3 ms·

I have not read article, because it's paywalled, but I was very sad reading the previous comments. Over the last few hundreds of years, the humanity has changed

I have not read article, because it's paywalled, but I was very sad reading the previous comments. Over the last few hundreds of years, the humanity has changed so much in the environment. Implications of things were not fully understood at the time they were introduced. I'm not saying whether these people are right or wrong, but calling them crazy is not really serving anything. Just imagine how people would look at you of you claimed you have serious health problems because of this wonderful new material called asbestos.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
I think the idea that the human body and brain is somehow inherently immune to any effect from radio waves, with no such mechanism even proposed as to why this might even be the case, is just as much a belief in faith. This one of those questions where an experimental design to get to the ground truth is just impossible. Everyone on earth is exposed to radiowaves, so to establish a demographically matched control population to a radio wave laden case population is simply impossible, short of raising up a large sample size of humans in a lead lined vault deep under ground. And even then, you can’t control for every latent factor.
- plorg 2y ago
  Is there a proposed mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation is said to be harmful? I am willing to believe it could be (I would guess at certain wavelengths more than others if so), but absent any statistical evidence of such an effect and without a testable mechanism of action it is just as unreasonable to believe the contrary assertion. I haven't heard of either, so I default to the position of if this was such a significant problem we would be able to prove it by now. Unless or until that happens it's not something we need to worry about. But absolutely keep doing research. So one thing a person could do would be to identify radio emitters and compare the rates of, say, cancer among people living within a certain radius. Even if the planet is awash in electromagnetic radiation the intensity drops off significantly according to the distance to the emitter. Large emitters are well-documented so it shouldn't be hard to find this information.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    It doesn’t really matter to me if there is a proposed mechanism already or not. Phenomena exist before we are able to describe it mechanistically after all. There are assumptions to that setup as well. There’s the assumtion that this effect is dependent on magnitude that you could measure easily within a certain drop off. Maybe the drop off point is quite far from these emitters or doesn’t even exist, and any such exposure is enough like a binary condition. Then there is the assumption that people living near large emitters today are always around them, and the assumption that people not living around large emitters never go off and spend time around them. I think there are many interesting questions like this where you just can’t ever get a reasonable design that is truly powered enough for all the potential latent variables involved. Modern science works well when the fruit is low hanging statistically, but thats not always the case for every question.
    - kergonath 2y ago
      > It doesn’t really matter to me if there is a proposed mechanism already or not. Phenomena exist before we are able to describe it mechanistically after all. Right. But then you’re talking about something that could happen, or that could not. If you are thinking about something you do not observe, then not having any hypothesis as to how it could work makes the whole endeavour useless, to the level of the Russell teapot. You could just as validly speculate that the pink colour is harmful because of Venus’ influence resonating with the water memory and justify your point of view with the same “there are things we don’t know” argument. Two observations specifically on electromagnetic radiation: - if this were actually a thing, we’d have seen the signal in epidemiological data, considering that WiFi has been around for 25 years and is used by ~billions of people, and cell phones are even older and more used - we do know quite a lot about the effect of radiation on matter. We might not know everything there is to know, and biology adds a layer on top, but e.g. the energy transfer from some microwave radiation to biological tissue is limited by very well-known Physics. We know that occasionally an atom gets knocked out of its position, and that even though most of the time it’s fine, it can occasionally cause problems, which is why UV sunlight is bad. We know how X or γ radiation