

AM Radio Waves May Be Harmful? 548
Klar writes "Wired News reports that: 'Korean scientists have found that regions near AM radio-broadcasting towers had 70 percent more leukemia deaths than those without.' The article continues: 'The study, to be published in an upcoming issue of the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, also found that cancer deaths were 29 percent higher near such transmitters.' While 'their study did not prove a direct link between cancer and the transmitters', the FDA and the World Health Organization are urging more studies, especially of radio waves from cell phones."
Incomplete testing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Interesting)
ROFL
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:2)
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:2, Interesting)
Or the ever dangerous hydrogen hydroxide, which is corrosive and excessive amounts in the lungs may cause breathing dificulties and even death.
We keep several crystals in a freezer, but don't know why as nobody ever seems to need them and they sublimate into the air, which is quite worrying.
A week or two back I posted on a different topic about the broadcasting power which once was used for AM/MW broadcast in the USA, exceeding in some cases 300,000 watts. The radiant energy, picked
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Interesting)
"I can put a spare bulb in my hand
And light up my yard"
The idea behind the song is from a news report about that, and how Ed realized that they were talking about his neighborhood. Yeah yeah, offtopic, whatever.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Interesting)
First it was microwave towers, then power lines, then cell phones.
And every time, the National Academy of Sciences found NOTHING to warrant the claim of a causal link between elecromagnetics OF ANY FORM and cancer.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes the NAS's report so much better than Koreas? Are the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health not peer reviewed or something?
I hope you're not making the mistake of conflating a big name at the top of the paper with its validity. Science is about being open to new ideas, let's not slam the paper on the grounds of dogma without at least reviewing what it has to say.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an important point that is no emphsized. What are the other things other than radio waves associated with AM towers? And, can they cause cancer? Assuming the correlation panned out, correlation with AM towers does not equal causation by radio waves.
This part of the article struck a cord:
Moreover, many lab studies show low-frequency EMF disrupt living cells, Milham asserts.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Informative)
and somewhere in there was police officers' higher incidence of testicular cancer in those who claimed to use their crotch as a radar gun holster.
my guess is impaired circulation, but hey....
Get it over with (Score:5, Interesting)
"If it is or uses either Electricy or a Chemical, and/or its not found in nature in any way, it will kill you slowly"
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually,
about 7 years ago they found that the salmon were no longer spawnng because of fishing in Greenland where the most hearty and mature of the salmon go for the winter. Over fishing of these stock left only weaklings for the fems to mate with. You may make fun of it as alarmist, but the numbers dont lie. The drop from 1.5 million to half a million migrating salmon was enough to convince Greenland to stop salmon fishing altogether. at that time only 100,000 salmon were actually laying eggs. Very funny eh?
Now they have found that the salmon spawns are now increasing in level and things may stabilize. That is, if Global Warming doesnt stop them.
Your comment about warming indicates your age, your lack of historical knowledge, and lack of general education on the environment. Warming has been a public concern since the 50s when the first effects were felt, and when people started realizing the huge effects humans and their chemicals can have on the environment through books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which concerns the pesticide DDT.
But it has been on people's minds since the 1800s when entire cities would be choking to death on the thick black clouds of smoke that hung in the air, the temperature up several degrees due to the insulation of sunlight. You think L.A. is bad? You should read about the factory towns of the Industrial Revolution. but I have a feeling you dont do much reading anyway..
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Interesting)
Your comment about warming indicates your age, your lack of historical knowledge, and lack of general education on the environment. Warming has been a public concern since the 50s when the first effects were felt, and when people started realizing the huge effects humans and their chemicals can have on the environment through books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which concerns the pesticide DDT.
Rachel Carson and that damn book will
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Informative)
DDT does get used in Africa, but only after people had to pretty much beg for exceptions to the ban on using it. If they had been able to use it earlier millions of lives could have been saved. But the tree huggers don't care about that, do they?
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The sky is falling, we're doomed
2) There is no way anything I find useful could be harmful
How about a little balance, folks. There are plenty of times throughout history where something in widespread use was later found to be more dangerous than it was worth. Asbestos and DDT come to mind. Hell, some of the early scientists who worked with radioactive materials thought it was neat that they could warm their hands over it.
The world is not doomed. Neither is the world a safe place. I hope they continue the research, take any findings with healthy skepticism, and then implement appropriate measures to improve our quality of life.
