Danger Of Strong Electromagnetic Fields 146
blueworld writes "U.S. Department of Energy researchers have discovered a possible cause for reported illness around high voltage power lines. They found that rats' bodies produced high levels of ozone when exposed to strong electrical fields. Electrically grounded water produced the same result when exposed to the fields. Apparently, the water in our bodies may be responsible for the health risks of high voltage power lines."
Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing like a little begging the question fallacy to get your day started. (Hint: there is no demonstrated evidence that being anywhere near a high power line is harmful at all. Witness the astounding lack of corpses of all varieties along the millions of miles of high power lines crossing the United States.)
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:4, Funny)
No (Score:2)
No, I don't. Could you explain it to me?
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:2)
IMHO high voltage lines would only be hazardous to those who work close to them. EM fields follow the inverse square law and HV lines hang quite high, so the amount of energy anyone around those lines absorbs wouldn't be very big.
Perhaps they should ask birds if they have any negative effects from being near HV lines?
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:2)
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:2)
Yet at least I have no difficulty in believing that constant exposure to HV line EM fields can affect human body, especially growing human body.
I would not want to live under one myself for very long, say, more than a year. And I'd never allow my children to live or go to school under one even for that long. There certainly are enough "anecdotal evidence" that I rather not take the chance... To me, it would seem totally idiotic to voluntarily
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:2)
Actually IIRC my e/m lectures, while the electric field of a point charge varies as an inverse square, the field of a line charge varies as a simple inverse (you have to add up the effect of all the charges along the wire). So the fall-off isn't nearly so far.
Then again I remember something about (point)dipoles falling off as fourth powers, and HV lin
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:2)
Which has the unfortunate side effect that you can be electrocuted between active and the Earth (i.e. touching a single wire) rather than having to touch two wires simultaneously with different hands... but it appears to be worth it.
Presumably high voltage line pairs aren't doing something tricky w
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:2)
Having actually stood under a HV transmission line, I can tell you the field strength was significant enough to FEEL it. It is also strong enough to light a neon tube held in the hand.
The question there isn't the existance of a significant field, but if that field is harmful.
Fallacy of the excluded middle (Score:2)
I seem to recall reading that the people "affected" by power lines tended to live on the downwind side, leading to speculation that the HV corona effects (well-documented) might charge fine dust particles and make them more likely to precipitate out, clump up
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, golly, by your argument cigarettes cannot be killing anyone either, then. I mean, when was the last time you saw a corpse with a lit cigarette in his mouth?
Is there any evidence that being near high power lines is harmful? I have no idea. Cancer is so frequent that if power lines cause thousands of people to get cancer, it would probably be very hard to detect. And, since such simple matters of civilization seem to elude you, people who get cancer generally die in hospitals.
So, because such effects are hard and costly to detect through population studies, people look for causal relationships and mechanisms. You know, the kinds of relationships and mechanisms apologists for businesses, Republicans, and power companies always demand.
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Naturally, we aren't looking for corpses around high voltage lines. What we are looking at are statistically significant differences in rates of illness. Naturally, if you measure illness rates in two different populations, they will differ somewhat due to chance.
We have a number of studies out there some of which show sigificantly higher rates. However a single such study is not conclusive. One out of twenty experiments conducted on identical populations will falsely identify a significant difference between them. So generally, when looking at a pattern of studies in which usually no difference is found, but in which a few studies indicate there may be something, the simplest conclusion is that there is that the positive results were due to chance, especially if there is no plausible physical mechanism for there to be an effect.
However you can't be entirely sure that the difference between our small number of positive studies and large number of negative studies aren't due to some subtle difference in methodology, either explicit or implicit. That's the nature of science -- you are never really 100% sure. So if there is a plausible, lab observable mechanism found where there was none before, it is worth looking at past studies to see if difference in things like the definition of "proximity" may play a role in results given this mechanism. It might be worthwhile to even design some studies which take this effect into account.
However, basically I'm with you -- I don't think there is convincing evidence now that there is any effect.