interacts with matter and is more likely to affect molecules. Saying that “there are things we don’t know” is misleading in that the subject is actually very well known, even if we don’t know everything, particularly on the biology side. It is perfectly valid to be skeptical by default. But in face of evidence and a solid body of knowledge, we should also be skeptical about our own skepticism. > Modern science works well when the fruit is low hanging statistically, but thats not always the case for every question. That is quite far from the truth. In reality it’s quite the opposite. Science is incremental, with occasional breakthroughs. But most of its progress is through constant grinding on tiny subjects, very far from low-hanging fruits. You have lots of different people, each one exploring their own ideas and hypotheses. In a field so important and popular as the effect of technology on human biology, there are thousands upon thousands of researchers competing, each one trying to find a better idea than their colleagues. This system is actually very good at exploring weird, goofy-sounding hypotheses because the reward is so important.
- tgv 2y ago
  What would the effect be? How would it show up? What mechanism can explain radio waves affecting brain structures? What tissue can receive radio waves? What frequency are we even talking about? Anyway, the way to start with your hypothesis is really simple. Relate the amount of relevant electromagnetic energy in the environment to whatever symptom you think it causes and measure the population for that symptom. Get people who exhibit the symptoms to places where that energy is absent (removed from society, in a Faraday cage, whatever). Check if the symptoms disappear. It doesn't have to disappear completely, just gradually. If you believe that even the slightest amount of EM radiation will still have an effect, so a test free of it is practically impossible, I have a surprise for you.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Also add some tests to check whether it's psychosomatic. For example, a device that appears to be on but is actually off, and vice versa. If symptoms vanish just because you disabled the power LED, then that tells you something else is going on.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    basically all living tissue absorbs RF because it's full of water. This also affects brain electrical activity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208983/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208983/
    - tgv 2y ago
      First: those effects are of high power, nearby fields. The EM contamination in our environment is very low power, mostly lower frequencies, and evenly distributed. It's hard to imagine it affecting any brain signal, since even the lowest present frequencies are three orders of magnitude faster than a neuron's polarity change. I don't know that water absorbs normal radio frequencies. Above 1GHz or so, it starts to absorb, but the effect is heating, nothing else. Having a mobile phone next to your head increases the temperature in nearby brain tissue a little bit, so it's hard to image that the low power frequencies can do anything else but increase the temperature very, very lightly, something which the body can deal with effectively. I don't see it.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Do you call it immunity when there's simply no mechanism for interaction? Either way, we evolved on a planet orbiting a giant fusion reactor spitting out EMF. The ones that are close to the limits we call "ionizing" are widely used by life, because evolution was able to take advantage of interactions between chemistry and physics. The frequencies far away from that line simply aren't used by life because there's no viable mechanism for chemistry to interact with them. That's the same reason RF is considered harmless.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    At the same time we know only within this century perhaps that we understood we are within enough distance to that emf fusion plant we orbit to have it damage our DNA. There are other processes that are influenced by voltage that could possibly be more or less excited in the presence of sufficient rf. I don’t see any structures in our biology like a faraday cage that protects us from outside rf, you die if you are microwaved for example.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      Microwaves kill by hyperthermia and boiling. Do you get a fever standing near your wifi access point?
      - kjkjadksj 2y ago
        I’m not saying you do or don’t. I just merely gave two widely acknowledged examples of emf harming living things to demonstrate that it is presently possible is all. I say nothing about magnitude of effect. Frankly I don’t care beyond the point of having a mind being open to new evidence yet to be discovered.