An unrelated example: brain disease has tripled in the past two decades in most developed countries. But not in Japan. Aren't you curious as to why? Or would you rather stick your head in the sand and proudly proclaim everyone who is curious to be an alarmist?
Cheers.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Informative)
3. "But think of the children"
I actually worked with a group doing mobile phone testing. We found that the radio waves penetrated very deeply into the skulls of children 12 years and younger. At the time it wasn't a problem because there were very few kids of this age with mobiles.
As to whether it caused damage or not... no idea. We just did the physics.
you forgot the biggy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Insightful)
When I look around and see the sheer quantity of radiation that we're being bombarded with from mobile phones, mobile phone masts, power lines, terrestrial TV, digital TV, WiFi networks etc. plus the amount of carcinogens in exhaust fumes all around us it makes me wonder if it all adds up in some way that we're not yet aware of and if there's some connection with the number of people getting cancer. I fear that one day someone will do a study that will take into account ALL radiation sources and find that we've gotten a little carried away with the old spectrum.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Insightful)
Cell phone signal: 4 W.
Stepping outside under full sun: 1000 W.
We are exposed to far greater amounts of EM radiation from the sun, in all sorts of unfilitered frequencies. And we have been since before man really groked that it rose every day and set every night.
I might also add that radio operators have been using very high powered equipment for more than a century. There is only one nasty effect from working around microwaves: male sterility if you are dumb enough to stand in front of a microwave tower to keep warm. And the problem there isn't the EM radiation. It's the fact that male testes don't like heat.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder about some of the same things as the parent mentions (although you have to be careful comparing to the sun, as a lot of that energy is in different regions of the spectrum).
If the EM radiation is bad at these low frequencies, what about the radio operators, or even worse, various scientists that are exposed to extremely high levels of the stuff? A lot of the equipment around various labs probably produces orders of magnitude stronger low-energy EM radiation. I don't hear too much of there being
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Insightful)
To make a long story short: any link is statistically insignifigant. What elevated cancer risks were found couldn't rule out other causes from chemicals, lifestyles, or location.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Informative)
A handheld cellular phone emits a maximum of 600mW, but rarely does so in an urban setting. (Remotely mounted antennas are allowed to transmit up to 3W or 4W.) The power emitted is adjusted based upon the tower's reported reception strength. Not only does this conserve battery power, but it helps reduce congestion in the cell network by keeping your signal from straying into the next cell over.
"But it's RF!" you say. So, what is it that RF does? It induces current, and mostly in a conductor the same length (or fraction of the length) as the wavelength of the signal. Now, the 350mm wavelength emitted by an 850mHz transmitter (300,000,000 m/s / 850,000,000Hz = 0.353 meters, or a half length of 0.167 meters (~6-1/2 inches) is actually pretty close to the width of the average skull, so we can assume that the skull will effectively absorb some of that energy. How much?
Interesting ... A quick trip to Google found an Amateur Radio RF Safety Calculator [utexas.edu] and I entered the following values: 600mW, 2.2dBi gain antenna, 0.1 feet from antenna and 850 mHz, and it tells me that I'm not in the "safe zone" -- I need to be 0.22 feet from the antenna. According to the FCC, the maximum permissible exposure in a controlled area is 2.84 mw/cm^2, but the cell phone is exposing me to 8.5293 mw/cm^2.
I may have to rethink my cell phone usage... :-(
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, however, it's pretty obvious that it's complete alarmist nonsense.
Leukemia and brain tumors are such rare diseases, that any statistic is not going to be representative (I've once read about a study that "proved" that churches cause brain tumors.) Even a single case can skew the whole study into one direction.
Why don't they look at lung cancer? Prostate cancer? Breast cancer? Those are much more common.
Of course I can tell you why: Because with not-so-rare diseases, it all evens out and there is no statistical link between disease and radio emitter any more.
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:4, Insightful)
It turns out that lead, oil, and mercury were far more likely to have been the culprit. Each of those contaninates DID have a profound and immediate effect on the animals tested.
Links [junkscience.com]
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Insightful)
1) The sky is falling, we're doomed
2) There is no way anything I find useful could be harmful
How about a little balance, folks. There are plenty of times throughout history where something in widespread use was later found to be more dangerous than it was worth.