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:2)
Re:Textbook case of Begging the Question (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.google.com/search?q=power+line+incre
But if you had a choice between living under a powerline, and living half a kilometer away would it influence your decision ? Even without definite proof - why take the risk.
Ways to cope? (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, the study identifies another potential health risk. So, what are some ways that we can reduce the potential damage? Some sort of sheilding on power lines? Are there any materials that can cheaply stop this type of radiation and it's effects?
A diet high in anti-oxidants is one easy way to at least limit the damage... (Free radicals caused by the decomposition of 03 as it attacks are responsible for much of the damage. Anti-oxidants can help prevent this).
Re:Ways to cope? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ways to cope? (Score:2)
They found that rats' bodies produced high levels of ozone when exposed to strong electrical fields
Did anybody else get a mental image of a rat standing between high voltage insulator stand-offs, with an evil genious in a lab coat throwing one of those Frankinsteinian knife switches, sending a 13kV electrical discharge through the rat, resuting in a **poof** of ozone-charged rat plasma?
Re:Ways to cope? (Score:4, Insightful)
That didn't stop the FCC from issueing exposure limit guidelines and requiring licensees to learn complex formulas for evaluating exposure risks at their radio stations. This was off-putting enough for many licensees that it resulted in the removal of antennas from the roofs of many tall buildings.
All of it was driven purely by politics. I personally had to spend a couple of days learning about this crap when upgrading my amateur radio licence from Technician to General class.
To understand how ridiculous this all is, just think about the inverse square law.
But I digress. To create exposure guidelines and counter-measures when there is absolutely no evidence of risk is laughable.
Re:Ways to cope? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought about it, and realized it applies to point sources, while a power line is a linear source following an inverse law, at least when one is closer to the line than the line is long.
Re:Ways to cope? (Score:2)
Electro-magnetic radiation from a arbitrarily long line-source follows an inverse linear law.
Electro-magnetic radiation from a arbitrarily large planar-source would follow a "constant-value" law. While this "constant value" result may seem impossible, it is actually the easiest to explain. Say you are standing on an infinitly large white floor. The horizon is infinitely far away, and the horizon line divides your view of the universe in
Yum? (Score:5, Funny)
Hm?
Oooh... Anti-oxidants...
Re:Yum? (Score:1)
Saccharin (Score:4, Interesting)
This finding immediately triggered the threat of the so-called "Delaney Clause," a congressionally mandated provision that requires the Food and Drug Administration to ban--literally "at the drop of a rat"--any synthetic food chemical shown to cause cancer when ingested by laboratory animals.
Saccharin's reputation was further tarnished, however, in 1981, when the National Toxicology Program, referring again to the Canadian rat study, elected to put saccharin in its "cancer causing" list-- formally declaring it an "anticipated human carcinogen."
There was no scientific basis for such a classification of saccharin as a human cancer hazard.
Taken from: http://www.acsh.org/press/editorials/saccharin051
The pseudo science of it was that the rats were give enough saccharin to make a 55 gallon drum of soda...
On topic, I have an ozone/ion air cleaner and it does a great job doing what I want it to do... keeping the house smelling clean.
Re:Saccharin (Score:2)
Re:Saccharin (Score:2)
This one generates a considerable amount of ozone when you want it too.
So how are fish stores/aquariums? They use mondo amounts to scrub the water, whith redox meters to make sure it does not harm the fish. I have seen generators that make 2000 mg of the stuff per hour! Home user ones still generate in the 200 range... enough to make you puke.
Re:Saccharin (Score:2)
Re:Saccharin (Score:2)
Re:Saccharin (Score:1)
That rat weighs ~.5 lbs and you weigh (say) ~200 lbs. Have you consumed 22000 gallons of soda during a very short period, like with the study?
As for asprin in rats, try giving a rat (say) 176000 scaled doses over a short
Re:Saccharin (Score:2)
You'd lose that bet. After a few hundred they just pop.
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Re:Ways to cope? (Score:1)
If a diet is too high on anti-oxidants, our bodies will stop creating their own. So, one has to be careful when it comes to this.
