[cnlwsu]

"Radiation" should be better taught and understood I think. A local wind farm got shut down in my home town because someone convinced some townies they give off radiation and will give everyone cancer. There's a big difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radaition - A microwave (cell phone etc) can boil your blood with enough power but it will never cause a chemical change to DNA.

[woofuls]

DNA mutates spontaneously from background radiation and mutagens present in the cytoplasm (oxygen is even one!) and etc. This isn't normally a problem because the rate at which this happens is balanced by protein repair kinetics, however, if you are boiling the blood denaturing these proteins isn't an unreasonable expectation in non-thermophiles... Furthermore, if you're boiling blood, DNA can uncoil and become susceptible to other problems.

The question is what power is required affect this balanced system. Apparently over time mutations occur which cannot be repaired and sometimes after that cancer occurs ordinarily. It is easy to tell when this happens to 100% of organisms you're studying after doing X and waiting less than a year's time, but is considerably harder to answer when you're trying to see if there is a lethal effect over 60 years in 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a million. This is an open and challenging problem.

I don't claim microwaves of some power won't cause cancer, but I also won't claim oxygen can't cause less cancer. In the microwave case there isn't enough evidence to expect it in lower power situations, but to some tolerance there is always a possibility.

The problem with a lot of folks is the way in which they perceive risk. Risk management should be taught. SF should worry a lot more about an earthquake than cancer from wifi.

[pronoiac]

I agree! At the time, I thought of running the numbers to compare them to, say, radio and TV transmissions towers, or microwave ovens, but I had thought it was a done deal, with a few details to work out.

[mikeash]

Science literacy in general is woefully inadequate. You can get amazingly far in life without knowing what "radiation" actually is, or why airplanes leave trails behind them sometimes, but it leaves you open to being extremely easily fooled.

[911_Inside_Job]

I'll just leave this here: http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-...

"Frey tested microwave radiation on frogs and other lab animals, targeting the eyes, the heart, and the brain, and in each case he found troubling results. In one study, he triggered heart arrhythmias. Then, using the right modulations of the frequency, he even stopped frog hearts with microwaves—stopped the hearts dead.

"Frey observed two factors in how microwaves at low power could affect living systems. First, there was the carrier wave: a frequency of 1,900 megahertz, for example, the same frequency of many cell phones today. Then there was the data placed on the carrier wave—in the case of cell phones, this would be the sounds, words, and pictures that travel along it. When you add information to a carrier wave, it embeds a second signal—a second frequency—within the carrier wave. This is known as modulation. A carrier wave can support any number of modulations, even those that match the ­extra-low frequencies at which the brain operates (between eight and twenty hertz). It was modulation, Frey discovered, that induced the widest variety of biological effects."

Well that's food for thought! Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it"

Or as put by Joe Bageant:

"The Information Racketeers: It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long-term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet-proof mammalian material."

[mikeash]

> Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it"

That would be nice if anyone was saying that. But we're not. Instead, we're saying that people fear it out of ignorance, which is considerably different.

Do you have a link to Frey's study? I couldn't dig that particular one up.

[911_Inside_Job]

Try: http://www.ct.gov/csc/lib/csc/pendingproceeds/docket_409/inl...

I found it as one of many papers by Frey at: http://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/?page_id=594

[mikeash]

Is there a later one as well? Because that one shows only a small effect, certainly nothing like stopping the heart altogether.

[911_Inside_Job]

Well, if I know the typical populace, which includes people who have conditions, or know loved ones with conditions, which make arrhythmia life-threatening, they would not regard such effects lightly.

But, sure, the GQ author may be guilty of using a mis-leading characterization of the induction of irregular heart patterns as the full "stopping" of heart patterns. ("Hey it's true it 'stopped' for a little," plausibly says the misleader.) Kind of like industry just may be guilty of mis-leading us in the opposite direction.

Oh, and thanks for not trying to make me substantiate the Joe Bageant quote. He's more of a dead, angry, neo-communist Hunter Thompson who values rhetorical effect above all, and will play loose with facts. I just like his rhetoric.

But back to the bottom line: "The data as a whole clearly indicate that the heart responds to EM energy, particularly if it is pulsed and the pulses impinge at the right time in the cardiac cycle... [but] are not sufficient to draw conclusions about mediators.... [but, again,] the neural system is responsive to the energy."

Anyway, in my long experience, people let their preferred conclusions guide them persistently (if sub-consciously) to interpret perceptions, observations, and "facts" accordingly. The conclusive ends justify the means of getting there. When people want to persistently deny something, they can, easily. With that in mind, I just say "I exhort you draw your own conclusions -- you probably were going to do just that anyway."

Profitable as this conversation has been, I think I'll exit stage-left now.