"Rats and mice were exposed to RFR in special
chambers for up to two years, or most of their
natural lives. NTP scientists looked for a range of
cancers and noncancer health effects.
Exposure to RFR began in the womb for rats and at 5-6
weeks old for mice. The RFR exposure was intermittent,
10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling about
9 hours each day. The RFR levels ranged from
1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram of body weight in rats,
and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice.
The chambers were shielded rooms with a
transmitting antenna that radiated RFR fields,
plus rotating stirrers that generated a uniform field.4,5
Pilot studies established field strengths that did not
raise animal body temperatures excessively.6
The rats and mice were exposed to whole body
RFR at frequencies of 900 and 1900 megahertz,
respectively, from two technologies – Code Division
Multiple Access (CDMA) and Global System for
Mobile Communications (GSM).
NTP and RFR experts from the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the IT’IS
Foundation designed and built the chambers
specifically for these studies. "
Also:
"Were there any surprise findings?
NTP found longer lifespans among the exposed
male rats. This may be explained by an observed
decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often
the cause of death in older rats"
I particularly like "...strengths that did not raise animal body temperatures excessively." No sense microwaving the rats to death. For a 70kg person, that exposure (using the rat scale, 105 - 420 watts) for your entire life. Vs a cell phone which has an effective radiated power ERP of about 1 watt[1]. So somewhere between 1% and .25% of the power.
Cell phone signals fall off with the square of the distance so the bulk of the power of a cellphones RF energy that you are exposed to comes from the handset.
[1] "Meanwhile, the total power emitted from the cell phone itself ranges from 0.75 to 1 watt. According to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), this is an acceptably safe amount of power for a cell phone since their cut-off or specific absorption rate is only 1.6 watts per kilogram (W/kg). As a result, the power radiated from a cell phone is considered as non-ionizing as opposed to ionizing." --
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/EbruBek.shtml
Also, 2.5 W/kg in a shielded room is far, far more than 1.6 W/kg exposure. Cell phone radiation, when it even goes through your head, keeps on going right through to the other side[1]. In a shielded room, the radiation bounces off the walls until it's absorbed by the stuff in the room... ie the rats. The absorbed power in humans is microwatts. The rats were absorbing fractions of a watt.
[1]: as evidenced by the fact that cell phones actually work. When you cover them up with your hand, you don't suddenly drop the call.
And a cell phone emits <1 W total, of which tens of millionths or less are absorbed. I was pointing out the difference between W/kg absorption and W/kg emission. These rats were absorbing tens of thousands of times more energy than you would experience holding a phone directly to your head.
Nope- It's a technical elision. An 80 kg man in an open field next to a 80 W transmitter is exposed to 1 W/kg, and absorbs microwatts/kg. Ionizing radiation is treated much more rigorously, and thickness and and frontal area are used to calculate the actual dosage, but for EM sources the wattage/kg is not unusual as a metric. It's useful for nearby transmitters, where exposure is focused on a single part of the body, vs simply being exposed to 80 watts of incident power.
They can't get close enough to you to matter. The way to think of this is to imagine a bubble around each person's phone. Just like a bubble gum bubble, the bigger it gets, the thinner it gets. So if its dark pink when it is emerging from your lips, it is transparent by the time it is 6" in diameter.
The energy of the cell phone transmitter is spread out further and further as you move way, and because the 'bubble' is both taller and wider, each meter (about 3') you step away from the phone, the signal is 1/distance^2 less powerful. So 2 meters away, 1/4 as powerful, three meters, 1/9th etc.
I like the Tokyo subway image, and others have gone to the trouble of computing people densities[1], if you take their number of 7 people per square meter as a good maximum, then 100 people divide into 7 person groups and you get a box that is about 4 meters on a side (12' x 12'). You're only getting 10% of the energy from the phones that are 3 meters away.
Again, the energy falls off with the square of the distance, so unless those hundreds of people have very long arms and decide to press their phone against you...
1 watt corresponds to an in-use phone. Heavy data use. Even a call has much lower power. Unless the phone is actively doing something, the cell pings are very brief and use very little power.
