm_N%C3%BCrnberg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldeturm_N%C3%BCrnberg [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiaturm https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiaturm
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Those towers still have ugly looking antennas on them; they're just too high to really be noticeable on the ground. [0] But for modern cell networks, you don't really want very tall towers. Taller towers mean they pick up the UHF radios from further and further away. You can realistically only carry the same number of subscribers per cell, so to support more users you're going to want to have more but smaller cells. In even medium density areas, you want your antenna elements closer to the ground to have smaller cells. Giant tall towers make sense when you're trying to broadcast or receive signals in a large area. They make sense for television or commercial radio or emergency services VHF/UHF radios. However, that's totally unlike modern cell networks today. And even then a lot of emergency services radio systems are going for more of a distributed network of antennas throughout the city instead of just a single giant tower. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Olympiaturm%2C_M%C3%BAnich%2C_Alemania_2012-04-28%2C_DD_21.JPG/800px-Olympiaturm%2C_M%C3%BAnich%2C_Alemania_2012-04-28%2C_DD_21.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Ol...
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      > Those towers still have ugly looking antennas on them; they're just too high to really be noticeable on the ground. Yup, and unless you're standing right next to them you have absolutely no idea how huge these antennas are - but visually, they drown like flies in a swimming pool, you can't make them out any more, and that's the point. Small cell towers can be visually hidden. Even if it's just a sheet of drywall or a fully plastic wrap/enclosure that's printed on to look like wall bricks or roof tiles, I don't care, it doesn't need to be a full fake facade like in NYC [1]. All I want is for the telcos that are robbing us dry here in Germany to have to respect the people whose space they want to use. [1] https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/new-york-fake-facades/ https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/new-york-fake-facades/
  - xondono 2y ago
    > In ye olde times, back when we actually raised taxes to have money to build things, we built aesthetically pleasing radio towers People still build this kind of stuff, it's just less common because it's way more expensive (it's labor intensive, so it doesn't get cheaper over time). Most companies have turned to the other way of doing this, they just offer money to the buildings, and if they consider it an eyesore, they can pay for the "beautification". Most building managers won't do it though. The funniest thing of this whole business is that a lot of residential buildings oppose the installation arguing "health issues", which ends up with the antennas built on another building. They not only don't get the cash, but most times their actual exposure goes up.
- pcl 2y ago
  The linked article is about a study of mobile phone use, not proximity to a base station. I don’t know anything about base station technology, so can’t comment on the risks there, but I would imagine that the risk profile of holding an antenna to your head is different than the risk profile of living near an antenna that transmits to hundreds of devices.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    The number of devices doesn't really matter, but it does influence something like a duty cycle. It's all about power level, distance, and duty cycle. Sure, the cell phone antenna is going to transmit at something like 1kW, but its also significantly further away from you. Inverse-square law is a hell of a thing, so something being really close to you will end up imparting more effective energy than something far away.
- amirhirsch 2y ago
  You can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
VMG 2y ago
Sadly my experience shows that people who believe that mobile phones ARE linked to brain cancer also don't believe in studies that show the opposite edited for clarity
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  Correct, you can always find studies that say the opposite. My general rule: err on the side of caution for any new technology.
  - smt88 2y ago
    This is not "new technology". Cell phones have been around for 50 years and in widespread use for more than 25 years. Non-ionizing radiation (in the range of frequencies used by mobile phones) has been used for wireless communication for more than 75 years.
    - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
      This is not "new technology". Cell phones have been around for 50 years and in widespread use for more than 25 years. Larger scales like 50k years are to be considered. Evolutionary scale.
      - vel0city 2y ago
        Better not use wheels then. We don't know what the effects of such recent technology could be! Integrated circuits? Electric lighting? Gasp! Those are way too modern. Better switch to caves and campfires for housing and lighting.