There is a third point of view: the scientific perspective:
1. It is an extraordinary claim that electromagnetic radiation of energy that is too low to damage any biological material
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:4, Funny)
I've decided I really don't want to know any more about Japanese lifestles than that...
Re:Incomplete testing (Score:3, Interesting)
cell phones? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:cell phones? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:cell phones? (Score:2, Informative)
Cheers,
Erick
This is a conspiracy! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is a conspiracy! (Score:4, Funny)
Similarly, FM radio waves cause copyright laws to become more draconian, and the frequencies used for television broadcast have been shown to result in lower SAT scores in nearby areas.
Looks like we were right... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Looks like we were right... (Score:2)
So... does the guy wear it? or does the girl put it... wait, I'm confused.
Re:Looks like we were right... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Looks like we were right... (Score:3, Funny)
Does anyone actually say this? I mean really, this isnt 1952. Who actually feels happy enough to shout out this out when they walk in the door from work. Furthermore.
Wife: Great, lets go out to dinner. Just make sure you take that stupid...
Uhhhh, go out for dinner? Isnt this 1952? Dinner is supposed to be on the table. Bitch.
*SMACK*
Re:Looks like we were right... (Score:4, Funny)
"When standing next to a high power microwave transmitter, the areas of the body with the highest water concentration begin boiling first: the eyes and the testicles"
I don't want to climb those things anymore.
AM Radio (Score:4, Funny)
We liked pop, we liked soul, we liked rock, but we never liked disco
Cancer causing phones? (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't it already a known fact that cell phones cause cancer? Over here (Australia) they are always telling us that.
Wi-Fi? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know what it's doing. (Score:3, Funny)
Cell phones harmful? (Score:4, Insightful)
50,000 watts (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:50,000 watts (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, yeah, you don't deserve insightful, which demands I put on my pedantic hat *and* look like a kook. But seriously, "These are not the bad statistics you're looking for."
How much energy does the sun deliver to say a in^2? Well it's a lot more than a cell phone or most in^2 not actually on radio towers where they're concerned. So the em-radiation probably isn't causing cancer. But it might be affecting the kinetics of cancer cells already present and floating around, helping them decide where to set up shop. But even then that would only apply to transmitters very near people, who were particularly sensitive to their effect through what amounts to bad luck.
In this study they more likely discovered those near radio towers lived in old houses, didn't have a lot of money to spend on taking care of themselves, and close to copious amounts of smog. Wow, I wonder if radio towers cause self-inflicted gunshot wounds too?
Re:50,000 watts (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the power spreads out at a rate proportional to the square of the radius. So, if your brain averages
Re:50,000 watts (Score:4, Informative)
1) Assume a cell phone antenna is 1 inch away from your head.
2) Assume a 50,000 watt AM transmitter
3) Assume a 1 watt cell phone.
4) We know radio energy diminishes from the source outward at 1/r^2.
5) The square root of 50,000 is approx 224.
So, the energy being pumped into your head by your cell phone is roughly equivalent to standing 224 times farther away from the AM transmitter than your cell phone is from your head (which is one inch).
224 inches is around 19 feet. A 1 watt cell phone pumps more energy into your head than standing 20 feet away from a 50,000 watt AM transmitter.
It pumps more energy into your head than standing 27 feet away from a 100,000 watt transmitter.
Good math, messy physics (Score:3, Informative)
In any case, the amount of power the human body absorbs from a 1500kHz AM signal is phenomenally small. The body is small compa
There's at least one Nobel Prize... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see it happen. Personally, I think that if there were a smoking gun here, it would have been found at some point in the last hundred years. There have always been confounding factors in these alarmist studies. Always.
Re:There's at least one Nobel Prize... (Score:2)
Re:There's at least one Nobel Prize... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to agree with you, but a number of studies recently have shown that under these radiation wavelengths, some membranes in the body pass some molecules when they would otherwise block them.
Example here [iinet.net.au].
It turns out it's insufficient to just consider heating effects and ionization effects, since lipid membranes are composed of dipolar molecules which can be subject to other electromagnetic effects.
I doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
There are plenty of such mechanisms. For example, just about any circuit with a nonlinearity (like most biological cells) near a radio station will pick up a small audio frequency signal. Those signals are strong enough to be audible in stereo equipment, telephones, etc. that aren't well shielded. And lo
Re:There's at least one Nobel Prize... (Score:3, Interesting)
Many organisms, humans included, depend on biomineralization. Fergzample, bones are calcium, and which are (obviously) created biologically. Less well known, however, are ferrous crystals, set down by biological organisms. Some rodents have iron crystal structures in their teeth. Some molluscs have magnetite teeth. Many species, including birds and mam
Quick! (Score:3, Funny)
Was there ever any question? (Score:3, Funny)
(And to balance things out, so is Al Frankin IIRC, but I wouldn't compare the two)
Re:Was there ever any question? (Score:2)
Yet they contend cell phones are safe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonetheless, after reading about toxic power supply dust from my computer and now AM radio waves, plus the stresses that are added with an always-on, get-it-right-now environment, one must truly respect the simpler life of a few decades ago.
please explain a mechansim (Score:4, Insightful)
a nobel prize awaits if you figure it out
Re:Cell phone cancer (Score:3, Insightful)
Rick James is dead... (Score:2, Funny)
Oh yeah... and Elvis is dead too. Had nothing to do with peanut butter & bananna sandwiches or drugs... nope... Graceland was just down the hill from a big 'ol King sized radio tower.
Did I mention "King sized"? Since his name came up, Stephen King is still very much alive. But Catherine Zeta Jones and th
Re:Rick James is dead... (Score:2)
"Elvis never did no drugs!"
If you thought AM was bad for you, try XM (Score:2, Funny)
Hrm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus, this study might just be showing that people who live in urban centers have higher a higher rate of certain cancers. Which isn't surprising in the least.
Re:Hrm.. (Score:3, Insightful)
cum hoc ergo propter hoc.
AM Radio Waves Considered Harmful (Score:2)
Another loosey-goosey study (Score:5, Insightful)
There might be something going on, but the cause might be something else entirely: for instance, the best neighborhoods with the best health care tend not to be near radio towers.
To quote last night's Aqua Teen Hunger Force (Score:5, Funny)
Shake: "Yeah, but like, you know, the good kind, right? Like how they find tumors and gave Spider-Man his powers and stuff."
Frylock: "No Shake. The bad kind. The other kind. The kidney losing kind."
Reduce risk by 50%... (Score:4, Funny)
and that tinfoil stops RF waves.
To summarize,
Higher density of RF waves at night
Tinfoil blocks RF waves
Putting these two together, we can conclude that wrapping your body in tinfoil when you sleep at night will reduce your risk of developing RF related complications by >50%:
how does RF cause cancer? (Score:3, Interesting)
sure RF (microwaves) can cook you, but that's an entirely different story. afaik heating tissue does not cause cancer -- one would expect stastically significant increase of cancer in burn victims if that were true.
are there other mechanisms for cancer / leukemia other than dna damage?
no news here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no news here. (Score:4, Funny)
Never mind all that, it *must* be the AM radio. That being said we should look into this but without jumping to any conclusions.
Re:no news here. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not where I live. AM transmitter sites, as you'ld expect of any endevour requiring acres of land, were built outside of urban areas where land was cheap when most were erected 20+ years ago. One of the big issues facing them today is the encroachment of housing developments. Any AM site I've maintainted over the past couple decades are surrounded by middle class and up housing less than 20 years old.
That's not to say I ag
Re:no news here. (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
radio killed....... (Score:5, Funny)
It's true (Score:2, Insightful)
An in respect to the Wi-Fi and cell phone comments, I hate to be a wet blanket, but a cellphone operates at
AM transmitters live in swamps (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't this sound like it might correlate with pollution enough to affect the results???
What's an "AM Radio Wave" (Score:3, Insightful)
And don't overlook this point: Poorer neighboorhoods have things like AM radio towers (and high tension lines) in them. Poorer people live less long than wealthy people. (Not a value judgement; it's the sad truth.) I didn't see much in the FA about correcting for this difference.
Select 200000 people. (Score:2, Insightful)
100,000 live far from AM transmission towers.
17 people who live near AM Transmission tower
get leukemia.
10 people who live far from AM transmission tower get leukemia.
So AM transmission towers cause 70% more cancers?
Don't panic folks. There's probably small sample sizes and correlation may not imply causation.
