Study Hints Ambient Radio Waves May Affect Plant Growth 298
Posted
by
kdawson
from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
dwguenther writes "A Lyons (Colorado) area woman with no academic pedigree has published a scientific paper in the International Journal of Forestry Research about the adverse effects of radio waves on aspen seedlings. Katie Haggerty, who lives north of Steamboat Mountain, found in a preliminary experiment done near her house that aspens shielded from electromagnetic radiation were healthier than those that were not. 'I found that the shielded seedlings produced more growth, longer shoots, bigger leaves, and more total leaf area. The shielded group produced 60 percent more leaf area and 74 percent more shoot length than a mock-shielded group,' she said." This was not a definitive study, as its author readily admits — it's hard to see how a double-blind study could even be designed in this area — but it was refereed.
...not all EM radiation (Score:2, Insightful)
Double blind should not be hard (Score:4, Insightful)
Have the plants taken care of by one person and judged/reviewed by another who only sees them when they are moved to the review area. Since this is just seedlings using large plant pots should be fine.
No double-blind? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Double blind should not be hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Have the plants taken care of by one person and judged/reviewed by another who only sees them when they are moved to the review area. Since this is just seedlings using large plant pots should be fine.
Now probably isn't the best time to tell them the Sun is a giant radio, amongst other things.
Hints? Might? (Score:2, Insightful)
Come back and talk to me when you have a more definitive study. Something statistically significant that doesn't focus on one species in one location. Oh, and let's see the methodology used to make sure it is actually a sound experiment because an American amateur scientist is did this one and I really don't trust most of my fellow Americans to do amateur science correctly.
Re:Right (Score:5, Insightful)
In spring 2007, she planted the aspen seedlings -- one group in a shielded Faraday cage, another group in a cage wrapped in fiberglass that did not block radio waves and a third set was unprotected altogether. By the end of July, there were measureable differences in growth, and at the beginning of October, she noticed differences in coloration.
It's one thing to criticize a study, but at least try to READ it first.......
A word on simple experiments... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, Louis Pasteur only finally disproved the theory of spontaneous generation with a simple experiment involving meat broth and a long necked decanter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation [wikipedia.org]
There's no reason to doubt that the certain frequencies we consider harmless are in fact slowly destroying delicate parts of our biosphere. We're the same scientists who didn't think lead paint or asbestos were a problem, and discovered germ theory only a short time ago. The article itself is not sensational, and even the DIY scientist is modest in her conclusions.
Re:A word on simple experiments... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no reason to doubt that the certain frequencies we consider harmless are in fact slowly destroying delicate parts of our biosphere
Sure there is. 1. nothing noticed so far 2. the sun dumps all kinds of EM on everything.
Lead paint is not an issue if you do not eat it. Asbestos is a great insulator and fine to use as such if it is properly sealed.
Won't matter to the anti-radio/radiation nuts (Score:4, Insightful)
This shit has been going on forever. They keep changing their target, but it is always the same tune: Radiation is bad, X is radiation, so X is bad.
When I was a kid the target was high voltage distribution lines. They said those were bad for kids, caused cancer. They had a data point, kinda, in terms of one community. Of course upon further study there was actual radioactive shit there (Radon IIRC). At any rate because of the serious nature of this, it was looked in to. Long term studies were done, looking at kids who grew up near these lines. I am probably a data point in one of those studies as our house was under some large lines when I was young (that's why I know about this shit, Mom was worried).
Well, now there's many decades of results compiled and guess what? There's no difference at all. They don't do shit.
Now any scientist could have told you that, the radiation is non-ionizing, hell the waves are millions of meters long from 60Hz power. The nuts weren't doing science, they were just being nuts.
So this is more of the same shit, same as the "cellphones kill honeybees" and so on. They do not consider it logically, they are just reactionary.
Re:If it's not a definitive study... (Score:5, Insightful)
For someone outside of academia to get reviewed and published is news enough.