Either way, if someone wants to change their anti-oxidant diet, now they have the Super Vitamin E [betterhumans.com] which is rather neat.
Irony in action (Score:2, Redundant)
I knew It! (Score:5, Funny)
Dihydrogen Monoxide [dhmo.org]: It really is the invisible killer [circus.com].
Scientific Urban Legend (Score:5, Informative)
The jump to link this observed creation of ozone with the popularly held belief that power lines adversely affect health is erroneous.
In the original study which created the popular myth that power lines cause illness, the authors correctly found a correlation between living in the proximity of power lines and leukemia rates but never found causation. After much debate it was revealed years later that traffic density has an even greater correlation with the observed leukemia rates and provides a well understood and now obvious causation -- pollution [enn.com]. It just happens that power lines exist in areas of greater traffic density. Unfortunately, the general public was never copied on the second corrected paper and to this day believe that power lines have adverse health effects, when they instead should be worried about pollution from traffic.
Although the article states that the creation of ozone around power lines could be a health risk, the quantity of ozone created for various transmission structures is never quantified and nor compared with ambient urban polution. Thus at worst it is yet another vehicle for the propagation of a scientific urban legend or at best a warning to shut of indoor air ionizers whose output of ozone can lead to concentrations in excess those present of ambient pollution levels.
Michael. [michael-forman.com]
Then maybe you need to read up on some(+) (Score:4, Interesting)
I speak from doing a bunch of research on this problem, after finding out that Electromagnetic radiation was one of the seven possible causes for the cancer that I survived.
The electromagnetic field (EMF) is not harmful IN AND OF ITSELF. In conjunction with how the body works, some people are subject to some of it's effects. To whit: An EMF field will cause already existing cancer cells to grow faster than normal. Of itself, this is not fatal, as you have to have the cells in the body to start with.
Some schools think that the body causes cancer cells to grow all the time. The body's immune system then kills off the bad cells while leaving the good ones alone. In the presence of an EMF field, the body has to work harder, and once it loses the battle, the cancer will grow out of control.
As I found out, the transition out of such a field to the hospital for a week made me feel better, and when I re-entered the field for a while, I felt worse. The best decision that we apparently made for that time was to permanently remove me from the field, though we didn't know it was even there at the time (in hindsite, we recognized the source of the EMF)
Re:Then maybe you need to read up on some(+) (Score:3, Insightful)
There was an article on this(+) (Score:2, Interesting)
The danger level is achieving 1 Telsa in the body. Now power lines may not reach that level (the EMF strength is reduced as the square of the distance after all), but things like electrical power meter boxes DO reach that kind of strength for a radius of 2-3 feet, and I was sleeping in such a
Re:There was an article on this(+) (Score:4, Informative)
Where on earth did you live that you were subjected to an EMF field of 25 Tesla?! A typical MRI machine only generates a magnetic field of about 1 Tesla (see, for example, this link [university...maging.com]), and high magnetic field laboratories only achieve magnetic fields on the order of 10 Tesla with specially designed electromagnets powered by very high currents with lots of cooling (see, for example, this link [mit.edu]) and only within small (maybe a cubic foot) volumes. I do hope that you can provide a citation to this article which claims causation between EMF and cancer, because I am only aware of studies claiming correlation between the two.
You misread what I said(+) (Score:1)
Mistyped the 25 Telsa. More like 2.5 Telsa is probable, though the apartment complex in question is not ameniable to the electric company measuring the spot in question (afraid of a lawsuit I guess). Based upon an electric company measurement, a electric meter box will general a 1 telsa field thru a stone wall (on the other sid
Re:You misread what I said(+) (Score:4, Informative)
A 1T field will cause a hammer to stick to it almost a meter away, and walking near it with metal-toed boots will make you feel lighter. It will also erase credit cards, etc. 2.5T is an absolutely massive magnetic field. You can generally only get it with superconducting magnets, because you need a completely throbbing amount of current in a toroid.