Sometimes poor, sick people can only afford to live in undesirable places, like next to a AM transmission tower. This doesn't mean that AM transmission ma
Someone pointed this out already... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the population who lives close to AM towers are lower class than those who don't live next to AM towers and as such smoke tobacco more or don't eat salads as much...
Other factors could be contributing after all..
Wi-fi, Bluetooth and cancer (Score:4, Interesting)
just talk radio (Score:3, Funny)
Population Density (Score:3, Insightful)
what part of "needs further study" dont' you get? (Score:4, Insightful)
Realize this: There will never be a study "proving" the ill effects of non-ionizing radiation. Why? Find me a control group. You can't, not on this planet. A hundred years ago, when a five watt radio signal broadcast from New York could be heard in Miami, you might have been able to perform this study then. But now we're inundated with non-ionizing radiation, and unless you build a Faraday cage into about ten thousand homes and collect data over twenty years, you will never get "pure" numbers.
Why are you all so reluctant to even entertain the notion that non-ionizing radiation might create a health risk? Are you that in love with broadcast TV and Radio? Based on the attitudes I see here about the MPAA/RIAA, I find that hard to believe. So what is your explanation? A general love of all things electronic? The chance to pass down the mockery you got from the jocks onto the tree-hugging hippies?
I simplly don't understand the attitude most of you put forward regarding this issue. It's reckless and driven by emotion.
But don't worry, even if a study or three come out demonstrating a link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer risk, the EPA will sweep it under the rug [washingtonpost.com] when Infinity Broadcasting supresses the evidence under the Bush Administration's Data Quality Act.
"What I don't know can't hurt me" is not a particularly effective survival mechanism. Who knows, maybe we should be buying stock in Reynolds this very minute.
Epidemiologist's rule of thumb (Score:5, Interesting)
Epidemiologists use the heuristic that they start paying attention when one group has three or more times the risk of another group.
>maybe we should be buying stock in Reynolds
Smoking is a good example: the risk of lung cancer among smokers is about thirty times higher than among nonsmokers.
>Find me a control group. You can't, not on this planet.
That's what lab studies are for. You can shield one group of rats from RF and microwave a genetically identical group. You can start from conception and have useful results in a year.
>Why are you all so reluctant to even entertain the notion that non-ionizing radiation might create a health risk?
After a hundred years of experience and a zillion negative lab studies skepticism is indicated. I'm willing to be surprised but I don't expect to be.
Re:what part of "needs further study" dont' you ge (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, a study or three demonstrating a statistically significant link between nonionizing radiation and cancer is exactly what I would expect, even in the absence of real harmful effects.
This is epidemiology--hardcore statistics. When determining the risk associated with some factor, you can never be entirely certain that the effects you see are 'real', and not just due to random clustering. Toss a coin ten times--you'd expect to get heads five or so times, but occasionally (1 time in about a thousand) you'll see ten heads in a row.
By making (generally reasonable) assumptions about the nature of the randomness in the data, scientists and epidemiologists tend to come up with one or more measures of how likely an apparent result is to be genuinely significant. Generally, a result is taken to be 'real' if there is less than a 5% chance that the result is the result of noise (a P value of less than 0.05). Alternately, a study may state an odds ratio and 95% confidence interval ("If you take drug foostatin you are 1.7 times more likely to have symptom bar (95% CI 1.4 to 1.95)") denoting that the relative risk is 95% likely to fall in the stated interval.
Under those circumstances, if the scientists do everything correctly, and account for every possible confounding factor, and do all their math correctly...that still leaves as many as one study in every twenty potentially reaching the incorrect conclusion.
The journal in question here--The International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health--isn't exactly a top-flight journal, either. I'm not at work at the moment so I can't check their archives, but their impact factor is fairly low. (Down to 0.924 in 2002 [akademisyen.com], declining steadily since 1997 [unc.edu].) Yes, impact factor is by no means the only criterion by which a journal should be judged--but Nature they are not. Unfortunately, the Wired article refers to an 'upcoming' paper, so I can't get at the publication cited.
Looking at the other paper mentioned in the Wired article demonstrates that Wired can't be trusted to accurately report the findings of scientific papers, either. Wired [wired.com] says:
The abstract of the original paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology says: [oupjournals.org] (in part, emphasis added)
Re:what part of "needs further study" dont' you ge (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, we're talking biochemistry here, so there's really no cause or need to invoke the Incompleteness Theorem.
