Whats the relationship about using cell phones and brain cancer? How do electromagnetic waves have to do with it?
I’m currently working on a project to investigate mobile phone safety. There is a lot of information floating around on this subject, but most of it is unsupported by reliable evidence. Mobiles simply haven’t been around long enough for the evidence to be collected. Any information anyone can provide me with would be gratefully received…
This all started with the simple observation that people who live near power lines don’t live as long (on average) as those who don’t. One of the theories was that electric fields are somehow bad for you, and this brought about a natural extension from 60 Hz power line fields to much higher frequencies like the RF energy generated by cell phones. The common person has very little understanding of electromagnetics and such, and thus is very easily convinced or at least overwhelmed by a bunch of technical mumbo-jumbo. For a while, a lot of people were making quite a bit of money with hand held field strength meters and a little bit of techno doublespeak.
The basic theory was that energy (from the power lines or cell phones, or microwave ovens, or whatever device was being considered) broke down molecular structures in the human body, causing cancer cells to be formed. It’s a great theory, if you assume that RF electromagnetic radiation (aka radio waves) has the same properties as the type of radiation given off by nukes and such, but this isn’t true.
A lot of research was done to try and clear up this mass of confusion. As a previous poster discovered, despite a lot of research, there isn’t any hard evidence that RF energy really does you any harm, at least not at the levels generated by cell phones. If you go up a bit higher in energy levels you can get a nasty RF burn, since this is basically how a microwave oven cooks food (a microwave oven is just a big radio wave generator called a magnetron connected to a little box to keep all of the radio waves inside).
So, after tons of research, the only thing we can safely conclude is that people who live near high voltage power lines really don’t live as long as people who don’t, and we still really don’t know why. Back in the 80’s when I was getting my electrical engineering degree, this was starting to become a very hot topic. One of my college professors liked to point out that it could simply be that people who live healthy lifestyles choose not to live next to big power lines.
Personally, I think that if there was a definate cause and effect thing going on here that someone would have discovered it by now.
By the way, just to put it all in perspective, since you are likely reading this on a computer monitor right now, you are being blasted in the face with radiation from your computer monitor that has a lot more evidence of being dangerous than the RF generated by cell phones.
The relationship is that a woman in Florida developed brain cancer, and after she died, her husband attributed it to her talking on the cell phone. This somehow made big news at the time. That’s pretty much it for the evidence.
The reason that’s not plausible is that microwave frequencies from a cell phone are non-ionizing, meaning that they can’t break chemical bonds, therefore can’t damage cell DNA. Any effects of microwaves are simply due to heating the tissue, and the power from a cell phone is way, way too low to heat you up appreciably. You get lots more heat from just holding the warm cell phone to the side of your head, and orders of magnitude more power from a hair dryer.
So… shall I sell my Motorola and Nokia stock?
even thermal microwave effects can be nasty in the wrong place
www.reach.net/~scherer/p/biofx.htm
some links to possibly adverse microwave damage in humans (biased group but cites may be plausible)
http://www.c-a-r-e.org/tower2.html (bottom of page)
another list of cites of physiological changes to lab animal mainly
http://www.wave-guide.org/library/studies.html
note that the mechanism may be more subtle than simply ionising or heating. The jury is still out
The jury will be out perpetually. It’s impossible to prove something is absolutely safe. But people have been trying to come up with ways that EMFs might affect cancer for several years, and they just don’t have any good hypotheses.
Fortunately, this scare seems to be dying down now.
i assume to make up a conclusion we should have statistical data backing up, but those things take time to collect.
What do we do until then (and WHEN is that then, 5, 10, 20 years? btw)? Do we just keep on using them as usual?
Despite the lack of data, should we be aware of “potential” problems and get our on precautions?
Considering the sheer amount of radio and microwave traffic in the world around us, It’s a safe bet that our bodies are being constantly penetrated by all kinds of radiation, from computer monitors to aircraft radar to CBS News. I doubt that the tiny transmitter on a cell phone really adds all that much to the microwave soup we already live in.
The difference is that the output is concentrated right on your head. I would imagine the others would not be as great in comparison as they originate from far way. Remember, the energy drops away dramatically the distance from the source (inverse cube dependance?). Also, microwave radiation is much more energetic than radio waves
Here’s an article about the Danish study published last year about the relationship between cancer and cell phone usage.
Ah, but I’m talking about sheer amounts here. Would it make a difference if somebody was shooting you with a squirtgun if you’re already at the bottom of a lake?