I highly think your numbers are really really wrong. By that argument, a compass would still point towards an electric meter box from well more than 10 feet away! (If it's just the static field from a net current, it'd be an absolutely huge distance away : 2 miles! The static field from a net current drops as 1/D, not 1/D^3).
It should also be noted that magnetic induction is vector, not scalar: it doesn't add simply. Likely if you had several in a room, you could get any combination of all of the fields, including zero.
I would believe 2.5 mT, not 2.5 T. Even that's still a huge field. 1 A, at 1 meter, will give you about 1 milligauss. At 1 foot, then, it'd be *3* milligauss, or so. Maybe 9 if it's a bunch of conductors. Say 10 milligauss.
You'd then have to have 1 million amperes of current to generate 1 T.
Check those numbers again.
Re:You misread what I said(+) (Score:2)
On the bright side I get a 622 Mbps broadband [google.com] hookup for free and my kitchen [tsl.uu.se] can make a bag of microwave popcorn in 0.97 seconds (it tends to scorch if you leave it for a full second).
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Re:You misread what I said(+) (Score:2)
Re:You misread what I said(+) (Score:2)
Re:There was an article on this(+) (Score:2)
Good LORD, man! One Tesla is 10 kilogauss. Something like 20,000 times the Earth's field.
That's not "magnetic field of a power line" that's a big fucking electromagnet. You're talking about the field strength of a high-intensity MRI.
Like this. [university...maging.com]
Man, you need to talk to a therapist. Cancer happens some times. It
s not your fault. It wasn't the power company's fault. Get on with your life.
Here is your cite(+) (Score:1)
As for the numbers, I was doing that from memory, but the report from the electric company was in with the same file when I found it. The IEEE article suggests problems from 1Ut on up. At the meter box on the other side of the wall, approx 5G up to 46.4G was measured (note, not mg, which is use
Re:Here is your cite(+) (Score:2)
In any case, though, you need to read more of the literature: the epidemiology really doesn't work out.
I'm not sure what you mean by "1UT" -- I'm guessing you mean "one microTesla", but in that case you're talking about three orders of magnitude less than the Earth's field, which also is a little questionable -- seeing as you can get that kind of field swinging a kids' horseshoe magnet in the next room.
Honest
Re:You still didn't read what I said (Score:3)
The article cites the danger level as 1 U T where the u is a fancy symbolic one - probably your micro telsa.
Move off planet, then . 1 uT is 1E-6 tesla which is 0.01 gauss.
The Earth's magnetic field is 0.5 gauss. That's 50 uT. A bar magnet is a couple of gauss.
For crying out loud, I'd bet that a human's brain generates a few uT!
For some people this is a health problem.
If this were true, cancer patients would be wearing mu-metal clothing. It isn't. It's a crock. If they're claiming 1 uT is a proble
Re:Here is your cite(+) (Score:2)
The quote about making cancer cells grow faster is on page 18. As I said earlier, it DOES NOT say that EMF CAUSES cancer, mearly that it makes it grow faster.
Cancerous cells occur in our bodies all the time. It is a natural result of cell division gone wrong. Many of them self destruct, others are destroyed by our immune systems. When someone 'has cancer' what we really mean is that the cancerous cells are multiplying faster than their immune system can destroy them.
Naturally, anything that makes canc
Re:Scientific Urban Legend (Score:2)
Heh. Talk about a rock and a hard place.
Either your product doesn't [go.com] do anything at all [consumersearch.com] or it causes cancer, or maybe just other health [mit.edu] risks [consumersearch.com] (hint - read "The Buzz").
Note that the product in question hasn't bothered with getting any independant certification of claims (by, oh say, AHAM [cadr.org]) and is currently suing Consumer Reports over alleged improper testing
Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Planck's constant (Score:2, Informative)
There is very little interaction between chemical processes and power lines that are 20 meters away. That's because of Planck's constant: 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/s. When you multiply normal events by a number that has a decimal point and 34 zeroes, the result is tiny.
Notice this paragraph in the article: "Goheen also cautioned that the rats had to be placed much closer to the electrical device than would be the case for most people and their ion air generators."