You're discounting the fact that cell phones are more used for data than for talking and data is always being transmitted, especially with apps that run in the background.
Even then, how many people can be within touching distance? 10? 20 if they’re making a real effort? So let’s say 20 within a meter, and let’s say they’re all actively using their cell phones... it’s going to be significantly less than 20 watts, so still nowhere close. If a few hundred people beyond that are using their phones it will add an asymptotically diminishing amount of energy, so you’re never going to come close to the exposure these rodents experienced.
Also, when my phone is in my pocket I'm exposed to 50% of the radiation in one small spot vs. let's say 10% of the antenna's radiation spread across the whole body of the rat. Hopefully they tuned the power in their experiment to account for that.
No, when they talk about watts per kilogram I am pretty sure that they mean these were absorbed. Like they literally built 21 big microwaves, 7 for mice and 14 for rats, and then turned them on: it's no different than your microwave at home, the waves bounce around the walls until they find some water to call home. They're presumably not concerned with any microwaves that escaped the resonator.
>"Were there any surprise findings? NTP found longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats"
The increased lifespan could be at least partially responsible for the increased cancer rates. All populations that see an increase in lifespan see an increase in cancer rates. Cancer seems to be the default prize for living a long life.
Also, the caption on slide 20 for their BioEM2016 Meeting, Ghent, Belgium, June 8, 2016 presentation surprised me a litte. It states that the historical control incidence of malignant gliomas is in the range of 0-8%. This study saw a rate of 0% for its controls. That's not unreasonable but it is interesting. It's also odd that they did not see an indication of a dose response curve for GSM modulation, though admittedly the number of samples is low.
I don't doubt the statistical significance of the evidence presented, but data patterns suggest that it's at least a little possible that there's an issue with their protocol.
>The increased lifespan could be at least partially responsible for the increased cancer rates. All populations that see an increase in lifespan see an increase in cancer rates.
Of course, but wouldn't this be so obvious that the researchers would undoubtedly have accounted for that as a confounding variable? At least I hope so.
> Of course, but wouldn't this be so obvious that the researchers would undoubtedly have accounted for that as a confounding variable? At least I hope so.
Woudln't count on that these days, in general. If something is accounted for, it's usually stated in the paper.
To make sure I understand the energy levels right: 6 watts per kilogram would be roughly like sleeping with a multi-kilowatt radio transmitter running in your bedroom?
Far more than that. It would be about half as bad as literally sleeping inside a microwave oven at full blast. The rats were kept in a shielded room so the microwaves bounce around until they are absorbed. It's no wonder they got cancer.
I do wonder why they got cancer. The industry always told us that non-ionizing radiation is harmless and it’s laughable that it should have ANY effect. So now there’s at least brain and heart tumors, and, strangely, improved kidney function.
Non-ionising radiation does not penetrate deep into the tissues but increases the risk of damage to the skin and eyes. Dependent on the energy and exposure time, non-ionising radiation can cause localised heating, or photochemical reactions can occur with possible permanent harm.
It's not totally harmless. Just orders of magnitude less than ionizing radiation.
I generally agree with you, but not with the "does not penetrate deep into the tissues" part. Non-ionizing radiation includes frequencies like 980nm (near infrared) which penetrates 3 centimeters deep at ~15W: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552256/
Microwaves have wavelengths orders of magnitude longer than infrared light and can penetrate even deeper at the same wattage. It would IMO be VERY iffy to say that the possibility of photons emitted by a cellphone reaching the brain is zero.
I wonder if photobiomodulation is the cause of improved kidney function. PBM leads to nitric oxide release which in turn leads to lower blood pressure (beneficial for kidneys).
Whether the effect was large or small, there is a fundamental scientific question: how does non-ionizing radiation cause cancer? The fact that it can requires better models of how EM waves and biological matter interact.
Yes. It has been known for decades that biological matter resonates at microwave frequencies but we've been told over and over that non-ionizing radiations cannot cause cancer [0]. DNA is an electricly charged dipole that will heat up when exposed to microwaves and that would damage it [1].