        djhn 2y ago
        To be fair, being overly reliant on wheels for locomotion does have some serious consequences. Even cutting out walking and jogging in favour of *human-powered* bikes or wheelchairs will lead to bone density loss and muscular dystrophy.
lcvw 2y ago
How could it be? The radiation wavelength is far too high to cause any sort of chemistry. I know there are those that will still believe it does though.
- leumon 2y ago
  I think it depends on the amount of the radiation. While non-ionizating radiation doesn't have the ability to remove electrons, it still can heat up surfaces. Microwave ovens for example use non-ionizing radiation to heat up food, but this amount of radiation could potentially be dangerous if exposed to, because it could destroy human tissue.
  - moi2388 2y ago
    Wouldn’t it then hypothetically also kill the cancer cells? And due to increased water and blood flow, in an even higher rate compared to healthy cells?
    - ghodith 2y ago
      Unless you happen to be irradiating a tumor, then your going to be damaging a lot more healthy cells than cancerous ones
  - vel0city 2y ago
    You're right, it is entirely possible to get RF burns at the UHF frequencies involved here. I wouldn't want to hang out near a 1kW UHF antenna! But let's look at the scale of emissions here. A microwave oven is going to be radiating anywhere from 800 to 1600 watts of energy into a box designed to focus most of the energy where the food is. A phone is going to emit maybe 2W of power at its peak transmission power omnidirectionally. Meaning a lot of that 2W isn't going anywhere near your head.
- awelxtr 2y ago
  It's not about the wavelength, it's about the power. I use shorter or higher wavelengths (depends on the channel in question) to cook my food every day but my phone sure doesn't emit 700W
avalys 2y ago
“Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded.” This is not a new study. It’s a review and meta-analysis of existing studies. It is always hard for me to believe that the decisions on which studies to exclude can be done in an unbiased way.
- janice1999 2y ago
  I haven't read the study but it appears to include studies as far back as 1994. Mobile phone technology has changed a lot in just the last few years (MIMO, 5G etc). Frequencies used are increasing meaning decreasing wavelengths and decreasing penetrating power. I would hope that means less effects on the human body...
  - wanderingmind 2y ago
    What? E=h×freq, where h is plancks constant. So higher frequency, higher the energy. How did you come to the opposite conclusion?
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Penetration power of a material, not energy. An arrow is going to have more penetrating power than a baseball bat despite the bat potentially imparting more total energy. Lower frequency waves tend to go through things more while higher frequencies tend to get attenuated and absorbed by materials. So, if you're worried about the waves going deep through your tissues and into your brain, its less likely those waves will end up reaching very deep and will tend to be absorbed on the surface of your skin.
      - cogman10 2y ago
        Not for nothing, but generally speaking the lower frequency transmissions haven't fallen out of use. Instead, they are deployed more in less populated areas. (Not saying these signals cause cancer, just that they are still in use).
Eumenes 2y ago
> commissioned by the World Health Organization The WHO was a huge advocate for contact tracing during COVID. Many countries simply accept their guidelines for public health standards. Given how corrupt the funding of medical/scientijfic studies are, this is not to be trusted.
- shlant 2y ago
  you have conspiracy brainrot
- sillyfluke 2y ago
  Well, the WHO is also an advocate of the polio vaccine. What accurate conclusions are we supposed to make using this logic really. Unless you're saying it's in its interest to advocate the use of mobile phones. But people are already using their phones without the need for WHO pushing it down their throats?
  - Eumenes 2y ago
    They can be right on things, wrong on others. Its a big organization. This type of research will be cited in the future, which could negate interest/developments regarding tumors related to mobile phones. Why give a researcher $50k for a study on this subject when the WHO sponsored paper already said it has null effect?
    - sillyfluke 2y ago
      That's why you should attack the study and not the org. If the study/analysis is exposed convincingly as garbage the org takes a hit anyway. If someone bothered to check that the main opiod supporting citation was actually some random letter to the editor someone wrote and not an actual study perhaps they would have saved a bunch of people a lot of grief early on.
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      > They can be right on things, wrong on others. Its a big organization. Didn't you just nullify your original point?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