Someone who was able to show that ther
Re:Planck's constant (Score:2)
Please explain how Planck's constant has any connection to this. First, there is no reason to quantize anything at a distance of 20 meters, and therefore one should not expect Planck's constant to enter the picture. Second, classical electro
Re:Planck's constant (Score:2)
Re:Planck's constant (Score:3, Informative)
epsilon sub zero = 8.8542 x 10^-12 C^2 N^-1 m^-2 (Columb's squared over newtons * meters squared)
Re:Planck's constant (Score:2)
I think a better number to use might be the 1.984 x 10^3 oz/Keg Beer's constant. (BAC above zero) BAC above zero = 1.39x10^-1 kg ml^-1 (CH3CH2OH ml / bodymass kg)
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I knew Slashdot was harmful. (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone know where I can get some clouroflourocarbons for lunch?
Re:I knew Slashdot was harmful. (Score:2)
You can only get clouroflourocarbons at these five websites. [google.com]
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water in our bodies may be responsible (Score:4, Insightful)
So, if I cut my jugular vein, why do I die? Is it because of the knifet? No, it is because my heart pumps the blood out of me. The heart is to blame.
Re:water in our bodies may be responsible (Score:1)
"It's not the bullet that kills you - it's the hole." (Laurie Anderson)
Re:water in our bodies may be responsible (Score:2)
A magnetic field is not radiation by any stretch of the word. Really, you need to learn more before you post.
Anyway, blame not the AC, blame the mods on crack.
Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you
Re:Excellent! (Score:2)
Failure to Publish Negative Results (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes one wonder how often this happens? How much more would we know if negative results weren't suppressed?
Re:Failure to Publish Negative Results (Score:2)
Re:Failure to Publish Negative Results (Score:2)
Perhaps the place to put such a study if you happen to find one is the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis [jasnh.com] (that is, the statement of the ordinary which an experiment attempts to show is significantly less likely than an alternative hypothesis.)
I love the JASNH, even though it doesn't publish very frequently. They publish such varied and wonderful experiments as the one in which 'females showed overall preferences [jasnh.com] for strong mates, as well as for mates who were 7.7" taller and 44.5 pound
Unpublished study? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowhere in the text did it say who did that study and whether it had review of any sort. They continued this silliness... First Dumb question: How large were the rats and how much space did they take up in cage with the ionized air? Ok, I know it wasn't that much space, but don't ignore the effect.
Second dumb question: they're writing a research paper about three rats? Did they mention controls?
Third dumb question: How do KiloVolts relate to Ozone production? Shouldn't current also be a part of this?
Ok, Now I have to ask the question I've been asking for a long time while reading so much research of this sort: Who reviews this stuff? Why do we let these jokers get away with publishing such irrelevant twaddle in the guise of honest research? I've seen better high school science fair projects. These folks ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Re:Unpublished study? (Score:2)
This one at least is a dumb question, or at least one I can answer. It's the voltage that creates ionisation and thus ozone, current is irrelevant:
high voltage = strong electric field
strong electric field => electrons get stripped off atoms and molecules ('ionisation')
oxygen ions react with O2 => ozone production.
Creation of ions does result in an electric current (since electrons and
Re:Unpublished study? (Score:2)
No. What you're talking about here is basic Ohm's law. You can of course say that the current is a "consequence", but it's not, really. The only thing that will generate ozone is a coronal discharge, which is caused by current flowing and creating a low-resistance ionization path.
I can put 10 kV across air and not get a whit of ozone production. Just rub a balloon. Poof, 10 kV, and until you touch something grounded, that's 10
Re:Unpublished study? (Score:2)
Take your balloon at 10kV, floating in the air. How long does it stay charged? forever? of course not. The charge (and voltage) dissipates within a few minutes, generating ions and ozone as a result. Sure you're not going to get much ozone from a
Re:Unpublished study? (Score:2)
Look inside a monitor while it comes on. Sparks all over the place. 10 kV electron guns tend to do that. Coronal discharges. Small, yes, but lots of them.
or a laser printer when you turn it on?