There's a lot of water in the way between DNA and any microwave source. Microwaves do not penetrate water very well - part of the reason rain tends to cause problems with microwave links. Also the reason microwave ovens work: by heating the food.
So what is the proposed mechanism by which microwave energy is supposed to heat DNA enough to damage it?
Most of the microwave power does not deeply penetrate something like a whole ham. The microwaves are mostly absorbed by the outer layers and then the heat conducts through the inner portions.
The journal article below contains lots of detail. It claims that microwaves penetrate about 3.8 mm in cooked ham and 9.9 mm in cooked beef.
> The microwaves are mostly absorbed by the
> outer layers and then the heat conducts
> through the inner portions.
Then why does the plate have to be slowly rotated within the oven? I used to believe that it was for the waves peaks (distant from one another by a pair of centimeters) to be able to reach every point of the inside.
But if the inside is heated by conduction, which propagates evenly in all directions, then why care rotating the plate?
Microwave ovens do indeed have hot spots[0]. Conduction doesn't propagate evenly in very many foodstuffs, and you still want to avoid overheating any one spot.
About the only thing that can be reasonably uniformly heated in a microwave at continuous full power is a water-based liquid and that only because of convection.
Put a slab of meat in for a minute at 100% power and it'll be still cold in the center.
I was surprised by the table. Temperature matters way more than I'd expect for water, and it seems ice may in fact be effectively transparent to microwaves? Now I want to fiddle when I get home... it looks an awful lot like you can put a cup of water and a chunk of ice in a microwave and boil the water while the ice is still frozen... (though I'm going to assume that number for ice is pure ice; air bubbles in ice may wreck this up) Experimentation time!
Someone came up with a recipe exploiting the fact that microwaves are absorbed much more readily by fluids than solids. It was a frozen meringue with a hot center. I think it was in Sci Am. The name suggested the reverse of a Baked Alaska.
Sure, when you use hundreds of watts over several minutes.
The decay over distance should be roughly exponential: every x millimeters, you're left with only half of the radiation. Given the radiation caused by a cellphone in your pocket, how many microns of water do you need to attenuate the intensity to a non-mutagenic level?
WiFi typically uses frequencies that resonate with water, which limits its range due to H2O vapor in the atmosphere. These frequencies are used because they're not licensed for other purposes and because this range limitation allows more WiFi to more easily coexist in urban areas.
Would this be bad or good from a (hypothetical) carcinogenic standpoint? Since we are mostly water would this mean our interior below say the first few layers of skin are fairly effectively shielded from WiFi radiation?
> The fact that it can requires better models of how EM waves and biological matter interact.
Can I assume you are making this claim from the study? That they showed "some effect" ? If so, it is important to differentiate by intensity. EM waves are just light, you know red, green, blue etc. And if they are strong enough can give you a burn (sunburn being something everyone has experienced). But we don't get stories of people getting moon burn from the light reflected off the moon. In part because the amount of energy per square meter in moonlight is about 2.3 million times less powerful than sunlight. We are evolved to live in an environment that is flooded with EM energy in a variety of bands.
The study showed that if your cellphone put out 100x the amount of energy it does, there might be a small measurable effect on cancer rates. We know melanoma rates go up if you get a lot of sunburn (which is EM exposure). The energy per square meter in sunlight is 8 orders of magnitude higher than the energy per square meter from a cell phone.
Bottom line, there is still no mechanism, study, or theory, that supports a hypothesis that 1 watt cellphones cause cancer.
It's also possible that it increases cancer rates without causing cancer. Instead, it might be preventing the body from stopping new cancers that otherwise would have been stopped.
The observed cancer rate will be roughly the difference between the rates of cancers that start and cancers that are stopped by either the cell's internal repair mechanism or by the body's mechanisms for finding and killing bad cells. Something that affects the observed rate could be acting on either side of the difference.
It's the same way that DDT caused cancer when it was first used. It's the same way that BPA caused fertility problems for decades, and it's the same way that BPA substitutes look to be causing fertility problems now.
What way is that?