55 points by mindracer 2y ago

jeffbee 2y ago

I'll let the NIMBYs know. We're still arguing about base stations.

janice1999 2y ago
The linked article is about mobile phones, not base stations. If you're interested in base station technology (huge multiple-input and multiple-output arrays with 10s to 100s Watts RF output) Ericsson publish a lot of papers.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  The inverse square law has entered the chat.
  - janice1999 2y ago
    Mostly yes, but the base stations are more complicated with complex arrays etc. Ericson actually have a good paper on modeling max power output in new massive MIMO 5G base stations: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8039290 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8039290
mschuster91 2y ago
Well, at least the base station opposition usually has a point: these things are goddamn eyesores. In ye olde times, back when we actually raised taxes to have money to build things, we built aesthetically pleasing radio towers [1] [2] (my grandpa actually worked in construction of the latter as a crane operator) that have become a beloved part of our city landscapes. No one complained about RF despite the old analog emitters running multiple megawatts of power. Nowadays? It's usually eyesores on already ugly roofs in urban areas or metal towers looking about as pleasing as a high-voltage transmission lines. My two cents: Maybe if we would actually invest money into making things look good, we'd get less opposition. And that is valid for a looooot of other NIMBY-plagued infrastructure as well. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldeturm_N%C3%BCrnberg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldeturm_N%C3%BCrnberg [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiaturm https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiaturm
- vel0city 2y ago
  Those towers still have ugly looking antennas on them; they're just too high to really be noticeable on the ground. [0] But for modern cell networks, you don't really want very tall towers. Taller towers mean they pick up the UHF radios from further and further away. You can realistically only carry the same number of subscribers per cell, so to support more users you're going to want to have more but smaller cells. In even medium density areas, you want your antenna elements closer to the ground to have smaller cells. Giant tall towers make sense when you're trying to broadcast or receive signals in a large area. They make sense for television or commercial radio or emergency services VHF/UHF radios. However, that's totally unlike modern cell networks today. And even then a lot of emergency services radio systems are going for more of a distributed network of antennas throughout the city instead of just a single giant tower. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Olympiaturm%2C_M%C3%BAnich%2C_Alemania_2012-04-28%2C_DD_21.JPG/800px-Olympiaturm%2C_M%C3%BAnich%2C_Alemania_2012-04-28%2C_DD_21.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Ol...
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Those towers still have ugly looking antennas on them; they're just too high to really be noticeable on the ground. Yup, and unless you're standing right next to them you have absolutely no idea how huge these antennas are - but visually, they drown like flies in a swimming pool, you can't make them out any more, and that's the point. Small cell towers can be visually hidden. Even if it's just a sheet of drywall or a fully plastic wrap/enclosure that's printed on to look like wall bricks or roof tiles, I don't care, it doesn't need to be a full fake facade like in NYC [1]. All I want is for the telcos that are robbing us dry here in Germany to have to respect the people whose space they want to use. [1] https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/new-york-fake-facades/ https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/new-york-fake-facades/
- xondono 2y ago
  > In ye olde times, back when we actually raised taxes to have money to build things, we built aesthetically pleasing radio towers People still build this kind of stuff, it's just less common because it's way more expensive (it's labor intensive, so it doesn't get cheaper over time). Most companies have turned to the other way of doing this, they just offer money to the buildings, and if they consider it an eyesore, they can pay for the "beautification". Most building managers won't do it though. The funniest thing of this whole business is that a lot of residential buildings oppose the installation arguing "health issues", which ends up with the antennas built on another building. They not only don't get the cash, but most times their actual exposure goes up.
pcl 2y ago
The linked article is about a study of mobile phone use, not proximity to a base station. I don’t know anything about base station technology, so can’t comment on the risks there, but I would imagine that the risk profile of holding an antenna to your head is different than the risk profile of living near an antenna that transmits to hundreds of devices.
- vel0city 2y ago
  The number of devices doesn't really matter, but it does influence something like a duty cycle. It's all about power level, distance, and duty cycle. Sure, the cell phone antenna is going to transmit at something like 1kW, but its also significantly further away from you. Inverse-square law is a hell of a thing, so something being really close to you will end up imparting more effective energy than something far away.
amirhirsch 2y ago
You can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

VMG 2y ago

Sadly my experience shows that people who believe that mobile phones ARE linked to brain cancer also don't believe in studies that show the opposite edited for clarity

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
Correct, you can always find studies that say the opposite. My general rule: err on the side of caution for any new technology.
- smt88 2y ago
  This is not "new technology". Cell phones have been around for 50 years and in widespread use for more than 25 years. Non-ionizing radiation (in the range of frequencies used by mobile phones) has been used for wireless communication for more than 75 years.
  - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    This is not "new technology". Cell phones have been around for 50 years and in widespread use for more than 25 years. Larger scales like 50k years are to be considered. Evolutionary scale.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Better not use wheels then. We don't know what the effects of such recent technology could be! Integrated circuits? Electric lighting? Gasp! Those are way too modern. Better switch to caves and campfires for housing and lighting.
      - djhn 2y ago
        To be fair, being overly reliant on wheels for locomotion does have some serious consequences. Even cutting out walking and jogging in favour of *human-powered* bikes or wheelchairs will lead to bone density loss and muscular dystrophy.