Coronal discharges again. From the static buildup on the drum.
But as someone who understands Ohm's law, you surely realise that - since the relevant 'resistance' is a property of the atmosphere - current is entirely determined by the voltage.
No, it's not. It's set
Re:Unpublished study? (Score:2)
I think you're failing to get the basic point. Our electric supply is 220V or 110V or
Re:Unpublished study? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're failing to get the basic point. Our electric supply is 220V or 110V or whatever. High tension cables are 10kV or whatever. Batteries are 1.5V or 3V, not 5A. In almost all electrical circuits, we control the voltage first, and then vary the current by adjusting load. If I'm living under a high-voltage cable, I wouldn't write to the electricity company and say "please reduce your current", because that depends on what consumers are using. But I could say "please reduce your voltage"
No. The o
Re:Unpublished study? (Score:2)
How did they measure the ozone in the cage? Since they're using strictly Voltage measurements, how do they know how much ozone should have been present?
Is this measurement truly independent of the presence of the rat? I read a claim that the conductive moisture present in the rat's body causes the Ozone: How do they know that? Did they also insert a dead, dessicated rat?
I still don't understand how an experiment like this has controls of any sort.
"In the presence of god" (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently people feel very strange while exposed, and many describe feeling "in the presence of god".
Are these machines a health risk?
Re:"In the presence of god" (Score:2)
Re:"In the presence of god" (Score:2)
Yes - that's the sort of thing. Always fancied trying it myself.
Re:"In the presence of god" (Score:1)
Apparently people feel very strange while exposed, and many describe feeling "in the presence of god".
Are these machines a health risk?
No. Putting your head in a device which creates very strong magnetic fields and makes you feel funny is perfectly fine.
Another procedure that is a good idea is a lobotomy.
Re:"In the presence of god" (Score:1)
electric field != magnetic field
Re:"In the presence of god" (Score:1)
Wow, thanks for that insightful reply. Since you seem to be the expert, let me ask you another one: Does Water = Air?
fix the hole (Score:1)
now we can build a giant machine to fix the hole in the ozone!
wait, they did that in the second Highlander movie and it caused other problems.
maybe not.
Bullshit (Score:2)
First, it attempts to justify something which has not been shown to be true, namely that living near HV power lines is harmful. Every properly-conducted study that studied rates of disease has come out inconclusive.
Second, this experiment studied effects of CORONA DISCHARGES (translation: HUGE SPARKS). If HV power lines produce corona discharges, they need to be immediately repaired. They do not do that normally.
Please keep these two facts in mind when conside
Magnetic vs. electric fields (Score:4, Interesting)
If ozone is the problem and it is generated by the electric field, then most of the studies done so far are irrelevant because they never measured electric field strengths. This will be rather difficult to study, as the lungs are most susceptible to ozone, and contributions to lung problems from smoking and air pollution will have to be subtracted. Smoking correlates with poverty level, and poverty level and the proximity of major roadways correlate well with each other and with the placement of high-voltage lines. It's going to be a huge statistical mess.
Note that I'm not worried enough to step away from the computer....
When google ads don't work (Score:2)
Where's the semantic web when you need it?
How does this reaction work? (Score:1)
But what I totally miss here is a reaction mechanism or any other explanation. The usual link between HV and ozone comes from oxygen in air being ionized and then forming ozone.
However, I have never heard of such phenomenon occurring in (liquid) water - nor can I (being a M Sc. in chemistry) think of any probable (or even improbable) explanation. Perhaps any of the readers here can provide some insight?
Re:How does this reaction work? (Score:2)
ozone? (Score:1)
They found that rats' bodies produced high levels of ozone when exposed to strong electrical fields.
I'm sure they emitted more than ozone when they first came in contact with the strong electrical fields. :-)
Some vs. Too Much (Score:5, Informative)
There is an optimum level of hyperoxides in the mammilian system. Too much and you get toxic damage and cell death. Too little and you get infections. This is the chemical portion of your immune system. You have an endocrine process for keeping it at the proper level. Your cells produce superoxide dismutase to rid themselves of excess hyperoxides (primarily hydrogen peroxide, H2O2). Things that suppress superoxide dismutase riase the amount of superoxides in your body and help fight infections. Up to a point.