We simply don't understand what's going on, and it's important that we acknowledge that.
Our current scientific model says "we have spent decades and millions of dollars trying to see if cell phones cause cancer, and we have never found a link, therefore cellphones don't cause cancer."
Which is exactly the same as saying "we have spent decades and millions of dollars searching for little green men, and we have never found any, therefore we are 100% they don't exist."
Both of those statements are utter nonsense. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We honestly have no idea if little green men exist somewhere in the universe, and we also have no idea if cell phones cause cancer. We think we know, but we're just doing our best to look at evidence.
You can rest assured that in ~50 years we'll look back and say "Of Course! Those scientists in 2019 were so simplistic and quaint!"
"But don't worry, now it's 2070, we know so much better, so that new-fangled thing you have is perfectly safe!"
We have data involving a significant fraction of humanity and we didn't find a link. Cell phone aren't rare and cancer isn't rare. It means we have a very good statistical model. Cell phones have been widespread for 20 years now, which is less than we might want but still not bad. Furthermore, fundamental physics go against the idea that cell phones cause cancer. We have more or less proved that cell phones don't cause enough cancer to matter.
For little green men, we can only search the tiniest fraction of space, and we have only a single data point: us. The only vaguely statical model we have come from the Drake equation, and it has more holes than Swiss cheese. It would be laughed off by the scientific community if it wasn't so exciting.
> Cell phone aren't rare and cancer isn't rare. It means we have a very good statistical model. Cell phones have been widespread for 20 years now
Uh-huh, and cancer rates are absolutely skyrocketing, soon to be 50% of the population.
Why is that?
> fundamental physics go against the idea that cell phones cause cancer. We have more or less proved that cell phones don't cause enough cancer to matter.
You're missing my point. You should have said "fundamental physics, as we understand it today, can't explain how or why cell phones cause cancer, but there could be stuff we don't understand"
Have a good look at history and look at all the times we didn't understand stuff that we were doing, but we were pretty damn sure we did.
Cancer rates are skyrocketing, and it is a good thing, because it means we are not dying from something else first.
As we eliminate causes of death, others raise naturally. Right now, in the first word, we are at about 1/3 heart disease, 1/3 cancer, 1/3 others. If we get to 50% cancer, I guess all we can do is blame cardiologists for doing a good job ;)
Microwave and other non-ionizing energy can be used to influence rate of reaction. Chemical reactions depend upon orientation and bond state/dynamics, that are influenced (not necessarily broken, but, say, "flexed", stretched, etc.) by resonant radiation.
I remember learning about this decades ago, in college chemistry. (G\heck, getting out of the "radio" frequencies, many people have had photo-sensitive reactions demonstrated to them, for this very reason.)
Well, say you have a chemical reaction that presents a certain risk level. And say non-ionizing radiation in your environment influences that reaction.
Take it a step further down: Temperature influences rate of reaction. We certainly know that non-ionizing radiation effects temperature of absorptive materials.
Look at another aspect of this: We have chemical compounds that are strongly believed -- known either through strong empirical observation or deduction of the specific chemical mechanisms -- to cause cancer.
They appear or are known to be doing so without the assistance of ionizing radiation. Ergo, this effect consists of chemical reactions.
We know that non-ionizing radiation can influence chemical reactions.
We are nowhere near a comprehensive catalogue, much less understanding, of all the chemical reactions in the body. Chemicals that we and our natural environment evolved, much less chemicals we've manufactured and introduced into our environment.
Can we say that non-ionizing radiation cannot cause or promote cancer? I don't think so.
> Whether the effect was large or small, there is a fundamental scientific question: how does non-ionizing radiation cause cancer? The fact that it can requires better models of how EM waves and biological matter interact.
This is wrong. Non-ionizing radiation obviously causes cancer. "Ionizing radiation" for photons is (somewhat arbitrarily) defined as photons with >10 eV. That's far ultraviolet, far beyond anything in sunlight that has passed the atmosphere. But sunlight still gives you cancer.