Re:Somehow I always knew... (Score:2, Insightful)
Good point, maybe if they took Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck off the air, the plants would get better. She should try shielding them from just their programs.
--
Toro
Re:A word on simple experiments... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. the sun dumps all kinds of EM on everything.
This is where critical thinking comes in handy. I don't think any serious scientist will suggest that plants are not well adjusted to EM radiation from the sun.
As far as "nothing noticed so far," I imagine that was the same phrase they used when they were handling raw mercury without protection in science labs not too long ago. Ignorance is no substitute for reality.
Re:Not mine. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hints? Might? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a deep concern about over-stating the dangers of RF radiation... honestly, though, I don't see anything wrong with the PAPER and would say that Haggerty
approached the experiment in an appropriate scientific manner.
Come back and talk to me when you have a more definitive study.
This is not a perfect experiment... no experiment is. But the methodology is laid out. The experiment is reproducible, and that's what matters. I think it may spark interest in study... very likely from people who are VERY skeptical that RF could be the cause, and that's perfect.
I think that it's probably the case that something else is the cause, not RF. There are things that aren't controlled for. But you or anyone else can do a better experiment. You're right to be skeptical of a single one, but that doesn't mean Haggerty's work wasn't valuable.
double-blind method (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe it was a response. (Score:2, Insightful)
Light was controlled for within 5% of that received by the un-shielded plants. There were three groups, and it was simple... fiberglass screen shaded the "mock shielded" group from the sun the same way the aluminum screen did.
I personally think further experiments will discover some other cause besides RF, but Haggerty controlled for and measured a lot of other things... light, air circulation, etc. That doesn't mean her results will turn out to be correct, but she did present everything anyone would need to do to repeat her experiments to verify or refute them.
Re:Not mine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoosh!
Meta-woosh! Nobody could be that dumb. It must have been ironic. Maybe he was trolling for wooshes?
Re:A word on simple experiments... (Score:1, Insightful)
Lead paint is not an issue if you do not eat it. Asbestos is a great insulator and fine to use as such if it is properly sealed.
That's an absurd statement.
Releasing lead that had previously been entombed underground into the surface environment means that eventually it will end up in all sorts of living things whether you, personally, intentionally, ate it or not. It's an issue.
And there's no such thing as properly sealed. PCBs in transformers were supposed to be properly sealed too, but of course they were eventually found to be leaking. You have to assume that anything dangerous is going to get out of its container somehow. If you can't totally eliminate its uses, you at least reduce them to the point where the tradeoff between the importance of the application and the odds of leakage are considered acceptable.
Re:Double blind should not be hard (Score:3, Insightful)
The vast majority of the Sun's EM radiation is in the visible and ultraviolet range. The worst of the UV is intercepted by the ozone layer and life on Earth is well adapted to the visible light range. It would be interesting to compare the relative strength at ground level of the Sun's radio frequency emissions to those from terrestrial sources.
Re:i don't know about radio, but i find (Score:3, Insightful)
If it uses the same wattage how is there less heat? All light eventually becomes heat.
Re:Right (Score:3, Insightful)
Just how unbiased was this person? If they were hoping for a specific result, there are a lot of things they could do in an "experiment" like this, even without thinking that they are doing such things.
Do the experiment yourself and find out. You're skeptical so if anything, you'll have the opposite bias. That's how this works.
No human being is 100% free of subconcious bias. A good scientist will do everything they can to perform objectively identical actions on all members of their various experimental organisms. IN that way, they will minimize the effect of their own biases. And others can reproduce the same objectively identical actions to gather more data.
Haggerty's paper suggests that she attempted to be careful in this regard. She explicitly presents her method. That's one way we know that she was trying to avoid her personal biases.
Re:i don't know about radio, but i find (Score:1, Insightful)
The only real benefit to LED is less heat (and need to dispose of that heat somehow)...
So it'd be good for avoiding forward looking infrared [wikipedia.org] detection perhaps?
...but this is generally outweighed by the insane costs of 600w LED grow lights.