Now, are anti-oxidants good for you? Only if you don't take too much, otherwise you weaken your immune system. Are hyperoxides (ozone, H202) good for you? Only up to a point, otherwise you fry your cells with oxidative stress. Then again, in some cases this isn't a bad thing. Cancer, which is cell reproduction and metabolism run wild, lives on anaerobic processes. Excess oxygen, particularly as hyperoxides, can kill it.
All of this is based on the work of Otto Warburg. He won the Nobel in medicine twice for this stuff. Its usefullness as well as its theoretical implications (which bear directly on the lack of understanding as to why this experiment would be significant if it holds up) are pretty much ignored these days, and that's a damn shame.
We're mostly equally ignorant of the finer implications of water in biological systems, ushc as the role of polymerized water at cell membranes. Two of the most important factors in life and we're terribly ignorant about both, making work such as this article fairly impossible for us to understand.
Not to be too down on the slashdotters in particular, it's pretty obvious if the researchers knew of Warburg's work, they were ignoring it. The government usually does. They'd prefer people not be too aware that air or water treated by exposure to UV rays can prevent or cure some illnesses. Up to a point. But up to that point, that's some other medicines people wouldn't have to buy.
Our bodies are collections of systems (Score:3, Informative)
We tend to forget that the body is a collection of systems and messing with any of these systems can have a positive or negative effect. It's an mechanical system so applying too much pressure in the wrong area can break that part (stress the muscles, tear ligaments, break at a joint, etc). It's a chemical system and dumping too much (or having too little) of chemicals (drugs, minerals, etc) can wreak havoc on that system. It has an electrical system and only stands to reason that exposing it to large amounts of electromagnetic ratiation (or even direct electrical stimuli) will have some sort of effect on us. I think as people we tend to forget just how complex the body is.
Ozone is toxic; film at eleven (Score:2)
Known fact: Electrical equipment operating in air may produce ozone if there are electrical discharges. Most Slashdotters have probably smelled ozone in the vicinity of electrical arcs. (This may also be accompanied by the release of magic smoke.)
Known fact: Ozone is toxic at high concentrations. It is an irritant to the lungs, and it has been identified as a serious ground level pollutant in many cities.
Known fact: Those negative ion air fresheners contain high voltage co
Re:the article is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
So, perhaps you should read a bit closer.
Re:the article is wrong (Score:2)
Re:Dangers of strong magnetic field (Score:2)
Re:Dangers of strong magnetic field (Score:2)
Re:Water is responsible? (Score:2)
it's NOT really saying _that_.
it's saying it produces ozone.. which is harmful.
However if it's any 'scarier' than the crap from cigs or the crap from cars or the crap from the blade of the murderous villain is purely subjective..
Re:Water is responsible? (Score:2)
Re:Water is responsible? (Score:1)
RTFA. (As should I
Re:Water is responsible? (Score:2)
Re:Water is responsible? (Score:3, Informative)
Water vibrations heat the food.
This is true as much as saying that Jews were killed in WWII. It is not wrong, but it is faaaar from complete.
Fact is any molecule with polarity (including H2O) will be subject to molecular vibration. The nature of the vibration is the molecule moving in alignment with the magnetic feild. In essence, I make a wave in a pool, and the water molecules move as I directed. This makes the molecules rub together, creating friction.
2.4 Ghz has nothing to do wit
Re:Water is responsible? (Score:2)
The Microwave Foundry [c2i.net]
But the answer is no. A blob will not arc. THe problem is keeping the inside from melting.
Re:Water is responsible? (Score:2)
Re:Here that buzzing? (Score:2)
The buzzing sound from a transformer is generated mechanically from the transformer parts vibrating like a loudspeaker. They don't have to vibrate much to create an audible hum.
As for not being evolved to handle those environments, lightning has been around for much longer than humans have.