There are any number of ways that cells and genes can be disrupted by non-ionizing radiation. Just disrupting in-progress reactions can eventually damage cells, and that doesn't require anything nearly as dramatic as ionizing an atom. At the bare minimum, all waves >1 GHz interact with and are absorbed by biological matter.
However the low-microwave frequencies from cell phones and wifi are hugely innocuous in addition to being crazy low power. They practically only interact through heating. I'm about as worried by the visible radiation from a cell phone's screen as I am from the transmitter. Hell, I'm pretty positive the local heating from the CPU getting hot will be more likely to contribute to cancer.
It may be a secondary effect. Most people know the feeling of having a “hot ear” from talking long on a cell phone when it’s against the ear. Frequent heating of cells can be inflammatory which in turn is recognized as a possible cause of cancer - https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/06/09/more-on-...
Note that “hot ear” can’t possibly be an effect of RF, more that you’ve just held something up to your ear.
Simple evaluation based on the size of the battery in a phone tells you that there can be no significant heating effect on anything, given that there’s no functional difference between a call and a phone just using data, this effect would be constant to everything around it. There’s simply not enough energy capacity in the battery for this to be true.
I don't think the parent was suggesting that what makes your ear hot is RF.(of course it's conduction from a hot phon and lack of ventilation). They were suggesting, I think, that cancer can arise from having frequent hot ear, regardless of the heating mechanism.
I think the above poster is not clearly differentiating between heating from RF radiation and heating from electrons colliding with silicon or battery components. Given that simple failure in communication, I'd like to see the calculations they performed to arrive at their conclusion.
Yea, I dunno what that guy is talking about. Batteries carry incredible amounts of energy, certainly enough to output significant amounts of heat. After all, there was that whole scandal where Samsung cell phone batteries were exploding into burning fireballs...
The potential energy of a battery carrying out the intended chemical reaction to generate electricity and the potential energy of lighting it on fire and burning that same battery in air are very different things.
Modern batteries are impressive compared to their predecessors but adding up the watt-hours in a battery and then calculating how much that would heat a bucket of water is a serious disappointment.
You're telling me that you've never held a phone on your hand and had it get hot? C'mon man. Every modern phone that I know of gets quite hot when doing something like streaming video or taking a voice call for an extended period of time. You can do a simple Google search and see that people quite often discuss how their phone gets uncomfortably hot during all kinds of normal activities.
Nobody said anything about heating a bucket of water. The discussion was about heating up someone's ear, which certainly happens.
I think you’d struggle to find people who wear ear protection but aren’t exposed to, for example, other hazardous conditions on a mining or building site that are hard to control for.
> "But the results apply only to male rats and involve radio frequencies long out of routine use."
"For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world’s largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents"
World's largest? Most costly? And more or less not applicable to current reality?
It is exactly things such as this that trigger the general public to mistrust government and mistrust science. What's most unnerving is the gov and the science expected the public to not respond as expected.
Or how about reasonable levels of power? Ten watts per kilo is an absolutely nutso-bismol bonkers level of radiation compared to what real people and animals are exposed to. I don't spend twelve hours a day inside a magnetron.
I'd like to see the results of an experiment where they have a highly controlled pair of populations that are identical in every way except one group of rats is in a Faraday cage. It would be ideal if they were still exposed to natural radio frequencies--after all, radio is not an exclusively man-made phenomenon. But of course GSM doesn't get through the atmosphere easily. A long-term study like that might actually be useful.
These studies where they bathe the rats in a few thousand times the average ambient power of our cell network are utterly blatant examples of confirmation bias in science publishing. They cranked up the amplitude until it had to have an effect on biology--stopping just shy of "significant heating" of tissues. Basically it's a microwave on defrost, complete with a scattering reflector and turntable to make sure the rats cook evenly. Doesn't seem like good faith to me. And of course dumbed-down science journalism will immediately clickbait it into the headline "Cellphones Will Literally Kill You," as is tradition.
I’m sure you could get some grad students to volunteer to sit around in the lab and play on their phones, if you wanted to up the exposure in a way that mimics realistic patterns...
Also, I assume they are referring to humans not keeping the cellphone 9h per day close to their brain.