lcvw 2y ago

How could it be? The radiation wavelength is far too high to cause any sort of chemistry. I know there are those that will still believe it does though.

leumon 2y ago
I think it depends on the amount of the radiation. While non-ionizating radiation doesn't have the ability to remove electrons, it still can heat up surfaces. Microwave ovens for example use non-ionizing radiation to heat up food, but this amount of radiation could potentially be dangerous if exposed to, because it could destroy human tissue.
- moi2388 2y ago
  Wouldn’t it then hypothetically also kill the cancer cells? And due to increased water and blood flow, in an even higher rate compared to healthy cells?
  - ghodith 2y ago
    Unless you happen to be irradiating a tumor, then your going to be damaging a lot more healthy cells than cancerous ones
- vel0city 2y ago
  You're right, it is entirely possible to get RF burns at the UHF frequencies involved here. I wouldn't want to hang out near a 1kW UHF antenna! But let's look at the scale of emissions here. A microwave oven is going to be radiating anywhere from 800 to 1600 watts of energy into a box designed to focus most of the energy where the food is. A phone is going to emit maybe 2W of power at its peak transmission power omnidirectionally. Meaning a lot of that 2W isn't going anywhere near your head.
awelxtr 2y ago
It's not about the wavelength, it's about the power. I use shorter or higher wavelengths (depends on the channel in question) to cook my food every day but my phone sure doesn't emit 700W

avalys 2y ago

“Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded.” This is not a new study. It’s a review and meta-analysis of existing studies. It is always hard for me to believe that the decisions on which studies to exclude can be done in an unbiased way.

janice1999 2y ago
I haven't read the study but it appears to include studies as far back as 1994. Mobile phone technology has changed a lot in just the last few years (MIMO, 5G etc). Frequencies used are increasing meaning decreasing wavelengths and decreasing penetrating power. I would hope that means less effects on the human body...
- wanderingmind 2y ago
  What? E=h×freq, where h is plancks constant. So higher frequency, higher the energy. How did you come to the opposite conclusion?
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Penetration power of a material, not energy. An arrow is going to have more penetrating power than a baseball bat despite the bat potentially imparting more total energy. Lower frequency waves tend to go through things more while higher frequencies tend to get attenuated and absorbed by materials. So, if you're worried about the waves going deep through your tissues and into your brain, its less likely those waves will end up reaching very deep and will tend to be absorbed on the surface of your skin.
    - cogman10 2y ago
      Not for nothing, but generally speaking the lower frequency transmissions haven't fallen out of use. Instead, they are deployed more in less populated areas. (Not saying these signals cause cancer, just that they are still in use).

Eumenes 2y ago

> commissioned by the World Health Organization The WHO was a huge advocate for contact tracing during COVID. Many countries simply accept their guidelines for public health standards. Given how corrupt the funding of medical/scientijfic studies are, this is not to be trusted.

shlant 2y ago
you have conspiracy brainrot
sillyfluke 2y ago
Well, the WHO is also an advocate of the polio vaccine. What accurate conclusions are we supposed to make using this logic really. Unless you're saying it's in its interest to advocate the use of mobile phones. But people are already using their phones without the need for WHO pushing it down their throats?
- Eumenes 2y ago
  They can be right on things, wrong on others. Its a big organization. This type of research will be cited in the future, which could negate interest/developments regarding tumors related to mobile phones. Why give a researcher $50k for a study on this subject when the WHO sponsored paper already said it has null effect?
  - sillyfluke 2y ago
    That's why you should attack the study and not the org. If the study/analysis is exposed convincingly as garbage the org takes a hit anyway. If someone bothered to check that the main opiod supporting citation was actually some random letter to the editor someone wrote and not an actual study perhaps they would have saved a bunch of people a lot of grief early on.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    > They can be right on things, wrong on others. Its a big organization. Didn't you just nullify your original point?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]