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WiFi and human health

Foreigner said:
This isn't drug related so if a mod wants to move it, be my guest.

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/10/30/34-scientific-studies-showing-adverse-health-effects-wi-fi/

I'm really disturbed by this, if true. It means that even the Wi-Fi from a laptop could be harming us, and from cell phones.

For the more scientifically inclined, what are your thoughts on this?
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This isn't drug related but this is neuroscience related. I think a discussion about how this could affect cells, gene expression, and chemical make-up in your body would be quite informative.

I'm not knowledgeable to know about anything such as that, though, but I will say that it's horrible that we have been used as a science experiment but well, we wanted it.
 
I can't help but think given the wide spread use of it everywhere for a while that if it had a serious significant effect we would well and truly know it already. I'm sure if every household had asbestos construction working going on every day they would have worked that one out a lot sooner. But who knows
 
I think a better question is not why is it bad, but why did we assume it wasn't?

Let's start by figuring out what we mean when we say "RF radiation". The wavelength can be gotten by looking at the frequency: f = 2.4 * 10^9 Hz gives l = c/f = (3.0 * 10^8 m/s)/(2.4 * 10^9 1/s) or about 35 cm. A typical molecule, by contrast, is more like 500 picometers, or 0.00000000005 cm. Since electromagnetism is gauge-invariant it's not too hard to assume that this EM wave looks like nothing on the scale of our bodies.

Unfortunately, proteins (the stuff of life) aren't typical molecules. They tend to have a very complicated electric structure and they're much bigger than most molecules, closer to the nanometer range, which, a whole lot of math[1] later, means that even RF radiation of this frequency could affect their activity. The cell membrane, itself a huge (relative to molecular scales) macromolecular structure, is also susceptible to polarization, e.g. action potential. DNA fits this pattern too. And in fact, they all have very intricate charge distributions, which need to very closely match the charge distribution of the substrate. Chemical reactions are after all electromagnetic. So a living organism is sort of like a worst-case scenario for a system being affected by radiation. It's full of large and delicate molecules susceptible to electric disruption.

Trying to calculate the E field given an electromagnetic wave going through a human body is basically impossible. So we never really knew if it was safe, we just hoped.

Now, hold on. An AM radio tower can put out as many as a million watts of RF radiation. Why aren't people who work in these towers affected[2]? Well, the wavelength of AM radio is more like 300 meters. That's a whole lot longer, possibly too long to affect anything in our body. In fact: the wavelength of AM is so long that whole tower is an antenna. But more importantly, radiation follows an inverse-square law, and our bodies don't tend to be so close to AM transmitters.

Neither of those are true in the golden age of WiFi, when my ~3 watts laptop RF transmitter sits right now half a meter from my genitalia. Only the aluminium unibody and induced hipster field of my Macbook Pro can protect me.

I can't help but think given the wide spread use of it everywhere for a while that if it had a serious significant effect we would well and truly know it already.
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Quite the contrary: if it happens to everyone equally, we might accidentally think it's the result of something else. If it happens to a specific group "users of product X", it's much easier to notice.

[1]: I didn't actually do the math. It's very hard.

[2]: Well, we think they're not affected. [e minor]
 
AM broadcast transmitters, WiFi and cell phones aren't the only things putting out RF energy. Not by a long shot. At this point it would be easier to list all the things that aren't radiating RF in some way.

And while medium frequency (AM broadcast) may be running high power at lower frequencies, there are plenty of transmitters in the UHF range (300-3000 MHz) putting out kilowatt to megawatt amounts of energy (think TV transmitters, the majority of land mobile radio, radar, etc).
 
I think unless you're going to spend your life in a Faraday cage, there are far more productive things to worry yourself with. Don't forget, the sun is also a good source of radio energy :)

This reminds me of the (possibly anecdotal) story where a cellphone tower was erected in some neighbourhood, and shortly afterwards residents began complaining of malaise, headaches, nausea, etc... "microwave exposure" stuff.... and then it was revealed that the tower was unpowered and totally inoperable to that point.
 
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I didn't look at the studies but 34 studies? That's a lot. There's got to be SOMETHING to this, what is the damage mentioned in the studies?
 
There was a really good article in scientific American in the sceptic column that demonstrated fairly convincingly that the EM we're talking about more or less cannot cause many of the problems it's been accused of. I think his argument was based largely on the fact that it can't cause cancer via any known mechanism by which radiation does so because it can't ionize anything. I can't remember very well.
 
