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Comment by baobrien | Hacker News Reader

Here's the preprint 'Report of Partial Findings' paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/06/23/055...

As a non-biologist, the amount of power being exposed to the rats here seems pretty high - 0, 1.5, 3, and 6 watts absorbed per Kg of body mass. Also, if I'm reading this right, survival was very slightly lower in the control groups than any of the RF exposed groups.

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6 watts absorbed per kg of body mass would be somewhere in the range of 500 watts for a human being, so, yes, very high -- that's around 5x the amount of energy normally produced as body heat. I would think that would be enough to produce severe stress just from the thermal effects.

Holy crap, yeah you don't want to be near something dropping 500W ERP.

If I recall correctly most cell phones are on the order of 1-2W since more would tear through your battery.

100-500mW/Kg might still be appropriate, though, if you are dissipating a significant fraction of that 1-2W in your body. I have to imagine that most meat-power-dissipation would be pretty well concentrated near the transmitter.

Quick Google searches indicate about three watts. To a first approximation, you are not concave when talking on a cell phone, so figure at most 1.5W travelling in your direction. Humans are definitely not opaque to radio, but let's suppose I am. Personally, I weigh 90kg, so for me it's something like 15mW per kg at most, for the small handful of minutes per day I spend on the cell phone.

My level of concern about this could not be lower.

Keep in mind if they're doing CDMA the power is dialed down to keep it uniform at the receiver(otherwise the code XOR doesn't work) so unless you're at the limits of reception it's probably not at 3w.

Agreed though, the power seems really low.

That’s called “getting cooked”. If you stand under a heat lamp many multiples higher in energy than direct sunlight, bad things happen. News at 11.

So they effectively put the rats in a microwave oven on ‘low’.

I would be more surprised if they didn’t develop issues at those power levels.

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