- serf 2y ago
  >I think the idea that the human body and brain is somehow inherently immune to any effect from radio waves, with no such mechanism even proposed as to why this might even be the case, is just as much a belief in faith. it's an easy conclusion to get to just from the basis of what the human body does : we breath and exchange air -- that's plain for anyone to see , so we try to avoid breathing particles. We know that looking at the sun injures the eye -- we can see the evidence when looking at a patient. We know that fire burns the skin. The human body has junctions and functionality that actually interact with energy at those levels. Similarly we know what injuries from intense EM radiation look like, and it's not vague chronic fatigue syndrome-like symptoms, and it isn't caused by bombardment by non-interactive low power levels of differing frequencies and sources. > Everyone on earth is exposed to radiowaves, so to establish a demographically matched control population to a radio wave laden case population is simply impossible it's not impossible whatsoever to block all 'radiowaves' ; it's impractical and needless, so the study isn't being conducted by anyone that matters. p.s. lead is a piss-poor 'radiowave vault' material compared to copper/steel/aluminum.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    > it's not impossible whatsoever to block all 'radiowaves' ; it's impractical and needless, so the study isn't being conducted by anyone that matters. It's actually even easy to "block all radiowaves" until all that remains is background noise of a level not dissimilar to that experienced by humans since forever... see TFA itself for technically an example. And yet we are yet to find any person who can reliable distinguish RF "interference"...
- jdietrich 2y ago
  "Radio wave" is an engineering term - it just describes photons that we can detect and emit using a certain type of technology. It's a totally arbitrary category in a physical sense. What we're really talking about is photons with an energy up to about 10^-3 electron volts. My body is constantly radiating about 120 watts worth of photons, with energies up to about 10^-1 eV. I'm constantly glowing with non-ionizing radiation that I emit as a natural side-effect of living, producing vastly more energy than any wireless device you're likely to encounter. There's just no plausible mechanism by which a small quantity of low-energy photons could be more harmful than the far greater number of higher-energy photons you're exposed to in literally any environment compatible with human life. If you fear WiFi, you should be terrified of heat and light. Radio waves aren't a mysterious force summoned up by man, they're a tiny portion of the cacophony of electromagnetic radiation that we're exposed to by literally every speck of matter in the universe.
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    The "light bad" argument I think misses the point. It's not about heating, the idea is that an electromagnetic field might excite electrical systems in the body, and that we have evolved to tolerate some baseline level of that but maybe could experience adverse effects from sustained exposure above that baseline. I'm not saying that is or isn't true, but at least argue against the right thing.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
    There is the matter of modulation, though. Or let's just say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise Maybe we evolved to handle some 'colors' better, and that artificial stuff just hits us like a jackhammer, even if it's 'weak'?
- trickstra 2y ago
  To do science, you need to come up with counter-examples. A simple way to get to the truth in this particular case is to come to the town full of electro-sensitive people, and announce that there has been a large EM device secretly installed for a week and see how many of them will suddenly report symptoms, even when there actually wasn't any device installed. Or conversely do install the device and don't announce anything and check if somebody sensed it.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  If radio waves activate calcium channels in the heart or whatever, hopefully it's at least something that can be triggered to a greater or smaller degree and thereby can still be studied.
hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
https://wapo.st/4eLUEmn https://wapo.st/4eLUEmn
tapper 2y ago
check out Bypass Paywalls Clean for firefox. I did not even know there was apaywall.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I’ve given up on that plugin now that it’s hosted on a Russian equivalent of GitHub.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

