[testvox]

Some people do believe that non ionizing radiation has effects other than those produced by the added thermal energy (or that the thermal effects are in some way significant). The actual scientific evidence for this is minimal though.

[jcims]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4676010/

Essentially EM fields alternating in the low to medium frequency bands (~100khz-1mhz) can disrupt cell processes by physically jiggling the polar molecules that make up portions of miotic spindles/microtubules. Among presumably other things this effect is being investigated as a cancer fighting mechanism called 'tumor treating fields'.

The carrier frequency of mobile phones is obviously far beyond the range in question, but there could be signal modulation components that alternate RF power levels in this frequency range.

[avian]

If your phone emits any non-trivial amounts of RF power at 100 kHz-1MHz frequencies, regardless of whether this comes from intermodulation products or something else, it doesn't pass existing EMC regulations and can't be legally sold to consumers.

This is something that is already (or should be, in theory) rigorously tested for everything that's put on the consumer market (from your cheapest USB charger to your iPhone).

[jcims]

But we're talking about what happens after that GHz RF is absorbed by the tissues/fluids in the body. That becomes much more complex. It's not unlike the laser attack on MEMS microphones or a crystal radio powering a speaker in the audio range after receiving AM RF at 1Mhz.

Realistically we've been beaming our brains for decades now without a glut of brain tumors, but we might just be getting lucky, and if we don't know what to look for it could bite us later.

[lima]

Not a given if said USB charger is cheaply produced in China.

[avian]

Yes, you can debate how much imported (or for that matter, domestically produced) stuff is actually tested, but the fact remains that existing laws and regulations do cover this, even if enforcement is maybe lacking.

[lima]

I'm an ham radio operator, and shortwave spectrum pollution is sadly a big problem despite very strict regulations.

The unfortunate reality is that the market is flooded with noisy devices, often cheaply produces overseas, that vastly exceed legal limits (chargers and other rectifiers, plasma televisions, powerline adapters, and much more).

Enforcement is difficult due to how widespread these devices are.

In many places, the noise floor is to high that long-range shortwave radio communications all but impossible.

[craftinator]

Or cheaply produced in the US... Most tech I've bought from Shenzhen recently has been of better quality than domestically produced equivalents

[zaptidizap]

I think police cars should measure it.

[cududa]

Oh bull. There is no way to prove RF modifies microtubules.

[jcims]

https://youtu.be/voVa7Pj2xUg

There’s definitely an effect. It’s in clinical trials right now.

[phyzome]

This seems false on its face. Surely that would be a straightforward experiment.

[zaptidizap]

It was

[oliv__]

Just as a counterpoint to what everyone seems to be saying here: there most definitely is science that points towards RF fields having negative health effects for humans, and it is plentiful.

The fact that no-one talks about any of this just goes to show the extent of the lobbying done by the telecom industry.

https://www.emfdata.org/en

[ColanR]

> The fact that no-one talks about any of this just goes to show the extent of the lobbying done by the telecom industry.

If monsanto could do it, then others can too. I'm impressed by how quickly everyone decided that the scientific cover-up monsanto pulled off was a one-time event that couldn't possibly happen anywhere else.

[rpwverheij]

Exactly. Thank you for sharing that. I was wondering if there is a place that collects this. Not sure if you're related to the site, but when clicking through to an article the site shows german, even though Im visiting in English.

[_sbrk]

> Some people do believe that non ionizing radiation has effects other than those produced by the added thermal energy

Some people believe vaccines cause Down's Syndrome.

"Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period." - Michael Crichton (https://tinyurl.com/vcxj2ex)

[triceratops]

"If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus."

Appears to contradict

"What is relevant is reproducible results."

Aren't reproducible results a form of consensus?

[ColanR]

> Aren't reproducible results a form of consensus?

Not in the least. "Reproducible results" represents the technical and methodological ability to confirm that an effect is real. "Consensus" is whether a political body is willing to admit that the effect is real.

And we all know politics finds truth to be...

[Shikadi]

I think this is a semantic argument... If 100 independent scientists reproduce results, those results themselves are a scientific consensus, are they not?

[craftinator]

Yes, at that point the political consensus adopts the results of rigorous scientific testing as it's new bling

[ColanR]

Insofar as it's a semantic argument, it's irrelevant.

> If 100 independent scientists reproduce results, those results themselves are a scientific consensus

Not in any sense that's relevant to the discovery of new information or its verification.

[jeffdavis]

Maybe in some degenerate form of consensus, like consensus on raw observations. If one person sees a rise in temperature during a reaction, someone else can say "nuh-uh, la la la".

Other forms of scientific disagreement happen, but those disagreements imply different predictions, and can be resolved with more experiments.

Science is a process that bootstraps broad agreements (scientific laws) from very tiny agreements (observations). The fact that a broad agreement (consensus) exists carries no weight if one lone wacky scientist can show reproducible observations that contradict it.

[manicdee]

In scientific endeavours we only ever find what we were looking for. If we weren’t looking for non-thermal effects in cells we won’t see them, especially if our model of a cellular mass is a lump of ballistics gel, or a computer model of a skin surface in terms of resistive and capacitative networks.

The reason the scientific evidence is minimal is that we have been using simplistic models of human bodies for RF testing.