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It's a different frequency range, but here it is shown that extremely low frequency pulsed electromagnetic fields (ELF-PEMF) can have beneficial effects, at a really low field strength. So ionization is not all there is to EMF-biological systems interactions.
 
I'm way more worried about all the CHCl3, EtBr, and acrylamide I'm exposed to on a regular basis at work, but I'm still kicking.
 
Hammilton said:
Yep, that's the one
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Ah, OK. It seems to only debunk the EMF/cancer correlation; the article doesn't focus on possible CNS disturbances.

Can any of you who know about these things tell me why the 2.4 GHz frequency must always be used? Is there any real point in continuing to use a frequency that has been shown to interfere with the CNS? Makes absolutely no sense to me, but then again I'm not in the industry.
 
Can any of you who know about these things tell me why the 2.4 GHz frequency must always be used?
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Because it's one of the frequency bands allowed for consumer use by the government. Some 802.11 standards also support 5ghz signals, but those have worse propagation characteristscs.

A glance at FCC regulations confirms any suspicions. A band of frequencies clustered around 2.4GHz has been designated, along with a handful of others, as the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical radio bands. "A lot of the unlicensed stuff—for example Wi-Fi—is on the 2.4GHz or the 900Mhz frequencies—the ISM bands. You don't need a license to operate on them." That's Ira Kelpz, Deputy Chief, Office of Engineering and Technology at the Federal Communications Commission, explaining precisely why these ISM bands are attractive to gadget makers: They're free to use. If routers and cordless phones and whatever else are relegated to a small band 2.4GHz, then their radio waves won't interfere with, say, cellphones operating at 1.9GHz, or AM radio, which broadcasts between 535 kHz and 1.7 MHz. The ISM is, in effect, a ghetto for unlicensed wireless transmission, recommended first by a quiet little agency in a Swiss office of the UN, called the ITU, then formalized, modified and codified for practical use by the governments of the world, including, of course, our own FCC.
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Part of the reason 2.4ghz is deregulated is due to the prevalence of microwave ovens which emit radio energy right around 2.4ghz. So the FCC decided it's a good place to put devices, with the caveat that they should be required to accept interference.
 
Hammilton said:
There was a really good article in scientific American in the sceptic column that demonstrated fairly convincingly that the EM we're talking about more or less cannot cause many of the problems it's been accused of. I think his argument was based largely on the fact that it can't cause cancer via any known mechanism by which radiation does so because it can't ionize anything. I can't remember very well.
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you-hear-me-now
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That's not a very good argument. Radiation can have effects in chemical systems at levels far, far lower than those related to ionization. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-thermal_microwave_effect

It's highly controversial, but it's definitely not unheard of! Biological systems are very different from conventional solvent phases, too.

And since I seem to be the contrarian here: I really haven't done my homework. I'm not convinced of a causal relationship myself, but I think a lot of the arguments fielded as to why it "shouldn't" have an effect are intellectually arrogant, so I'll happily take the time to riposte.
 
lets look at this rationally.

the frequency band for wifi is 2.5GHz to 5.0GHz, so let's just assume 5.0GHz for calculation

using the formula E=hv, where h is planck's constant and v is frequency

E = (4.13×10^(-15)eV*s)(5000000000s^-1) = 0.00002065eV

0.00002065eV = 3.30849461×10^(-27)kJ

the bond dissociation energy for hydrocarbons is ~400kJ/mol!

NO, a wifi signal cannot cause cancer or otherwise harm living systems because it is not energetic enough to break chemical bonds (by orders of magnitude)

(somebody double check my math, i'm high. but i've done this calculation before sober in class, wifi and cellphones are harmless)
 
Why do you assume that breaking chemical bonds is the only way living systems can be harmed by EMF?
 
well let's restrict my earlier conjecture to answering the specific question 'can they cause cancer?', because cancer is a direct result of damage to DNA, which by definition is a process that must involve the breaking of chemical bonds

but i mean, come on... UV radiation you are exposed to from standing in the sun at a summer picnic is about 10^16Hz

E=(4.13×10^(-15)eV*s)((10^16)s^-1)=41.3eV

41.3eV=6.6x10^(-21)kJ

a wifi signal is 6 orders of magnitude less energetic
 
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