I think the idea that the human body and brain is somehow inherently immune to any effect from radio waves, with no such mechanism even proposed as to why this might even be the case, is just as much a belief in faith. This one of those questions where an experimental design to get to the ground truth is just impossible. Everyone on earth is exposed to radiowaves, so to establish a demographically matched control population to a radio wave laden case population is simply impossible, short of raising up a large sample size of humans in a lead lined vault deep under ground. And even then, you can’t control for every latent factor.

plorg 2y ago
Is there a proposed mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation is said to be harmful? I am willing to believe it could be (I would guess at certain wavelengths more than others if so), but absent any statistical evidence of such an effect and without a testable mechanism of action it is just as unreasonable to believe the contrary assertion. I haven't heard of either, so I default to the position of if this was such a significant problem we would be able to prove it by now. Unless or until that happens it's not something we need to worry about. But absolutely keep doing research. So one thing a person could do would be to identify radio emitters and compare the rates of, say, cancer among people living within a certain radius. Even if the planet is awash in electromagnetic radiation the intensity drops off significantly according to the distance to the emitter. Large emitters are well-documented so it shouldn't be hard to find this information.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  It doesn’t really matter to me if there is a proposed mechanism already or not. Phenomena exist before we are able to describe it mechanistically after all. There are assumptions to that setup as well. There’s the assumtion that this effect is dependent on magnitude that you could measure easily within a certain drop off. Maybe the drop off point is quite far from these emitters or doesn’t even exist, and any such exposure is enough like a binary condition. Then there is the assumption that people living near large emitters today are always around them, and the assumption that people not living around large emitters never go off and spend time around them. I think there are many interesting questions like this where you just can’t ever get a reasonable design that is truly powered enough for all the potential latent variables involved. Modern science works well when the fruit is low hanging statistically, but thats not always the case for every question.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    > It doesn’t really matter to me if there is a proposed mechanism already or not. Phenomena exist before we are able to describe it mechanistically after all. Right. But then you’re talking about something that could happen, or that could not. If you are thinking about something you do not observe, then not having any hypothesis as to how it could work makes the whole endeavour useless, to the level of the Russell teapot. You could just as validly speculate that the pink colour is harmful because of Venus’ influence resonating with the water memory and justify your point of view with the same “there are things we don’t know” argument. Two observations specifically on electromagnetic radiation: - if this were actually a thing, we’d have seen the signal in epidemiological data, considering that WiFi has been around for 25 years and is used by ~billions of people, and cell phones are even older and more used - we do know quite a lot about the effect of radiation on matter. We might not know everything there is to know, and biology adds a layer on top, but e.g. the energy transfer from some microwave radiation to biological tissue is limited by very well-known Physics. We know that occasionally an atom gets knocked out of its position, and that even though most of the time it’s fine, it can occasionally cause problems, which is why UV sunlight is bad. We know how X or γ radiation interacts with matter and is more likely to affect molecules. Saying that “there are things we don’t know” is misleading in that the subject is actually very well known, even if we don’t know everything, particularly on the biology side. It is perfectly valid to be skeptical by default. But in face of evidence and a solid body of knowledge, we should also be skeptical about our own skepticism. > Modern science works well when the fruit is low hanging statistically, but thats not always the case for every question. That is quite far from the truth. In reality it’s quite the opposite. Science is incremental, with occasional breakthroughs. But most of its progress is through constant grinding on tiny subjects, very far from low-hanging fruits. You have lots of different people, each one exploring their own ideas and hypotheses. In a field so important and popular as the effect of technology on human biology, there are thousands upon thousands of researchers competing, each one trying to find a better idea than their colleagues. This system is actually very good at exploring weird, goofy-sounding hypotheses because the reward is so important.
tgv 2y ago
What would the effect be? How would it show up? What mechanism can explain radio waves affecting brain structures? What tissue can receive radio waves? What frequency are we even talking about? Anyway, the way to start with your hypothesis is really simple. Relate the amount of relevant electromagnetic energy in the environment to whatever symptom you think it causes and measure the population for that symptom. Get people who exhibit the symptoms to places where that energy is absent (removed from society, in a Faraday cage, whatever). Check if the symptoms disappear. It doesn't have to disappear completely, just gradually. If you believe that even the slightest amount of EM radiation will still have an effect, so a test free of it is practically impossible, I have a surprise for you.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Also add some tests to check whether it's psychosomatic. For example, a device that appears to be on but is actually off, and vice versa. If symptoms vanish just because you disabled the power LED, then that tells you something else is going on.
- amatecha 2y ago
  basically all living tissue absorbs RF because it's full of water. This also affects brain electrical activity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208983/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208983/
  - tgv 2y ago