First off, many do in fact sleep with their phones close to their head these days, and second, what about the phone being close to the body/male testicles (in the pocket) throughout the day?
One other thing, wasn't the issue also not just with the phones themselves, but with the cell towers? I believe 5G towers need to be installed every 300 meters. If the towers are indeed dangerous due to how much power they radiate, then how many people will that affect in busy centers/apartment buildings?
Oh, right, my carrier doesn't support that for my device yet, so I forgot about it. Does it turn the radio all the way off? I guess it would, since WiFi will just supplant all the cell radio's functions.
> Radiation from cell phones can possibly cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization. The agency now lists mobile phone use in the same "carcinogenic hazard" category as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform.
Classified in IARC 2B, which also includes things like pickled vegetables, magnets, coffee, sassafras, styrene, and ginkgo extract. Also aflatoxin M1 (LD50 ~300 ug/kg), vanadium(V) oxide (LD50 ~10 mg/kg inhaled), HIV, and nitrogen mustards (chemotherapy drugs that also happen to be classified and stockpiled as chemical weapons). Even the items that CNN picked out, the cancer risk from those is the least of your worries. I won't call the 2B category "useless", since it actually is a list of compounds that might theoretically (but have not been shown to) cause cancer, but, well...
At this point in time it's not really relevant to say cellphone vs no-cellphone. It's death by cellphone vs saved by cellphone ie, you need to compare how many people have been able to call for help in an emergency, get a taxi rather than drink driving etc because they had access to a phone in their pocket.
It's like comparing new drugs to the best off-patent generic, not a placebo sugar pill.
”the rat study examined the effects of a radio frequency associated with an early generation of cellphone technology, one that fell out of routine use years ago.”
In some parts of the world (UK, Europe, Asia, South Africa, Nigeria, Peru), the 900Mhz GSM band is now being reused as LTE band 8.
It's not great news, this study. It could be wrong, it could be inapplicable to reality, it could be a lot of things that mitigate the results in one way or another.
But I think we can all agree that it would have been nicer to hear that there was "No Evidence" of a link.
How many studies were run that /didn't/ find any evidence? If that fact isn't included in the conclusion then this could be accidental p-value hacking.
> Current cellphones represent a fourth generation, known as 4G, and 5G phones are expected to debut around 2020. They employ much higher frequencies, and these radio waves are far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats, scientists say.
I'm confused by this statement. 4G uses even lower frequencies than 900 MHz, and this range up to 1900MHz will continue to be used for decades more, 5G or not.
As for 5G itself, as I mentioned in another comment, there's also the issue of carriers needing to install many more towers, which I believe are cancer-causing for anyone living in the immediate area due to the power they radiate.
I also imagine the 5G towers will use much more power than say 3G or 4G powers because if 5G wireless tech can't pass easily through objects, then you bet the carriers are going to "maximize" the distance. How? Through more power. So I doubt 5G will be much safer overall. In fact, I'm willing to bet it will be significantly less safe than previous wireless technologies.
So to ensure companies like Qualcomm and U.S. carriers don't get away with causing millions to die "because we found out too late", like this NYT article seems to be implying about the previous tech, we should already start enforcing laws or starting lawsuits against them and make them pay out billions, if evidence is indeed found (whether through more studies, or through discovery of what the company employees knew about these issues) that their tech was harmful to humans.
> I also imagine the 5G towers will use much more power than say 3G or 4G powers because if 5G wireless tech can't pass easily through objects, then you bet the carriers are going to "maximize" the distance. How? Through more power. So I doubt 5G will be much safer overall. In fact, I'm willing to bet it will be significantly less safe than previous wireless technologies.
As the frequencies increase penetrating power drops off dramatically. I don't care how many nerf darts get thrown at me if they can't pierce my skin they aren't going to kill me. Photons can't gang up and become more penetrative by just having more of them.
Man can you imagine if 1 billion people end up with brain tumors. How would that even get handled? I have no idea how hard tumor surgery is but I am guessing hospitals will have to be turned into large Foxconn type factories or something.