I’ve been reading that one of the most doubtful (and perhaps perolous) thing is that while you speak you keep moving and that deppending on where the antenna would be, the electromagnetic waves could go thru your head and cross the brain
That sure scares you a bit, doesnt it?
Cell phones do not somehow form a straight line between themselves and the nearest tower then broadcast along those lines. The antennas radiate in a fairly uniform pattern, which means that the RF (radio frequency, aka microwave) energy goes through your brain no matter which way you move.
The next time you are outside, look up towards that big bright gas ball in the sky (aka the sun). Now, picture bizillions of particles coming from it, smashing through your brain and the rest of your body.
Every time you walk into a grocery store, a little radar unit blasts you with RF and listens to the reflected signal to open the door. Look up. It’s the little box on top of the door.
Back in the early days of radio, people thought that the noise in radio sets was due mostly to crude electronics. As they made better and better electronics, they soon got to a point where the noise didn’t keep getting less and less. They eventually came to realize that the entire universe is blasting us with electromagnetic radiation, now called background radiation or background noise. You’ve got stuff whizzing through your brain all day and all night, no matter where you go or what you do.
Now are you scared?
scm101 - it’s the inverse square law. You were close. Draw a square 1 foot away from the source. Now draw lines connecting the source to each corner of the square. Go 2 feet out, and make a square connecting to those lines. The square is twice as tall and twice as wide as the square one foot away, and therefore has 4 times the area. If you’ve got the same amount of stuff spread around 4 times the area, you’ve got 1/4th the level at any point in that area. At 3 feet out, the square is 3x3. At N feet out, the area is NxN, so the intensity is 1/N(squared).
ok, enough fun with math. Anyone still awake can continue on to the next post.
By the way, microwave energy is not more energetic than radio energy. Microwave energy IS radio energy. It’s the same thing. Cell phones are typically somewhere around 0.9 GHz. Digital cell phones are about 2 GHz. My microwave oven is 2.4 GHz. Police RADAR is 10 and 30 GHz. Cordless phones are somewhere around 0.5, 0.9, and 2.4 GHz. FM radio is around 0.1 GHz. This is in the US, and the exact frequencies used are regulated by the FCC (you can probably get the allocations from their web site). Elsewhere in the world, frequencies will vary slightly.
Yes, it’s exactly the same type of energy that your cell phone uses that is also used to cook food in your kitchen. Cell phones don’t put out anywhere near enough energy to cook your brain though.
Are you telling me Microwaves and Electromagnetic cause more or less the same damage?
BTW, is it true you shall not eat on the same plate you’ve microwaved since microwave remaints linger on the dish?
kokomo, microwaves are one portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. AM radio is on the lower end at about one million cycles per second (1 MHz), garage door openers and radio-controlled electronics are above that from around 20 to 80 MHz, FM radio is around 100 MHz, TV broadcast is split partially below FM and partially above it, going up to a few hundred MHz. Cell phones are above that at around 800-900 MHz (PCS uses 1900 MHz). The frequencies above 1000 MHz are generally referred to as microwaves. Microwave ovens are around 2500 MHz, radars go up to 40,000 MHz (or 40 GHz), and there’s not much above that due to the fact that we haven’t figured out how to generate and distribute the signals up there effectively yet. So there’s a big gap up until you get to the really high frequencies of IR, visible, and UV light, around 100,000,000 MHz (or 100 THz). Above this are x-rays, cosmic rays, etc.
The waves at those really high frequencies can actually break chemical bonds between atoms, therefore they’re termed ionizing radiation, and are what can cause DNA damage.
Microwave ovens heat stuff up because the waves push and pull on the molecules (especially water molecules), causing them to jiggle around. Molecular movement like this is what we describe as heat. But they’re nowhere near strong enough to actually rip the atoms within a molecule apart.
A slight nitpick - the noise that pervades terrestrial communications is thermal noise due to the energy radiated by any material just due to its heat. The atmosphere is warm, so it radiates energy that’s proportional to its temperature and the bandwidth you’re measuring in. The scaling factor is called Boltzman’s Constant (the “k” in P=kTB).
The background radiation (or cosmic background) is thermal noise left over from the big bang, and is at a power level way below terrestrial thermal noise. Terrestrial noise is at an effective temperature of around 196 Kelvin. The cosmic background is around 4 Kelvin. Its discoverers won the physics Nobel for it.
So, is it safe to say then, that Cell phones do NOT have enough power to kill DNA.
But… what about the rest of the cells?
Slight tangent… Killer Cell Phone
The rest of the CELL i mean…:eek:
What would happen to the rest of the cell…