    First: those effects are of high power, nearby fields. The EM contamination in our environment is very low power, mostly lower frequencies, and evenly distributed. It's hard to imagine it affecting any brain signal, since even the lowest present frequencies are three orders of magnitude faster than a neuron's polarity change. I don't know that water absorbs normal radio frequencies. Above 1GHz or so, it starts to absorb, but the effect is heating, nothing else. Having a mobile phone next to your head increases the temperature in nearby brain tissue a little bit, so it's hard to image that the low power frequencies can do anything else but increase the temperature very, very lightly, something which the body can deal with effectively. I don't see it.
AlotOfReading 2y ago
Do you call it immunity when there's simply no mechanism for interaction? Either way, we evolved on a planet orbiting a giant fusion reactor spitting out EMF. The ones that are close to the limits we call "ionizing" are widely used by life, because evolution was able to take advantage of interactions between chemistry and physics. The frequencies far away from that line simply aren't used by life because there's no viable mechanism for chemistry to interact with them. That's the same reason RF is considered harmless.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  At the same time we know only within this century perhaps that we understood we are within enough distance to that emf fusion plant we orbit to have it damage our DNA. There are other processes that are influenced by voltage that could possibly be more or less excited in the presence of sufficient rf. I don’t see any structures in our biology like a faraday cage that protects us from outside rf, you die if you are microwaved for example.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Microwaves kill by hyperthermia and boiling. Do you get a fever standing near your wifi access point?
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      I’m not saying you do or don’t. I just merely gave two widely acknowledged examples of emf harming living things to demonstrate that it is presently possible is all. I say nothing about magnitude of effect. Frankly I don’t care beyond the point of having a mind being open to new evidence yet to be discovered.
serf 2y ago
>I think the idea that the human body and brain is somehow inherently immune to any effect from radio waves, with no such mechanism even proposed as to why this might even be the case, is just as much a belief in faith. it's an easy conclusion to get to just from the basis of what the human body does : we breath and exchange air -- that's plain for anyone to see , so we try to avoid breathing particles. We know that looking at the sun injures the eye -- we can see the evidence when looking at a patient. We know that fire burns the skin. The human body has junctions and functionality that actually interact with energy at those levels. Similarly we know what injuries from intense EM radiation look like, and it's not vague chronic fatigue syndrome-like symptoms, and it isn't caused by bombardment by non-interactive low power levels of differing frequencies and sources. > Everyone on earth is exposed to radiowaves, so to establish a demographically matched control population to a radio wave laden case population is simply impossible it's not impossible whatsoever to block all 'radiowaves' ; it's impractical and needless, so the study isn't being conducted by anyone that matters. p.s. lead is a piss-poor 'radiowave vault' material compared to copper/steel/aluminum.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  > it's not impossible whatsoever to block all 'radiowaves' ; it's impractical and needless, so the study isn't being conducted by anyone that matters. It's actually even easy to "block all radiowaves" until all that remains is background noise of a level not dissimilar to that experienced by humans since forever... see TFA itself for technically an example. And yet we are yet to find any person who can reliable distinguish RF "interference"...
jdietrich 2y ago
"Radio wave" is an engineering term - it just describes photons that we can detect and emit using a certain type of technology. It's a totally arbitrary category in a physical sense. What we're really talking about is photons with an energy up to about 10^-3 electron volts. My body is constantly radiating about 120 watts worth of photons, with energies up to about 10^-1 eV. I'm constantly glowing with non-ionizing radiation that I emit as a natural side-effect of living, producing vastly more energy than any wireless device you're likely to encounter. There's just no plausible mechanism by which a small quantity of low-energy photons could be more harmful than the far greater number of higher-energy photons you're exposed to in literally any environment compatible with human life. If you fear WiFi, you should be terrified of heat and light. Radio waves aren't a mysterious force summoned up by man, they're a tiny portion of the cacophony of electromagnetic radiation that we're exposed to by literally every speck of matter in the universe.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  The "light bad" argument I think misses the point. It's not about heating, the idea is that an electromagnetic field might excite electrical systems in the body, and that we have evolved to tolerate some baseline level of that but maybe could experience adverse effects from sustained exposure above that baseline. I'm not saying that is or isn't true, but at least argue against the right thing.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  There is the matter of modulation, though. Or let's just say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise Maybe we evolved to handle some 'colors' better, and that artificial stuff just hits us like a jackhammer, even if it's 'weak'?
trickstra 2y ago
To do science, you need to come up with counter-examples. A simple way to get to the truth in this particular case is to come to the town full of electro-sensitive people, and announce that there has been a large EM device secretly installed for a week and see how many of them will suddenly report symptoms, even when there actually wasn't any device installed. Or conversely do install the device and don't announce anything and check if somebody sensed it.
nerdponx 2y ago
If radio waves activate calcium channels in the heart or whatever, hopefully it's at least something that can be triggered to a greater or smaller degree and thereby can still be studied.

hoppyhoppy2 2y ago

https://wapo.st/4eLUEmn https://wapo.st/4eLUEmn

tapper 2y ago

check out Bypass Paywalls Clean for firefox. I did not even know there was apaywall.

EasyMark 2y ago
I’ve given up on that plugin now that it’s hosted on a Russian equivalent of GitHub.