Getting incarcerated and having all your assets confiscated is much more expensive.
Re:Won't matter to the anti-radio/radiation nuts (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily. Its nothing personal regarding this work, I actually didn't even look at it yet. I'm just pointing out the limitations of peer review. That doctor from India who studies the guy who claims to have not eaten or drank anything for the last 70 years publishes in a peer reviewed journal and everyone I've talked to from India about him called him a quack.
For example, as a scientist unfamiliar with this field, and thus not qualified to judge the particular details of the experiment I would instead focus on the general methods used and the apparent quality of the journal. This journal, found at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijfr/ [hindawi.com], has only been around for 2 years and unless there are some strange politics going on in the forestry field that likely means it does not attract top notch editors/peer-reviewers. It will also likely have a lower barrier to publication relative to other journals as it will not be receiving as many papers.
They also may be more likely to publish something with a questionable premise (although this should have been more an issue for whoever funded the project) and bad controls, etc if it seems like it will hit upon some kind of hot button issue and thus get the journal exposure. Not to say that doesn't ever happen in the case of Nature or Science, but there will be less pressure to do so.
Also its possible that this researcher simply wasnt allowed to publish elsewhere because people automatically rejected her premise as wacky, and so was forced to publish in a lesser known journal and rely on popular media exposure. Or as is more likely the case here, she simply had no credentials and so found it hard to get published.
All I'm saying is that these are things that should pop into your head when you see "peer reviewed" not necessarily images of reliability. Still its a better system than most. Maybe reviewers should have to have their names attached to each article they accept somehow, so some kind of meta-peer-review could go on.
Re:Double blind study (Score:4, Insightful)
yea the thing is its kind a waste of time and money for people to repeatedly perform the same badly controlled experiment over and over.
Sure, I agree with that. The next experiment should control for more variables. It's straightforward to improve upon the methods to leave less doubt. You can also do an experiment to show that some OTHER effect was likely responsible. Formulate another hypothesis that would explain Haggerty's data and test those ideas directly.
But if the people with the resources don't care about this particular issue, no one will do the experiment.
You can find out the same thing faster and cheaper if you just design it well to begin with.
I think if Haggerty had managed to get "no difference" among the three cages, no one would be calling for a better experiment, even though it would have been equally uncontrolled. We need to think about this.
Even if we ultimately prove that Haggerty's hypothesis is incorrect, she took a stab at addressing what she perceives as a gap or mistake in knowledge in the RIGHT way. There is no bad experiment as long as you are trying your best within your resources and acting ethically. There are unfortunate consequences of the media and concerned groups trumpeting EVERY paper as "the truth," but if that happens it is not really Haggerty's fault (IMO, after reading the paper.)
Haggerty did the right thing with her concerned skepticism. When was the last time you saw someone concerned about RF do something other than blog endlessly about RF sensitivity or spout mumbo-jumbo about the balances of life force?
Haggerty designed an experiment that controlled for a number of significant variables while changing the RF applied to the plants in a measured way. That's doing it right. Nothing is perfect. You can never control for ALL variables and there is always a need to minimize the impact of that. But you have to start somewhere, and if you have a fringe idea, that will probably be YOU in your own backyard.
Honestly, this takes the wind out of a lot of science **deniers'** sails. It's strong evidence against scientific conspiracy; evidence against "burying" of "weird" ideas. This person with no formal scientific credentials got a paper published that's based around a pretty deeply fringe idea. She deserved that publication on the basis of actually applying decent, if low budget science and getting a result.
I suspect that it won't be very long before there's a flurry of other careful experiments that explain Haggerty's results with a different interpretation of the causes. There will probably be theory papers on the spectral limits of the response of plants (as she cites some papers on outside-of-the-visible-light effects on plants).
It's not going to take that much time or that much money to refute this result, and in the meantime, Haggerty's publication suggests that properly executed scientific inquiry stands on its own, independent of preconcieved notions or weirdness of the result.
Re:MSDS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A word on simple experiments... (Score:2, Insightful)