Further, no--it's not possible to demonstrate every ill health effect. A thought experiment, if you will...
If Wired saw thirteen cases in LA, they'd say that compound Y causes a dramatic (thirty percent!) increase in disease X. If a scientist saw thirteen cases in LA, they'd say that's interesting, but easily attributable to noise.Clearly a jump from 4 to 8 leukemia cases means practically nothing -- statistically. But I don't think it's always good science, esp. when dealing in real-world non-controlled systems with intangible variables, to rely on statistical analysis as the impetus for public policy decisions.
If there is sound evidence (good animal or at least biochemical models) that particular conditions are harmful, then by all means such evidence should be considered. Controlled trials in the laboratory are very useful for sorting out cause and effect. In the absence of demonstrated mechanisms for harm in the lab, epidemiological data are all that we have. If sound statistical analysis reveals a significant correlation--that cannot be reasonably explained by other means or attributed to confounding factors--then it may be a fair basis for policy decisions.
I suppose the problem arises when one asks what constitutes a 'sound' analysis...and in some cases that's a difficult question.
Something they need to check... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem could be something other than the radiation, it could be the nasty chemicals used to keep the plants from taking over the tower.
This has been found to be a problem with powerlines in some cases, it could be part of the problem here as well.
The first thing that comes to mind is not always the real cause of the problem.
Re:Something they need to check... (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the possibilities of runoff and water supply contamination, I'd say that brush clearing chemi
Frequencies? (Score:3, Informative)
For the AM broadcasting, do they mean the broadcast band (which I think for most of the world is in the range
What gives? (Score:3, Insightful)
Light pulsing at certain intervals can give you a fit. Who's to say that certain modulations at certain frequencies can't interact with your bone marrow in some -as yet undiscovered way- that can cause cancer?
It's a little shocking to see so many bright people here with clamped shut minds. Let these guys do their study. I'm sure they know as good as any ego here that "non ionising radiation doesn't cause cancer...blah blah blah". If we all went around not bothering to study things because we already 'knew' better, where the hell would be be today? They've found something, and they're going to study it. And then we'll know a bit more about the possible causes of cancer. Good!
you can die from too much oxygen, too. (Score:4, Insightful)
long-term transmitter engineers, like HV and VHV linemen, tend to have a lot of cancer deaths. but when I grew up around all these guys, they smoked like chimneys and cleaned tools with gasoline as well. they sprayed lots of pesticides. they changed transmitter tubes without wearing masks (beryllium ceramics used in the tubes can cause berylliosis with the tiniest breath of chips or dust.) amazing any of them got to retirement parties.
also, notice how everybody says they need more studies when they publish a study. although "cell phones cause brain cancer, so fscking hang up and drive!" has been screamed from the treetops for 15 or so years, and "power lines cause childhood leukemia" has been around for 30 years, a funny thing happened on the way to publication. the only two large double-blind environmental studies to tackle these issues found no effect at all. none.
the power of microwaves to cook food was discovered in alaska when microwave techs with candy bars in their shirt pockets found after adjusting the dishes that their pockets were full of melted chocolate sludge on a cold tundra work shift. it is well known that directed or exceptionally strong RF fields, such as would be found in the open transmitters of the 20s and 30s or on broadcast towers, will cause cataracts. so there are federal limitations on exposure now in broadcast, and you can't go up a tower while the buzzbox is lit unless it's a pennywhistle station with a few hundred watts.
these are for the folks who are drowned in the beam, whose iPods wouldn't work and who, if equipped with pacemakers, cannot work the transmitter any more.
joe average on the other side of the fence? no problem.
another scare study, get fifty of them with good double-blind methodology and large enough controlled study groups to mean something statistically past four nines, and call me in the morning.
Cell phone antennas should be close to you (Score:3, Interesting)
Because a cell phone is a two-way device. It must transmit stronger to reach a distant antenna and it has no sense of direction. The GSM protocol provides a power control which makes the cell phone reduce power as much as possible, the goal is just enough to reach the closest antenna tower.
Parents demanding that cell phone antennas are removed from the school roof are NOT doing the children a favor.
Re:Not true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not true. (Score:2)
This is why I spend my mod points on Offtopics all over the place for PPSes.
Re:Not true. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not true. (Score:2)