Any cover which would reduce the amount of radiation would probably also interfere with the signal strength, which in-turn would also affect the battery life of the phone
This isn't something to worry about unless you're using your phone for 9h a day and have boosted the power output beyond the legal limit. Even then there isn't an explanation as to how it would cause cancer.
Unpopular but entirely correct. The study used power up to ten watts per kilogram. Your phone uses around a watt or less compared to your whole body mass. Let's say the average of 62 kilos. Your exposure is less than a fiftieth of what was produced in the experiment, probably less because you aren't irradiated 24 hours a day--you take it off your person to charge at some point. And the radio produces far less wattage when it's idle, which is going to be the vast majority of your day. Compared to the amount the rats were getting constantly, this would be a truly minuscule fraction of exposure over time.
Even with such extraordinary amplitude, the correlation was very slight. Trust me, everyone has much bigger health risks to worry about than radio. If you've ever had a drink in your life you've done worse.
Have you ever spent some time on your cell phone and then felt this "deep warmth" in your head? I've felt the same warmth after having gone through a "full body scanner".
I've mentioned this to a coworker before and he laughed at me. Then I heard him be on the phone for like 30 minutes and during lunch he mentioned that his head was feeling this weird warmth. I repeated my theory and asked him what are the odds of his phone usage and the warmth being unrelated. I've never seen him not use headphones when being on the phone since then.
This is a nocebo effect. The two things you just described aren’t even in the same ballpark of RF frequency. The brain doesn’t have any way of measuring pain; let alone temperature. Brain surgery can be done with the patient awake in desirable situations as a direct result of this.
The blog post is not credible. The author does not provide evidence for stating that heating tissue causes harm. The scientific paper describes heating of almost the exact magnitude as normal diurnal body temperature variation.
this happens to me.
Also I would get "phantom calls" right before my phone was about to ring. Sometimes I had leg twitches when I kept my phone in my pocket, that I thought was just a pinched nerve, but my phone would then begin to ring. I no longer store my phone in my pocket and have not had phantom calls/leg twitches. Placing my phone near a speaker I could correlate that the frequency of the twitches matched whatever frequency the phone pinged the tower. Not proof but very suspicious.
Interesting enough I have been disabling my wifi at home at night because I was challenged to see if I felt a better deeper sleep. I did, but I have not ruled out placebo effect. I want to randomize this somehow and record which days I think it is off (depending on my sleep) vs days it is on, to rule this out. I am horrified that EMF could be affecting me like this if it is true. I live in an area without other wifi, 3g, or 4g. I do not own a frequency counter, but that would help me eliminate other interference for better test results.
This type of uncontrolled self-experimentation is extremely fraught with bias and is not a reliable way to reach a conclusion at all. For example, you discount all the times you get a leg twitch and your phone doesn't ring. You probably don't even register it. Your muscles most definitely are not activated by 1-3GHz radio waves broadcast at less than one watt. Otherwise you'd be dancing like a marionette 24/7.
And the sleep experiment is even worse. How do you quantify "better deeper sleep?" Please don't spread this kind of anecdotal pseudoscience, it just makes the rest of the world more uninformed. The more confidence you have in your objectivity and expertise on the subject, the worse your bias gets. People who work with tech have to be doubly sure to control for bias.
From the fact sheet:
"Rats and mice were exposed to RFR in special chambers for up to two years, or most of their natural lives. NTP scientists looked for a range of cancers and noncancer health effects.
Exposure to RFR began in the womb for rats and at 5-6 weeks old for mice. The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling about 9 hours each day. The RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram of body weight in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice.
The chambers were shielded rooms with a transmitting antenna that radiated RFR fields, plus rotating stirrers that generated a uniform field.4,5 Pilot studies established field strengths that did not raise animal body temperatures excessively.6
The rats and mice were exposed to whole body RFR at frequencies of 900 and 1900 megahertz, respectively, from two technologies – Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM).
NTP and RFR experts from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the IT’IS Foundation designed and built the chambers specifically for these studies. "
Also:
"Were there any surprise findings? NTP found longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats"