“We have no reason to believe 5G is safe” | Hacker News Reader

“We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

blogs.scientificamerican.com

925 pointsbookofjoe586 comments

Honestly, after a glance at the links, they don't inspire confidence in me either. There are papers about very small changes on very rare types of cancer, measured by proxy on a species where it's common; papers criticizing the critics claiming association with interested parties (what is a perfectly fine thing to claim, but what is it doing in a scientific paper?); and the only wide review I could find claims that the literature has very weak conclusions that are not sufficient to claim any danger.

As usual, it's not the scientists that are wackos, it's the press that is claiming things completely different from what they say. There are proposals for better test equipment that should be taken, but I don't see any other claim for change there.

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.

The wildest of the claims anywhere on the linked papers is a ~10% increase on the rate of one of the rarest types of cancer, so this line of research won't give you the answers you are looking for.

The thing that concerns me about millimeter wave tech and 5G is that it seems like a solution looking for a problem. My city just had a wave of poles dropped in a few neighborhoods, and they seem to me to be an expensive boondoggle. IMO, we would be better served by the heavy hand of the FCC allowing fiber providers to run telephone poles and trenches without any accountability (as the wireless carriers can with 5G).

These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public.

It's not a solution looking for a problem. The problem is that the existing infrastructure does not support network slicing. Without network slicing the telcos are severely limited in their pricing models. "5G" is just them trying to convince consumers that this is for their benefit.

"These radio bands have been in military use for a long time. I’m surprised that no health studies have been done or released to the public."

I wouldn't be. To a good first-order approximation, the military doesn't give a hoot about long term health consequences and wouldn't release any such studies, if any were made, unless they indicated a requirement for the military usage to change.

>allowing fiber providers to run telephone poles and trenches without any accountability (as the wireless carriers can with 5G)

That would definitely invert the value calculations. I work in the industry and there's no question that the savings from 5G are regulatory in nature. Ironic that it's the less regulated tech that has the more questionable health effects.

This comment is utterly false. Just after a brief glance at the paper, I found a study on showing a 2x increase in cancer on a sample size of over 1,000,000 humans.

Please give a link, I want to read it without going through these that aren't that interesting.

Agree - there's shouldn't be any place for ad hominem attacks in a scientific paper. To me, this is a strong indicator of bias and/or journalistic incompetence.

Maybe it's initially counter-intiutitve, but the rise in the rate of cancer should be expected as lifespans are increased and deaths from other diseases decline. E.g. every male will get prostrate cancer "if" they live long enough.

I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves.

Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call their research "bullshit" or "impossible", call the people "thruthers" or claiming "Russian troll farms" are behind this story.

I don't think I've ever seen so much non-scientific HN comments on a science article.

At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.

Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit. Women suffering from anorexia developed fewer tumors. Similar experiments on lab animals in a controlled setting have the same result. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11246846 I believe there are other changing risk factors in behavior as well, for instance women who have never had a child are more likely to develop breast cancer and fertility rates have dropped dramatically over the last 100 years.

Cell phones have only been widely deployed in the last two decades, and I don’t think those trends in cancer rates you’re referencing correlate very well to cellular deployment.

I’d still be curious to see more research happening in the field of millimeter waves, personally I don’t see this technology as very useful right now either compared to traditional cellular due to its lack of penetration.

It's anecdotal, but a friend of mine with cancer switched to a keto diet and he had one tumor shrink, to the point where his doctor said they could (and should) now operate on it.

The large increase in sugar and starch in our diet does contribute to fast growing cancer cells and there are studies that link being overweight/obesity with cancer.

We weren't this fat decades ago. Some may blame more office work, but the biggest factor is the amount of sugar/carbs in our diets. It's grown tremendously and yet no one seems to take it seriously, discrediting things like Adkins/Keto as "fad diets" when they were closer/more consistent with American and Western European diets for several decades.

> Plentiful nutrition which has led to 90% of the population of the USA being overweight, obese, or overfat is another potential culprit.

Yeah I’m gonna need some data to believe that one. 90% obese / overweight? I’m calling bullshit.

The article says, "more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating." The link to the 500 articles is https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl....

I checked the "conclusions" of the first two: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29996112 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29709736

Conclusion of 1) Despite the improved exposure assessment approach used in this study, no clear associations were identified. However, the results obtained for recent exposure to RF electric and magnetic fields are suggestive of a potential role in brain tumor promotion/progression and should be further investigated.

Conclusion of 2) Ever use of wireless phones was not significantly associated with risk of adult glioma, but there could be increased risk in long-term users.

They both read as, "we found no significant effect".

Careful, you’re misinterpreting the document. The two studies you’ve picked are listed as “neither evidence of an effect or a null finding”, they are not included in the “more than 500 studies” finding harmful effects. Those studies are prefixed by “P” in the document and, although I haven’t counted, a rough estimate based on the number of pages makes it plausible that there are > 500.

That said, given the scientific consensus from rigorous meta-analyses, I expect that these “positive” studies are mostly of low quality and/or limited sample size. And scepticism is generally warranted when advocates start listing large numbers of studies instead of referring to a few meta-studies. As it happens, the best available meta-studies come to the opposite conclusion (namely, that there’s probably no harm from mobile EMF), so this long list is essentially bogus.

At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.

Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.

Unfortunately the hunch you have just spendt 30 seconds thinking about is sadly incorrect. The increase in life expectancy doesn't account for the increased incidence of cancers. There are other factors at play, which need to be investigated (some that we know: obesity, pollution, cigarettes).

That's not true, cancer rates have risen also in children and young adults.

from where does this increase in cancer probability statistic come from? anyone have a link to a paper? tried googling but found nothing reliable sadly

Sugar and seed oils.

The article writer is a known "truther" of the field. But I like his view, I believe we need opinions from his end of the spectrum, but I've also read a few times comments such as this:

>"Academia: Where Crazy People Can't Get Fired - Dr. Moskowitz disgraces the University of California-Berkeley in precisely the same way Dr. Oz and Mark Bittman disgrace Columbia University: They are charlatans who wrap themselves in the prestige of academia to peddle foolishness to anxious parents."

https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis...

To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.

Anyway, I have my fair share of worries on large density mmwave equipment environments, mostly focused on other things, as in, not on its effects on us, but on microbial life, bacterial life, not the focus of this article, so I won't derail, but at least for me, Moskowitz isn't this zero sum game as he may be to some field agents.

As a biochemist, I just want to chime in that I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already - we have to die of something, and cancer is something that is not "curable" in the sense of other disorders.

After looking at the list of publications purported to be evidence, I have to agree with the other comments here casting doubt. Most, if not all, of these publications are in no-name journals with few citations. I found one paper where the author listed a gmail email address (are they unaffiliated with any institution?)

> I think part of the reason for an apparent increase rise in cancer rates is that we have eliminated many other causes of death already

Where did you read "an apparrent increase rise in cancer rates" ? in this article or in one of the articles it references? which one?

I am not a biochemist, but I would assume academics are referring to incidence rates, not causes of deaths... If you did actually witness such a confusion in the papers, it's important to point it out, but if you didn't it would be equivalent to a physicist suspecting a colleague of confusing mu (the reduced mass of a binary system) with mu (a muon)... rather incredulous if you ask me...

Every academic discipline expects its disciples to be at least proficient in disambiguating words from context, so when one refers to a "cancer rate" in the context of causation, that it would refer to "incidence rates" i.e. the transition probability per surviving individual per unit time. This is independent of deaths by other causes.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I have worked with world-class scientists where the author only had a gmail address (untill we gave them an appointment at Berkeley).

I think this take is a little unfair. Sure, calling scientists “wackos” with reviewing the publications is extreme, we also know there is a massive body of scientific evidence looking at the link between RF waves and cancer that has pretty much found zilch at this point.

If you'd read some of the research linked in the article, you'd perhaps found this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25749340 which clearly shows a link.

Here's a longer list for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421... though a lot of those studies are about DNA damage and not cancer per se. Though DNA damage is known to increase cancer risk.

So no, not zilch, not at all.

the best explanation for why more people get cancer is fewer people are dying of other diseases. Also, more people are surviving cancer. Note: I'm a scientist, and one of the reasons I'm not clicking on links in the article is that I've already done my own looking into IARC and I've concluded they are non-scientific.

Note: I'm a biophysicist who has studied cancer and RF at the graduate level, and postdoctorate level, I can read the literature, and also make reasoned efforts at evaluating whether the literature provides any useful information that would affect the roll out of 5G from health perspectives. I am unable to find any reliable evidence that would indicate that this rollout will actually have "crisis" levels of health impact.

Now. On to the next step: I completely support high quality research done by high quality scientists on non-ionizing radiation. I would, like many other scientists, to see convincing evidence about the nature of damage that could be done by 5G. So far, nearly everything has been indirect in a way that does not inspire enough confidence to propose policy changes.

Doesn't help that the article is written in a kind of exaggerated, fear mongering way. E.g.: " 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO) "

MIMO is multiple inputs, multiple outputs, not massive. If the author is bending terminology to enhance his case, that makes the case look weaker...

Yeah. If an average person thinks MIMO stands for Massive Inputs and Outputs that's not a bad mistake. If someone purporting to speak with authority on the subject of RF radiation thinks that, it's grounds to suspect them of being a blithering fool.

> more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields"

Those 240 scientist have not published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields"

They are mostly experts in other fields.

>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women.

Annual invasive cancer incidence rates have been declining in the U.S. for over two decades.

https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html

Also, the lifetime risk of incidence is about 40% for both men and women:

https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2016/browse_csr.php?section...

Don't fight a knee jerk reaction with one from your own.

> Cancer have risen to 1 in 5 in women and 1 in 3 in men, and nobody knows why

'Nobody knows why', seriously? Did we not establish that the likelihood of cancer increase with lifespan? When you only gets to live to 50 of course you don't die of cancer and heart disease nearly as easily. Your risk of cancer increase each year of age lived after a certain age, and any increase in life expectancy will result in more people eventually dying in cancer.

To be fair, there’s also quite a few published studies showing a positive effect for various pseudoscientific medical practices. Those studies just tend to be very poorly designed, executed, controlled, and don’t represent the actual literature trend.

You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.

The average lifetime risk of getting cancer in the US has actually fallen substantially due to a decrease in smoking.

Diagnosis has simultaneously increased, especially in cancers where the rationale for treatment is low (e.g. prostate cancer in most men).

(work in cancer research)

So I started checking the articles in the link, seeing the ones that reported positive effects:

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29725476 The article only measures exposition, no conclusion on effects other than a literature review.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268055 Can't get the full article, but I only see mentions of a 900MHz source (inside 3G frequency band) and no mention of power. Also it's a biochemical study on rats. Slim evidence.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25747364 One author, talks about wildlife orientation.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26017559 This study talks about the effect of intensive radiation (3x the FCC limit for mobile phones, during 8 months) and it looks like it's actually beneficial for Alzheimer's disease. Funnily enough, it links in the abstract a lot of studies showing either inconsistent or no association between RF and cancer.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427287/ An study from the department of ¿Psychology and Psychiatry? that finds changes in EEG activity due to mobile phone use, only when the phone is placed near the ear. Little mention of whether the RF radiation can interfere in the EEG measurement.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25738972 Mentions the CERENAT study, which shows increased risk with really heavy mobile phone usage (as in calls). The only one with actual positive effects and looking like a serious study.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885019 Decreased nasal mucose in rats. No mention of whether thermal effects were at use here.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25918601 Finds decreased sperm quality, but also discusses other studies finding no effect, and also says "A point of limitation in this study is the inability to assess [...] whether sperm affections are time related or not".

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25531835 This one is about nicotine sulfate + RF exposition in frog embryos, and doesn't find effects of RF alone.

That's just off the first page and a half. Probably someone should do a more thorough review, but it does not give me any assurance that most of the studies with reported positive effects are done by people not in the related fields, have no relation to the problem or do not answer the actual important questions.

> And nobody knows why. However everybody who points to a possible answer is shot down without much investigation. Sad, really.

Mobile phones are not the only thing that has changed radically in the last years.

People don’t click the link because they already know better.

We are bathed in radiation everyday.

So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation.

Do people care about that though? No. The effects of radiation are grossly exaggerated, and frankly any negligible effects we feel are just the price we pay for living in high tech times. I doubt anyone wants to go back to a tech free lifestyle just so they can live maybe a few more years only to die of something else anyway.

So yes, it’s quackery to say 5G is unsafe and the only reason an article like this would rise to the top is so people could come out and trash it. You want to see scientific comments then go to more interesting articles.

You conflated ionising and non-ionising radiation (flying/banana/chest x-ray vs. radio waves, wifi, light from lightbulbs).

Just so you know.

Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well!

Better live underground, i guess.

Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight, right, so radiowaves could harm you, right? Yeah, but skin cancer is caused by ultraviolet, high energy, high frequency EM radiation (3-30PHz). Petahertz, Coral! That's several orders of magnitude less than most extreme 5G!

Don't even get me started on the power levels of sun vs a base station!

So yeah, the claims of health impact are bullshit.

>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.

There is a clear and well known pair of reasons for this. First people are living longer and the longer you live the more prone to cancer you are. People who died of small pox did not die of cancer.

Second, more controversially, atmospheric bomb testing in the 50's and 60's.

People live too long, and don't die of stuff like pneumonia or tuberculosis or syphilis or yellow fever much anymore.

Over a long enough time span, your probability of getting some form of cancer goes to 100%. Probably more like 200% or 300%, since there are so many types that they can cut out or beat back relatively successfully these days, at least until you get too old and decrepit.

I think the title of the link is phrased badly. "We have no reason to believe 5G is safe" makes me want to comment that "we have no reason to believe 5G is unsafe" without even reading it. Maybe the title should be more specific. For example: pointing out that millimeter waves are not present in <=4G.

To be fair, it doesn't seem unreasonable to start with the assumption that something is unsafe and work to prove that it is safe. Seems safer ;)

If this was some technology where not having it would be a major impediment to society, then maybe it would be a different story. But 5G just doesn't seem that important to me.

Frankly, that's SOP on Hacker News. Half the people are commenting on something they haven't read, and the other half are complaining that news from reputable sources isn't free and/or complain that they can't read it with NoScript in Lynx on Arch Linux.

>At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.

I mean, what else is there left to kill us?

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.

Couldn't it simply be that we are curing/reducing the incidence of most other diseases? Cancer is something that typically doesn't occur until the later years of life. By reducing the number of people who die of other causes, you are increasing the potential population of people who end up getting cancer.

I promise I'm not being snarky but would higher cancer rates be linked to the fact that we rarely die from anything else nowadays, barring accidents?

I actually read the article as I'm unsure this is about safe-for-human-body or safe-for-network-security.

What about the cell-phone-radiation-for-brain-cancer concern? Haven't heard about it for a while.

5G will work better in populated cities and I don't think it is a good fit for most areas in USA. Likely we will have 5G for very dense areas while 4G for the rest.

I will absolutely not live or work in close vicinity of any 5G towers.

> At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.

I'm not sure exactly what time interval you're making that claim over, but isn't a large part of it people not dying from plague and flu and having good medical care to live into old age in the first place?

>>Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research.

One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".

Is it "paucity of research" or "a paucity of research"? Agreed though.

Funny things start to happy on online discussion boards when billions of dollars are at stake. Comments deserve as much skepticism as the headline.

The dissonance runs high here on the subject of 5G, the only thing I can think of that comes close is vaccinations.

Once religion is out as a guide to navigate the world, there's really not much left except science to cling to.

Despite plenty of evidence that everyone and everything can be bought, despite plenty of respected researchers raising their voices against, despite all the proof you could want of how these situations tend to play out long term.

Once you give up blind belief in science, there's nothing left to hold on to; and that's obviously a scary thought for many.

I find the HN community to be bi-modal with respect to technology: either they are very distrusting (luddites), or blindly in love with it (techno-utopians).

5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.

As a contrary data-point, I'm an increasingly luddite programmer who doesn't care at all about 5G, but I live in a town that is kind of a hotbed for conspiracy stuff and I tire of the latest scare always going round without a plausible causal mechanism.

You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.

It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...

I work around RF sources professionally. I'm intensely interested in any biological effect of the radiation I work around. I have access to journals through work and my old university, and I read primary sources with great interest (and some knowledge, being an electrical engineer). I have yet to find any credible link between gigahertz RF and health problems (except the neck problems that come from staring at a phone).

I feel like the most damning lack of evidence is the lack of correlation between cell phone adoption and the purported ill effects. In the last 20 years pretty much the whole world started holding RF transmitters up to their head, from basically zero beforehand. If there was an effect, it would be epidemic.

Then there are people like me, who are in love with technology, but work with it and science so closely we have a very good understanding of when and how technology can have risks, and when it can have benefits. And when it's impossible to predict.

Who here actually gets excited about 5G? Everything I see about 5G is just full of business buzzwords. No one can explain why [a technical person outside of the mobile telecom industry] should care. Why the hell is there a new "G" if LTE was supposed to mean "Long Term Evolution" anyway?

I've coined the term "orchard picking" for this. If the subject is climate or vaccines, most people will yell "learn the facts" and "follow the science" and generally act as though dissenters deserve every ounce of contempt we can pour on them. On those topics I generally agree, except maybe for that last part. But somehow on other topics - e.g. most discussions of programmer productivity or effects of technology - it's all "meh, here's my anecdote instead" and other forms of pseudo-skepticism. There I tend to break from the crowd. I believe science is a mode of thought, not just another rhetorical club to pick up when it's convenient and set down again when it's not.

Perhaps because everyone here knows there's very little actual, proper science on programmer productivity, and even less of that is applicable in workplace environment.

There is no break from the pattern in this thread. People still call for following the science - they just consider this article's science to be the RF engineering equivalent of Wakefield study.

There is no "meh", just no link found between mobile phones and cancer.

Click links in the article? I feel accomplished with the fact I read the article....

I think the push to make these scientist seam like wackos, is all the money loss for the new tech(and even existing tech)

Oh, and more important than the studies is who is doing them and who is funding them.

Agreed.

> The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.

That’s a pretty strong group.

The pioneers behind reverse transcriptase were ridiculed by their peers for years. As DNA could only travel in one direction. Francis Crick even called the scientist a wacko. But in the end, the 'wacko' was proven correct and won the Nobel Prize for being so. His name is Howard Temin.

Learned all about him from Malcom Gladwell's podcast this weekend. A really fascinating story of someone that wouldn't give in to peer-pressure, because he was convinced:

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/40-the-obscure-virus-...

We have already solved all the worlds problems, unified quantum mechanics with classical physics, cured cancer and figured out how to factor primes. None of these works will ever see the light of day or be taken seriously because of the sources.

That may sound like hyperbole but somehow I doubt it's far from the mark. Tons of modern advances were from novices or unaccredited. Flight, Relativity, Baysian and Boolean logic; Two hicks, a patent clerk, a preacher, and a self-taught math nerd.

Radiation dosimetry is a combination of:

* Frequency of radiation

* Power of exposure

* Duration of exposure

* Where in the human body absorption is occurring

While the effects of the latter three are pretty well understood for certain kinds of radiation (ionizing and non-ionizing) ranging from "acute radiation sickness due to gamma burst" to "listening to the radio your whole life doesn't have a link to cancer", there is truth that a specific band of millimeter 5G has been less studied than others.

However, science follows patterns, and interpolating the existing data to this sub-infrared region opens a kind of wiggle room similar to, but in fact the opposite to, low dosimetry of ionizing radiation that has given the Linear No Threshold model a run for it's money. Except in this case, skeptics are typically concerned about chemical effects due to subdermal heating (not really as compelling as ionizing radiation effects), or debating the "non-ionizing-ness" (which is less common because its even less supported by evidence).

It comes down to a persons personal risk. In my opinion, the sun beats out all non ionizing radiation concerns, particularly when it comes to heating of the skin and subdermal tissues. Wear a hat and sunscreen (against the sun).

Still worth researching and acknowledging the data gap, as the EU does in its metastudy of 40+ years and X00 scientific papers [0], but there's no reason to be alarmed based on the existing corpus of evidence.

[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Edit to add citation

> It comes down to a persons personal risk. [..] Wear a hat and sunscreen.

What's the "hat and sunscreen" protection against millimeter wave cellphone towers, that someone else installed on their private property near you?

I'm not yet convinced the risks exist. But conceptually if there was a danger, there's no "personal risk" argument. We're blanketing the whole area around a tower with millimeter wave/5G, a person cannot opt out.

The sun is a 1000 watts per square meter exposure at your body, cell towers might be 100w if you hugged the antenna then inverse square law to distance to about 0.00000001 watt with a strong signal. Your cell device is a millwatts transmitter, equivalent to an LED light shining on you.

You don't need hat and sunscreen for street lights or flashlights nor would you need it for cellular power levels, orders of magnitude difference in exposure.

Mostly the protection is the inverse square law. Provided you're not holding the device next to your head the exposure is tiny.

A hat and sunscreen does offer some protection against millimeter wave radiation - the had will block some (smallish but non-zero) percentage of the radiation, as will the sunscreen as long as you apply a thick layer.

As far as I know the exposure is a bit like a bell curve.

Right besides the tower you're in a blind spot, then it gets more intense as you move out of the blind spot and then it gets lower as you move further away.

I have a wallet with RFID protection. Could we make cell phone cases and/or glass with shielding that blocks 5G signals, limiting exposure in part of the phone that wouldn't be need to be sending and receiving signals? Basically have a naked antenna and shielded everything else. I am not a mobile phone hardware wizard :)

There is such a thing as RF shielding that uses copper or other conductive metals in a grated screen as a means to block out radio frequencies. While the application is typically used as a means to create telecommunication dead zones, i could easily see somebody capitalizing on this kind of health scare by putting copper shielding in say clothing like a hoodie.

I think when comparing this to the sun there are lots of things worth considering from many different angles.

1. To say this threat is nothing compared to the risks we face from the sun, completely ignores the fact that we have millions of years of evolutionary exposure to sunlight and because of that fact the immune system has become way more acclimated to dealing with it's carcinogenic properties. Of course, our immune systems aren't perfect but considering how much more exposure we all are to sunlight than any other carcinogen, if we didn't have a strong evolutionary tolerance to it; melanoma would obviously be the #1 leading cause of cancer. But it's not.

Now in hindsight, what we don't have evolutionary genetic tolerance for is microwave radiation. While i'm not in anyway an expert in biology or the physics of light, I do have enough insight to know that we should never underestimate the possible negative outcome of any potential problem when it's still just a mathematical theory we're playing with rather than a reality of nature we're all dying from.

I mean, we underestimate and miscalculate these kind of things all the time and it's kind of counter productive that the answer to the question of "When will we learn to stop doing this?" is always "Once, we underestimate and miscalculate, discover our error and become smarter because of it"...

2. The bigger issue this has when compared to the sun is the fact that all of us can agree while there is such a thing as getting too much sun. However, there isn't such a thing as internet that is too fast. We essentially all want to be able to download terabytes at the speed of light so that we can one day be on Mars and be able to seamlessly stream Netflix from Earth while were up there. And while of course there is a speed of light limitation of like i believe 8 minutes, that doesn't mean people aren't going to complain why they cant instantly stream from there.

This is what we need to understand about this issue. There is no limitation to how much radio wave radiation we want when we are thinking of that radiation in the language of the internet, as "Content".

3. When it comes to protecting ourselves from this, if it actually does turn out to be a substantial problem. All the solutions suck.

The radio wave EM shielding for example protects you from the potentially harmful waves. But it also creates like I said, a deadzone.

So putting it in your walls of your home, because you don't want you and your entire family constantly being exposed to the cell tower that might only be a football field length away from your house (as the one near my house is), also means you can't receive or make calls to and from your cell phone. This is a deal breaker for most people, and as far as i'm aware RF shielding isn't like sunscreen where it blocks out most of the harmful light while letting in the some you want. It's an all or nothing solution.

Which is why I think putting the RF shield in clothing like a hoodie would be an interesting venture idea. The shielding protects your body, while your phone is still outside of the shielded area. (although this obviously doesn't protect your face and i don't think RF shielded masks are going to find a market other than antifa)

And another reason why the implications of this would really suck, is that it means were stuck with crappy wires and the companies who own the rights to pumping internet to and fro over them. I am mostly looking forward to 5G because I view it as the primary means we are going to get ourselves out of the era of shitty slow internet and greedy cable company overlords who wouldn't know how to disrupt something if a tv with rainbow bars on the screen hit them in the face.

The thing is that there's really ton of evidence that non-ionizing radiation is not significantly harmful to humans at levels that don't cook you.

If you want to counter that you can't just pile up small studies that might be hinting at possibility that there might be some other effect.

You need a smoking gun. Single study, but bulletproof and large, showing strong effect. Everything else will be dismissed as "maybe, possibly, but most likely not really".

This comment explains precisely why the dismissal from so many here. Correlational studies without a plausible causal mechanism are highly suspect.

As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.

Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause damage to DNA, or has a very large correlation established that does a very good job of controlling for other factors, these studies will be dismissed out of hand.

There's plenty of ways that non-ionizing radiation can result in increased cancer rates. For example, they can induce currents in the DNA (DNA is s molecular wire) which might jam the base excision repair system and prevent it from detecting DNA damage (which is a redox-driven process).

What's even scarier is that this sort of an effect will not be found in a standard Ames test and also is unlikely to be found in highly controlled lab settings, since it requires a second factor - a contaminating primary mutagen - to manifest its effect.

wouldn't all that depend on tge specific signal transmitted? If you just look at random memory access, you'll find that it's not prone to corruption. That didn't stop rowhammer for example.

> As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.

Actually you got that wrong. This was related to real piracy (i.e. people with eye patches on ships robbing other ships) which went down, not software piracy. So the decline of pirates is related to global warming.

(The example came from Bobby Henderson, the founder of the flying spaghetti monster.)

Agreed in principle, however from what I get :

(i) it seems this "non-ionizing radiation" has many parameters that can modify significantly the way it propagates in the environment (and in human bodies), so I'm not sure speaking of non-ionizing radiation in a general way is sufficient to address the problem

(ii) following this reasoning and your comment about "a single study, bulletproof and large": it does seem that it is in fact what is being asked by this group - that time be given for a meaningful and large study of the specific radiation from 5G tech

and therefore requiring that kind of large study before widespread implementation actually seems warranted.

I'd be interested in seeing signatures from people at institutions I recognize and trust. There are a lot of people with degrees FROM credible institutions, but very little in terms of currently being researchers in the field AT credible institutions.

It's not hard to find 250 wackos if you pull random scientists working in random fields at random institutions. Most have no better way to know safety of 5G than I do.

Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.

But an appeal to experts -- with no real experts behind it -- doesn't do it for me. Neither does an appeal to papers based on volume, without a clear description of what they found and how. Most science is junk science.

The scientists' appeal, including a list of signatories and their affiliations, isn't hard to find by following links.

https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal

Likewise for a list of relevant papers:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl...

Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill? Can we dispense with the tired ad hominems and talk about science? A self-proclaimed guess from a self-proclaimed non-expert seems ill placed in a credentialist diatribe.

When the list of people also includes folks who claim to "customize clinical trials to support marketing claims"[0] it is hard to take even experts with solid credentials seriously.

0: http://energymedicineri.com/

Five out of five signers from my country are well-known EHS proponents, and at least three have financial ties to the illness. Having a Ph.D. degree from a well-known university does little to prevent later involvement in quackery.

... I found them, and that's exactly what raised flags.

If a faculty at HMS signed on, that'd be okay. If a ransom person with a degree from HMS does, that doesn't carry the same weight. I was pretty clear about "at" versus "from."

Science isn't a democracy.

"Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust?"

After their primary university admissions scandal? Absolutely not, not that I ever trusted them in the first place (Memphis has a far better medical program.)

Harvard Medical School is good institution but people on the list are not experts in the subject. Autism researchers etc.

I would like to add to this that many academics who study wireless research, specifically MIMO beam forming - aren't particularly incentivized to find issue with 5G. I've spoken to a few who have dismissed health concerns whilst waving their hands about the actual Science. To them this is worth anything up to 10 years of funding and research opportunities in what can be a very competitive research area.

They receive A LOT of funding from cellular companies in particular, any research that throws doubt on 5G could lead to their funding being pulled. Not only this, but most of the interesting 5G hardware is coming from the cellular companies on loan.

My point is: You have a perfect storm for a rushed technology with potential for health risks. Almost every Country on the planet is investing lots of money into 5G and the technology itself requires a significant number more cellular towers to be built in closer proximity to people.

If there is any genuine question about 5G's safety, I would rather stay on the side of caution. It's not as if people will kill over if they don't have 5G immediately. Not only this, the technology will be more mature and the price will likely come down for infrastructure development.

It is impossible to find a control group that hasn't been previously exposed to some form of 2/3/4g radiation .

The article explicitly calls the 200 participants the world's leading experts in non-ionizing radiation. I haven't researched their credentials or examined their research. But if all existing research points in one direction, that constitutes empirical evidence. Of course methodological and statistical problems abound across all academia. The article makes existing research seem unequivocal and argues we need to conduct further research for 4G as well as 5G health effects

Fortunately the article is wrong because the signers are almost all either: 1) long-retired and out of the game entirely, 2) not trained in the field or qualified at all, or 3) known quacks who have peddled this kind of thing for years, or some combination of the three, and the articles cited are all written by that same population (and often published in no-name journals that I could probably get published in) or don't say what the author claims they do (many of the articles explicitly state that they found no connection whatsoever).

So I guess the moral of the story is "don't believe everything you see in pop science magazines," although I would have hoped nobody did to begin with(?)

>Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.

I highly doubt that 26+ GHz will receive much attention. You have no range, you need line of sight otherwise it won't work. At least 3.4GHz (and the other LTE bands) don't have that issue.

Why is being below visible light a factor? Different wavelengths have different properties that don't necessarily map linearly with frequency, such as the ability to pass through your body.

E=h.nu;frequencies under UV have insuffient energy/photon to ionize anything.

I clicked on a few links and Googled a few names. It's roughly what I'd expect: People with few publications now working in other fields, people without scientific publications, but university degrees, people who regularly speak at events from radiation critics, people who are invested in other fringe theories.

People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mark for a piece of science. It means that hopefully it's not complete bullshit. Sometimes it still is, because noone can forbid you to call your journal "peer-reviewed" with your own weak standards of peer review. And sometimes credible journals make huge mistakes (remember the "Wakefield-study"...). Even with only well-performed, non-flawed studies you'll always have some studies saying that something is there that actually isn't. That's simple statistics, you'll have outliers.

"Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results.

Also it's not true that "nobody knows why" cancer incidence has risen. It's a mixture of people getting older and diagnosis getting better. Not mysterious at all.

> People with few publications now working in other fields

I'm surprised this statement passed muster on HN where there must be some number of PhDs now working in other fields. Certainly the ones I know wouldn't take kindly to the idea that somehow, just because they left academia their research can be easily and completely dismissed.

There's nothing wrong with changing fields. But if you tell me "these are the most relevant scientists in the field" and most of them aren't actively working scientists - it looks fishy...

Being such a person is totally fine (I’m one myself). What’s damning is the fact that this list is largely composed of just such people (plus some that are less qualified).

Yeah, this is just a ridiculous way to dismiss the papers. Most authors are "people with few publications now working in other fields". One professor trains 25+ PhDs in their career, and usually all but one or two of them will end up fitting that description.

It's unfortunately common in science for someone who's an expert in one field to think they can easily be an expert in another field and get it completely wrong. Linux Pauling is the most well known example of this.

Furthermore, even if cell phones cause cancer then the risk will in all likelihood be so small that it doesn't justify banning the technology. [1]

For example, eating barbecued meat causes cancer, but it we don't ban it.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU5XkhUGzBs

Wouldn't the difference there be that the person consuming meat is voluntarily consuming it while even people sticking to older tech phones are exposed to the newer radiation? I am no luddite but this would be my argument from a devil's advocate position

But not everyone eats barbecued meat or has barbecued meat near/next to their body 24/7 like people who use cell phones. I can opt out of eating barbecued meat though it carrying a phone close to my body.

> For example, eating barbecued meat causes cancer, but it we don't ban it.

Sure, but the absolute risk is very low and it's probably zero if you add veggies to your meal. And also causality was not established, observational studies on this topic suffering from the healthy-user bias in addition to a lot of confounding factors and in general for nutrition the evidence is very low quality, compared with medication research.

This isn't a boolean. Saying that "this or that causes cancer" is meaningless without giving the risk factor, which has to be statistically significant and in case of meat it isn't.

In other words if you want to compare the risks of 5G with anything, I think nutrition is a really poor choice due to the low standards for evidence we have and due to all the confounding factors and biases.

Not sure if assessing the safety of 5G is easier, but at the very least you can do double-blind studies. At the very least you can compare it with the placebo effect. Which in nutrition isn't possible.

Cigarettes and alcohol too. Radiowave effects, even if they do cause anything, are quite easy to mitigate in humans by wearing clothing with carefully positioned electrical conductor insertions.

"Causes" implies that you will get cancer if you partake. Maybe you mean "increases the risk of". Agreed that your risk exposure might only be fractions of a percent and not worth abstaining or regulating.

I find your certainty regarding the reasons we have increasing incidents of cancer to seriously detract from your previous points.

Most people in the cancer field (I worked in a tangential one) believe that incidence of cancer is due to people living longer (cancer rates go up a lot as you age), and not dying of other diseases first. In a sense, cancer is what you get after you solved the other problems.

"And nobody knows why."

Not only that but the article also leans on the somewhat infamous 'rat study', which produced hugely misleading findings, as explained in a good writeup by John Timmer here (https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/a-critical-analysis-...)

> "Here's a large number of studies saying X" is meaningless in a topic where a very large number of studies have been done. What you need is systematic reviews of the literature that not only count studies, but evaluate their quality and combine their results.

The sixth link in the article will get you what you want: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421...

"The present review - of results published by my group from 2006 until 2016"

Self-evaluation of quality is not quite a systemic review of literature. Neither is research on drosophila melanogaster quite in the same ballpark as research on homo sapiens.

Thank you. The sheer volume of blatantly false comments on this thread is astounding to me.

I haven't read the article, and I'm not a party to the 5G debate, but what you're describing in your comment is a meta-analysis, which is a practice that has produced some of the most controversial findings in recent times. If anything is needed to clear up an inconclusive body of studies, it's better and more reliable studies and experiments, not meta-analyses.‎

Meta-analyses try to find the unknown common truth by reviewing multiple studies and their methods and weighing them accourding to their percieved (really, calculated) quality.

By combining the results of the best studies and giving us an overview of them, meta-analyses really are the best studies we have.

"In addition to providing an estimate of the unknown common truth, meta-analysis has the capacity to contrast results from different studies and identify patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light in the context of multiple studies." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis

Isn't meta-analysis necessary and critical today?

With a potentially large # of studies on a specific subject, some of which may be contradicting, meta-analysis will be done.

Whether by accredited scientists, or institutions who do this on a professional basis with open and established criteria and consistency in approach (though there may still be flaws in the approach); and/or by individuals when confronted with large # of studies, when I feel bias would almost certainly be the primary driver.

While you absolutely cannot eliminate the latter, it feels it would be foolish to dismiss or eliminate the former.

As long as:

a) World is a bit tricky (phenomena difficult to define and isolate; limitations in equipment and measurements; limitations in humans)

b) We use statistical analysis as primary differentiator of significance There will continue to be contradicting studies.

Not disagreeing it's always better to improve studies and experiments, but it feels like meta-analysis of multiple studies is not just a necessary evil, but a good and desirable next step.

Thoughts?

It's... more complicated than that.

Yeah, a meta analysis is only as good as its inputs. Unfortunately many meta analysises read like "we found 20 studies on the topic, but 19 of them are crap and the one good study didn't really ask the question we're asking, so we really don't know". And yeah, there's considerable wiggle room for a meta analysis. But I don't think you'll find any serious scientist doubting the usefulness of a meta analysis per se.

I knew other grad students who'd say, "oh, it's a meta analysis" and then toss it in the bin. But in recent years I've met people who worked on boards for cities and hospitals where they dug though a lot of papers and wrote detailed meta analysis about the larger body of work. They'd comment on things that seemed consistent and inconstant, and tried to help others make well informed decisions.

With a meta-analysis, you do have to look at the whole thing. Phrased like, "when controlled for.." you can't control for some things over 10 different studies. You need to read how they attempted to control for things and why the came to their conclusions.

They are still valuable and you shouldn't just chuck them in the bin.

Can you give some examples of the controversial findings of meta-analysis?

So as to help me best evaluate the validity of the article, what is your background? Are you familiar w/that field? That would help me assess the usefulness of your critique of the backgrounds of people linked to in the article.

> Peer review is a lowest level quality mark for a piece of science.

Peer reviewed used to be the epitome of proof, now it's been relegated to base minimum?

Are you saying that consensus is no longer considered valid proof? (not that I disagree, it's just that this is a rare argument in my experience)

Also the World Health Organization (WHO) is cited:

https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf

"Lyon, France, May 31, 2011 ‐‐ The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer1 , associated with wireless phone use."

The "possibly carcinogenic" declaration is quite weak ("evidence far from conclusive").

Even if it was "carcinogenic to humans", there's a lot of things that are vital to modern society which fall into that category. It's then up to the regulators to guess an "acceptable" limit of exposure.

The author's bias is apparent from his biography:

"Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology."

This article does not represent scientific consensus. It is alarmist, linking nearly every report that supports the author's point of view and offering no opposing points of view. This is not journalism.

Did you see, at the top of the page, "Observations | Opinion"?

Should that absolve them of writing deceptive articles that feed in to a type of paranoia that is fairly harmful to society[0]?

[0]: Not that the anti-wireless people are particularly influential right now, but they're fairly close to antivacciene people in how they perceive the world with an almost complete absence of rational thought.

With every new generation of cellular technology, this question comes up.

This started as early as CT, then DECT, GSM, 3G, 4G and now 5G.

After 30+ years of having consumer grade wireless telephony we are still debating whether the radio signals have any negative effect on living beings.

If we can't draw any conclusion from a sample size that big, then I must conclude that the effects of EM-radiation are so minimal (if any at all), that it is not something I should worry about.

Edit: typo

On the one hand, I think your conclusion is correct, but on the other hand, it took quite some time to establish the health risks of smoking. Because there were concerted disinformation campaigns etc.

It's not like smoking is subtle. Just ask any none smoker, or how people started with their first cigarette. Coughing, dry throat, WTF is happening, I've smoke in my lungs.

> it took quite some time to establish the health risks of smoking.

Same with asbestos, lead in gas/paint, uranium lipsticks, &c.

That is true. However we had multiple areas in the world where we could watch the mobile market basically explode within a short amount of time, there are people using phones for hours daily across time spans upwards of a decade and yet so far I haven't heard of any health statistic correlating with this trend.

Whereas with smoking we can see over ten times higher risks for certain types of cancer-related deaths. That doesn't mean there's no effect due to mobile phones, but I think if it were remotely comparable to smoking we'd see a significant impact by now.

Not really, it was known to be harmful for a long time, whereas there’s no evidence yet that RF waves used by cellphones are harmful.

I remember reading Heinlein stories published in the 50s that refer to cigarettes as 'cancer sticks' and 'coffin nails'.

Genuine question: Is there a name for saying "past evidence hasn't shown this to be true, thus it's likely to remain untrue"?

I was debating a different technology with a friend and he made such a comment, but my response was that the frequency, scope and importance of past technological advancements won't hold a candle to those of the future.

It's just a specific use of either a Bayesian Prior or Heuristic.

The robustness of an item is proportional to its life:

Something which was true/false for 10 years is more likely to remain so for the next 10 than another thing which was true/false for 1 year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

We've also had broadcast radio for over a century now, at much higher power levels than mobile phones.

The pulsed nature of the newer technologies is different enough.

5G is also fundamentally different in one important way. We are moving a way from fewer high powered towers, to a lot more low powered cells. Yes this existed in 4G, but 5G is taking it to the next level.

Remember how long it took for us to finally get lead out of gasoline?

> I must conclude that the effects of EM-radiation are so minimal

Cancer rates are rising and we're not sure why. Is that acceptable?

I see your point but I have a hyper sensitivity to EMF (among other things) and I turn off any wireless technology wherever I can (like Bluetooth, when I don't have any paring devices at home) and many devices aren't comfortable for me to keep, despite me working in an IT industry.

The symptom isn't classified as a disease at where I live, so it's hard to get any decent medial treatments and I'm afraid 5G might harm me even harder when higher frequency typically makes me feel worse without a way to get away from it.

This thread would be much shorter if someone had read this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230

Or not if someone would read this https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3251

Perhaps you don't appreciate how a review looking at 100 different setups & methods and 93 of those all arriving at the same endpoint (RF leads to oxidative stress) represents FAR stronger evidence than a single study showing the opposite under very specific conditions.

Bad formatting in that paper makes it very hard to read.

Overall it seemed to have pretty strong cherry picking feel. Are you sure this paper is objective?

and also this: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914

These are good things to read to understand a consensus that yes, electromagnetic radiation has biological effects.

For people reading this stuff, always search for something called the Odds Ratio (OR), which is a gold standard way of comparing how clinically significant a thing is. For example, smoking has an OR of 60 for lung cancer. A well covered paper on birth control suggested its OR for developing depression is 1.26, and the massive aspirin on heart health study had 0.95 OR of cardiovascular disease in one of the surveyed counties (ie aspirin improved clinical outcome).

If error bars on measured OR contain 1.0 you can’t say if it is helpful or harmful. OR accounts for baseline incidence in a way that RR (relative risk) does not. So it lets you actually choose among behaviors instead of within diseases or outcomes. It informs why it’s possible to tell everyone they shouldn’t smoke (OR is very high), keep taking birth control (because depression outcome is better than unwanted or complicated pregnancy outcomes), and aspirin for cardiovascular disease prophylaxis (very limited side effects, very cheap so even 0.95 is worth it).

I don’t know if there’s a consensus that electromagnetic radiation from electronics has clinical significance. If there is clinical significance it will be a small OR for most outcomes. It won’t be comparable at all to e.g. smoking.

However this is still an imperfect measure. In Japan OR for lung disease from smoking is 15, 4 times better than the US. The researchers speculated this has to do with a specific filter on common Japanese cigarettes but it could be genetics or other things that they didn’t control for (ie BMI and gender matching but not Japanese ancestry). So technology can have huge effects on clinical outcomes but 4x 15 is a much bigger deal than 4x 1.015. My point is that it has its limitations but OR definitely measures something real.

This is a robust framework for evaluating how this research matters to you in a way that does not require conspiracies or investigating the researcher’s backgrounds. Additionally it is widely accepted by legitimate medical practitioners across the world.

Under this framework, the reviews posted here do not document clinical significance, although individual papers cited in them might.

A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR (high RR in mice vs placebo is strong research evidence just not strong clinical evidence). So mouse OR isn’t often predicative of human OR. But this applies to chart reviews too. Still a pretty durable framework.

Keep in mind that many readers here are involved in these technologies. Any safety issues would directly or indirectly harm their interests. Alternatively, some likely feel they understand radio frequency radiation and know a-priori that it is safe; "why, I have carried a phone for years and I've never been nuked like a microwave burrito."

It's an interesting comparison with the vaping thread last week or the week before, where a similar number of comments came to the conclusion that it should be heavily restricted because we don't have enough data.

Your first link was paywalled so I couldn't read it, but the potential issues with meta-analysis papers has been discussed to death already.

The article you linked second, is interesting. He makes some bad claims (The electric fields produced by muscles are strongly polarized contrary to his claim that they are unpolarized) and there is some questionable math, but what I really want to highlight is how he uses the pulse repetition interval in his section on forced oscillation. By his own math, a CW signal at mm-wave frequencies produces no biological effect being to low of intensity. The formula given is proportional to 1/(2pif) so it follows, but he then uses the PRF to set the frequency and displacement and finds that at these low frequencies, the effect is strong enough to be dangerous.

The problem with this though, is that the PRF is how often you activate the transmitter and not the frequency of the transmitted RF signal which leaves us with the perverse conclusion that, mm-wave is fine under normal circumstances but becomes more dangerous the less you are exposed to it.

"However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research."

This sounds like bullshit. What were there changes between 3G and LTE that would make it more dangerous?

More efficient use of spectrum?

Different modulation techniques is the one they're claiming now. For some reason OFDM/CDMA is more dangerous than FM or amplitude modulation (AM) and there are huge biological differences, they claim.

The studies that look at calcium voltage channel activation in cells are easily replicated and point to biological effects.

There is even reason to think that newer modulations are safer precisely because they are more spread spectrum, with lower power and peak power at any particular frequency.

The towers are also spread more densely, with smaller cells and lower power, which also lowers peak exposure levels. For devices, just the fact they only have to transmit a short distance to a local tower tells you about the energy.

You are probably getting more cancer risk for stress hormones caused by the Instagram/Twitter on your phone than the electric field it generates, no matter how 'patterned' or polarised the field is.

From TFA:

"Along with the patterning and duration of exposures, certain characteristics of the signal (e.g., pulsing, polarization) increase the biologic and health impacts of the exposure."

"The latest cellular technology, 5G, will employ millimeter waves ... 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO)"

"massive"? :D The M in MIMO is multiple.

The author of the article himself embarked in a crussade to ban limit EM emissions after publishing a meta-analysis which shown there is correlation between 10 year phone use and brain tumors. Yes. Without accounting for any other risk factor. Because the lifestyle of people who use phones and people who don't are certainly similar.

Correlation != causation. And the author does not ask for caution and research, he asks directly for limits on the technology.

In such matters, there's a strong psychological bias from tech-savvy people to dismiss evidence and side with the technology (not the science, which would include estimation of potential harm etc, but with the technological application, which is assumed as de facto good).

It's a strong self-identification with technology who instills a fear of appearing as a luddite, like the unwashed masses who fear this or that and fall for hoaxes about the dangers of safe substances (vaccines, chemicals) and harmless technologies.

But it can also be thought-stopping, and more emotional based than empirical.

Hm. Sure, some people just point to how the same thing happened with GSM, 2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi... but that's just a fallacy, because we also know that gamma rays, X-rays and UV are harmful, so deductively there must be some grey zone between 3G and hard gamma rays. Since we can't simply infer the health effects with certainty from first principles (let's say from physics/chemistry) we should demand relevant data.

But we have a lot of data (even if not as an enormous pile as about WiFi), and we know that so far the evidence points to no unexpected effects. There are interesting avenues of inquiry about the effects of 50-70 GHz on biology (heating of insects, interference with bacterial growth), of course those effects are a lot smaller than what we already do from air pollution to manufacturing an dumping lot of chemicals everywhere, heating our cities, and so on.

Between Gamma rays and 3G is UV. Between UV and 3G is visible light. Between visible light and 3G is IR, one of which is the heat human bodies give off. Do warm blooded animals cause cancer? Because they're still a far higher frequency than 3G and the wattage of a human at rest is 100W which is roughly equivalent.

Do hugs cause cancer? If yes, then we can start narrowing it down to 3G/5G more after that. But by that stage I think we're doomed as a species anyway.

No, we can quite safely say that visible light also does not cause cancer, seeing as how we're bathed in it daily.

So any proposed grey area would in fact have to be a total surprise outlier, where EM far less energetic then visible light tripped over some biological weak spot.

Visible light is between 3G and gamma rays. Gama rays are dangerous because they can yank electrons out of atoms and thus change their chemical makeup.

It is not about technology, it's about frequency. At low frequency (i.e. less than X-ray or perhaps UV) and low power, there is a strong evidence that EM radiation is safe. And the theoretical models agree with that. So it's not about 5G or 6G or 7G, the details of the technology doesn't matter.

It's strange the relation you pointed with anti-vaxers. I think that the fear to 5G and vaccines are very similar, but it a very emotionally load topic, so mixing them is a bad idea.

For everyone genuinely worried about this: have there been any studies that specifically single out technicians who work on cellular antennas? Long hours every day, getting closer to the antennas than any of us ever do? I'm not suggesting there's a risk, but it seems that if there were a risk, then we've identified one of the highest risk populations for study.

Here's a longitudinal study on about 55,000 Polish military personnel found in the article:

"The cancer morbidity rate for RF/MW-exposed personnel for all age groups (20-59 years) reached 119.1 per 100,000 annually (57.6 in non-exposed) with an OER of 2.07, significant at P < 0.05."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8717316

5G has been paused in Brussels [1] already due to the companies inability to prove it is safe. The energy output of 5G antennas is apparently higher than 4G and higher than their current laws allow.

[1] https://www.brusselstimes.com/brussels/55052/radiation-conce...

How the hell do you prove it's safe? Try proving carrots are safe.

This is just some youtuber soccer moms spreading FUD.

The normal way to do it is to conduct a long term study with control and test subjects. Carrots have been studied for a long time, as long as you consume them in moderate amounts they are safe but in large amounts you can get all sorts of issues. It's probably the same way with 5G radiation but we don't know yet.

And I don't think the government of Belgium consists entirely of youtube soccer moms but there are probably some of them :)

EMF Scientist appeal is BS. It's random collection of people (many retired cranks) with PhD.

Autism researcher from Harvard Medical School is not convincing.

Why not? Studying of not-neurotypical behavior in humans is less convincing than studies of rats?

It seems odd to associate risk with "NG". Any risks would be more likely related to the frequency spectrum being used and the signal power than to the modulation techniques and communications protocols. 5G can be deployed in the same frequency bands that are currently in use, although higher frequency bands are also anticipated.

Interesting observations:

- More 5G towers operating in the same frequency/power range as 4G means less RF energy emitting from your Phone to the (now nearer) tower.

- The emissions from the towers to the phones should also be less, because A) they need to emit less energy to reach the (now nearer) handset, and B) the "fountain coding" in 5G means that less data packages need to be transmitted to carry the same data payload as 4G. Of course, this is counterbalanced by the probably higher data usage under 5G.

- Beam-forming millimeter-wave antennas cannot penetrate flesh, so won't try to establish links in that direction. Regular 4G frequencies do (and, use your head as an antenna element). So, transitioning from 4G frequencies to millimeter-wave should reduce the amount of your-head-is-an-antenna utilization for a set amount of data...

When I started reading about the radiation safety of 5G, I started understanding that most early operators were not interested in the safety aspects as much as the money aspects of it.

And if anything, what time has shown me is that the for-profit people will not operate these right. As regular people, we can of course choose to stop buying 5G phones, as long as we do have other sources of Internet.

My personal mobile internet usage has shown me that it is grossly expensive, underutilized and doesn't majorly solve a speed problem for me - only remote connectivity.

And no, I don't need more cancerous substances than there are. Especially after watching Chernobyl, I sure as hell don't need radiation messing around with my cellular structure.

In short, 5G is unnecessary in most cities, and the risks outweigh the benefits, IMO.

At least the EU has a very good tool for grey area scenarios like this where evidence is still lacking either way: the Precautionary Principle.

>>We conclude that, because scientific knowledge is incomplete, a precautionary approach is better suited to State obligations under international human rights law.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...

I feel EMF from WiFi/LTE with my head. Someone wants to study me?

As soon as there is a high-bandwidth transmitter very close to me - headache comes in seconds.

I've done blind tests holding non-remitting iPad or the one streaming 1080p movies at high bitrate and easily able to tell when there is no radiation.

I think it would be interesting, and potentially beneficial for you, to do a proper double-blinded test of your claim.

have you conducted a double blind test? Label two which are streaming, and two which aren’t. Ask a friend to pick two at random. Repeat many times and record results.

Many people have been studied who present with these symptoms. They are consistently unable to detect the presence of fields.

PS I can already see fault with the experiment in which the streaming devices are likely to be warmer.

I haven't done a double test, so will definitely try it. Re: device temperature - don't even need to hold the device. It could be just very close to me if the bandwidth is high.

Once I set at the table next to my friend's open laptop and started feeling those head 'cramps' immediately as he started downloading a large ISO. Put on pause - the feeling subsides in a minute.

Doesn't feel like a pain, def. not sharp pain, but a significant discomfort, sort of a little brain earthquake. I don't know why EMF sensitivity is not properly studied, as it's def. not a myth!

I've had someone in my flat make almost exactly that claim. They made it while unknowingly sat immediately next to a busy WiFi router. The claim did not go well for them.

Also worth noting that an iPad playing high bitrate video will be warmer than one which isn't; I could probably tell the difference too.

so you're suffering from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...

It has been widely studied and no proof of such an ability exists. Would love to see some proof of this from you

I agree with other suggestions: do a proper double-blind test. Others mentioned temperature difference, but I'd also suggest coil whine as an alternative hypothesis - and it's known that many electronic devices emit audible noise that's picked up (and really uncomfortable to) small subset of the population, especially when under load.

I have the same sensitivity towards Bluetooth waves. I can tell when Bluetooth is on if I'm hugging it. Because it hurts when it does.

I used to get a very sharp pain in my head, above my ear, when making outbound calls, just before the recipient would pick up. Nobody seems to believe me, and I have never had the motivation to try to prove it to anyone, but it got to the point where I would hold the phone away from my head until the person answered.

It began with a Sony Ericsson, but happened across a couple of different phone brands over the years. Still happens extremely occasionally now (maybe twice a year) with my iPhone.

I'd be interested to know if the signal strength is suddenly spiked when a call is connected.

I get a sharp pain in my head above my ear from my glasses. The skin right there is very sensitive. Just rubbing things (including phones) causes the same senstation.

Not when it comes to GSM, it has consistent timeslots for active calls. The dial tone is modulated the same way as speech data and can be considered active.

This is called Hypochondria.

Link the peer reviewed study.

I'm amazed that I scanned a bunch of comments and it seems like no one read the article and noticed that it's not actually a proper SciAm article, just an Op-Ed.

Let me repeat, this is not a proper SciAm article in which some actual academics condense their interesting research into something more easily understood by people outside the field.

This is an Op-Ed. It's an opinion. And more specifically, it's an opinion from someone who is most certainly not unbiased.

"Op-ed" doesn't mean anything these days. I've seen plenty of "proper" Scientific American articles that get basic physics horribly wrong, or have a very heavy slant towards a particular point of view.

They have been repeated reports that wifi is linked with male infertility... and I haven't yet seen this disproved as quack science...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4503846/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6240172/

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190429005914/en/Stu...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1607551X1...

I definitely would like to avoid 5G beam forming aimed at my crotch if I wanted to have more children. But isn't that sort of close to where we all hold our phones when we are siting? Yikes.

That first article is published in a journal I’ve never heard of, studied a total of 27 mice, and has a strange study design that doesn’t consider random effects.

Thanks for those articles.

On the damage Wifi is shown to do here, let's say it doesn't only show up in sperm but also in other cells.

Now imagine a pregnant woman, the unborn child being a girl. She's five months into her pregnancy. The unborn girl has at this point in time, in her own ovaries, already developed fully all the egg-cells she'll have for the rest of her life. Now imagine damaging those cells. How long before that shows up? Two generations.

It pains me to see pregnant women carelessly using an iPad on their belly to watch Netflix.

Sorry for ranting, thanks again for the info.

This article is going to have a lot of influence in civic debates about 5G. Everyone in the US recognizes Scientific American; now the anti-5G folks can say "even Scientific American says it could be dangerous!". And they'll be right, it does say that.

The article writer is a known "truther" of the field. But I like his view, I believe we need opinions from his end of the spectrum, but I've also read a few times comments such as this:

https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis...

To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised (in a good way!!) that Moskowitz got published on Scientific American at all.

The sun is way worse than 5G. Saddens me for the academic world to see such study / or see an argument based on a number of “scientists” instead of an argument of quality.

Bad headline.

5G covers a huge spectral range starting at, yes, 5 GHz.

5GHz is coming out of every home router built in the last couple years. If it was unsafe, we would probably know about it. (Let’s say ‘unsafe’ as in, “it is ‘unsafe’ to drive a car” since we need some baseline risk tolerance).

> If it was unsafe, we would probably know about it.

The article claims this is in fact the case. Quote:

"We are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation."

I've clicked a few cited papers and they are all behind a paywall, so I can't make my own opinion how justified this claim is.

We have heard about these increases since wireless landlines were introduced.

I would be more likely to believe this risk if it was showing up as hand tumors since most people are now carrying phones far more often then holding them up to the head.

It would however be interesting if the known decrease in male sperm count worldwide was actually attributed to cellular devices in the pocket.

There seems to be many “all or nothing” arguments here.

How about a “maybe it’s a factor and we should do some research first because we just don’t know” argument?

Honestly, my alarm bells ring when people get this polarized and passionate about a topic that shouldn’t be that intense.

It's pretty simple: nobody wants to be the kook who won't use cell phones, so it's a contest to see who can be the most aggressively normal.

Maybe they're killing us, but damned if I'll be that guy.

I would think the more important safety risk from 5G would be that it's going to cause interference with weather-forecast satellites.

A small increase in cancer incidence seems like less of a danger than hurricane path predictions being off by 300 miles less than a week out (https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/5g-buildout-likely-to-put-we... and many others)

I'm seeing a lot of people support or dismiss these findings for bad reasons. Hilariously, some people are dismissing papers because "the authors have a history of publishing papers about this stuff". In other words, papers on X are wrong because they are about X. This is reasoning on the level of "God exists because the Bible says He does, and the Bible is true because God wrote it". It's just going in a loop and spitting back your original preconceptions, without actually processing the evidence. You can't actually learn anything that way!

I scanned through some of the mouse studies, but they all had the same problem for me: to see effects, they blasted the mice with huge powers, on the order of 1 W/kg absorbed. For reference, the human body itself, through all its metabolic activity, barely generates that much. If you were absorbing anything near 1 W/kg of power at any frequency, you would start overheating, as if you'd just stepped out into the midday sun. Increase that by a few times, and you would probably shortly die, by literally being cooked. So I think most of those studies can be safely discarded. Anything is bad for you at those crazy intensities, which are far higher than what you get from a cell phone.

Of course, this leaves a lot of other studies that may or may not be more solid -- but without more time I can't draw any solid opinions.

It seems theoretically impossible for non-ionising radiation produced by 5G or any other radio emitters to cause cancer as there's no known mechanism for it to induce carcinogenic damage, so a priori we should expect that 5G is safe until shown otherwise.

Joel Moskovitz was co-author on a meta-analysis (https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2008.21.6366) that claimed to find a link between mobile phone use and brain tumours. However, this was a meta-analysis of case-control studies, which is the weakest form of study (worse even than a prospective observational cohort study). The problem here is they essentially had to ask people who did or not have tumours how much they used their mobile phones and trust them, which introduces the obvious issue that people with brain tumours who had heard that phones may cause cancer are probably going to report higher usage of mobile phones than those without tumours. Moskowitz even notes this in the discussion of his paper. He even notes that other, better, better, prospective cohort studies have found no evidence for a link between cellphones and cancer (https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/93/3/203/2906436), but dismisses the study because they looked at subscription data rather than examining 'actual exposure to mobile phones' (which his study didn't do either).

This fear mongering, with no a priori theoretical justification and no evidential basis from people who've checked anyway just to be safe, muddies the waters and distracts from real environmental problems like air pollution causing respiratory diseases. This isn't quite as bad as promoting antivaxxer positions, which are imbecilic because the benefits from vaccines obviously outweigh the costs even if they did cause autism, but it's getting awfully close.

Mutagenic effects can come from many sources, not just direct modification of DNA. Anything that interrupts or interferes with the replication process can easily influence the quality of the output. Tumor Treating Fields [1], for example, use ~150-200kHz alternating electrical fields to mechanically disturb microtubule formation to corrupt mitosis and destroy cells in the process of reproducing. There's nothing remotely ionizing about this process but on the fringes of effect it could result in damaged but not destroyed cells.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5035531/

> his was a meta-analysis of case-control studies, which is the weakest form of study ... Moskowitz even notes this in the discussion of his paper

Sounds like he's noting that the link found is (as you say) weak to non-existent. Which supports the claim in this Scientific American article: that studies are inconclusive and as such we have no reason to believe the technology is safe.

Also worth pointing out here (as I have elsewhere) that the ACSH link is not from reputable org. It seems to be the only link people are posting and re-posting to rebut Moskowitz's research here on HN.

If the link is "weak to non-existent" and our a priori thinking is that it should be perfectly safe, shouldn't we default to it being safe? I'm not against also running studies to make sure we haven't missed something, but this seems like an unfair standard that we don't apply to other forms of things we expect to be safe a priori.

I'm still just outraged at this "5GE" hoax being played on us by AT&T. They should have called it "5GL" for lies!

It wouldn't matter if there was direct evidence linking 5G to cancer. "Global Industry" sells us things that cause cancer. They sell us things made with things that cause cancer. There is literally no part of the planet that isn't polluted with these materials. (Just one example...https://fortune.com/longform/teflon-pollution-north-carolina...)

I wish that I weren't so cynical, but I just don't think that anything would stop the initial deployment of something like this.

The amount of money that is expected to be made by content creators, network operators, and everyone in between, just makes it incredibly unlikely that health concerns would be taken seriously.

Unless you could force these companies to account for health outcomes as a real cost of doing business and not an externality that could be fobbed off on the legal system or public budgets...I just don't see how you change it.

There are a lot of arguments for and against this, but what's not controversial is that widespread 5G is going to significantly impair our ability to forecast weather by as much as 30%.

23.8 GHz is the frequency water vapor in the atmosphere emits, which is what weather radars are looking for. A bunch fo 24 GHz signals all over the place are going to screw it up.

Potentially a more informative source on this topic:

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...

Maybe AT&T's stunt with 5GE (fake 5g) is a necessary tactic to get regular people comfortable with 5g so when it actually comes out the mindset is along the lines of "I've had 5g for years and haven't dropped dead so these health claims must be FUD."

i don’t know why 5G is so important when not only is 4G pretty good, but 4G is better than most wired internet i’ve used in the US and Europe.

My vote would be fix the often abysmal wired networks first.

When I saw the headline I thought that this might have to do with digital security, and I was both interested, and confused as to how 5G had anything to do with digital security. I'm disappointed to see that in reality it's just this tired old debate again. Low-power non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation is not dangerous to biological beings.

I'm not a scientist but have worked in the telecom industry. My understanding is that regardless of 4G/5G modulation, it's all just RF electromagnet radiation, using the same frequency allocation as old analog television transmissions. Besides, given the frequencies used, there will be difficulty having the RF get through building walls.

> massive inputs and outputs, known as MIMO

MIMO is Multi-Input Multi-Ouput, surely?

There does appear to be such a thing as Massive MIMO, which they might mean?

So what happens if you're standing in the path of a milimeter wave beam from a tower trying to reach a user behind a wall?

MIMO, active beam steering and paths with reflections. In theory. In practice, we'll see, but probably you'll have to hold your phone high to provide some clear line of sight between the antennas if you want those blazing fast speeds.

I'd recommend watching this video of a real-world 5g test https://youtu.be/_CTUs_2hq6Y - The speeds are >1gbps when you're effectively next to the 5g nodes, while it would reach <400mbps while going around walls and would jump between LTE and 5g (in an attempt to be on the fastest network).

Apart from possible health effects, is anyone else concerned about 5G eventually being used for real-time CCTV surveillance networks with centralized facial recognition?

The higher bandwidth (up to 10 Gbps) and higher cell density should support quite a few simultaneous video feeds to a central government location.

The government doesn't need to do anything. Advertisers will deploy the technology and when the government wants access, all they have to do is get a warrant or maybe even just ask nicely.

Or lease direct access. Lots of companies make bank by selling to the government access to their databases, even when said database contains information you'd think the police (or whomever) would already have access to, such as public records info.

Pretty sure anyone setting up CCTV does so on a wired network. Why the outrage now when your scenario has been possible for years (piping CCTV footage to a central location)?

Yes, I know it's been possible for years. But 5G would lower the deployment costs dramatically (assuming the operator gets a good flatrate data deal) and it enables connecting moving objects like buses and trains into the network.

You are right that the slippery slope has been started already a while ago.

This is already the case. I highly recommend you attend any physical security exhibition, CCTV vendors will happily demonstrate the capacity of their facial recognition appliances. (And that’s business grade commercial, imagine mil-spec)

Releasing things into our daily environment without adequate testing is likely why so many men are infertile now compared to a few decades ago and we don’t know why. Sperm counts are halved for example. At least there is some research in this case, which is nice

Why is this a headline? This is a title for a research paper. A headline would be "We have reason to believe 5G is unsafe." Until then this is could just be viewed as lobbying, if I were the cynical type.

All arguments about the safety of 5G seem to speak about how the waves interact with human cells in isolation.

What about the combined energy and interference with the myriad of other waves our bodies are subjected to?

I spend a lot of time in public transport, and on internet in general. I never paid for 3G or 4G on my smartphone. Only wifi. OSMAnd for maps, etc.

5G is also pretty bad for the environment (netflix, instagram, snapchat are also pretty awful). The amount of energy and resources you need to make all those electronic is gigantic, not to mention the lifespan of a smartphones is so short, smartphones vendors are now trying to add more and more features to make customers replace their phones.

I'm really dying for any electronic brand to release durable hardware, and I'm also eager to have minimal smartphone OS that consume less CPU and memory.

I can't understand that race towards higher bigger everything.

How exactly are they "bad for the environment"?

Would you prefer we revert to manufacturing plastic VHS tapes, then distribute them by diesel trucks like we used to in the good old days?

Would you prefer people get their morning news on broadsheets made from the bleached pulp of rainforest trees?

Or would you like to go back to the good old days of AM radio when the inadequacy of the receiver electronics was compensated for by sheer power at the transmitter, to the tune of megawatts of broadcast power?

You're probably one of those people who would prefer to breathe in lungfuls of woodsmoke rather than bathe your skin in the harmful rays of electric light.

I believe he's implying we don't need to share all that information, period.

I agree.

Remember: reduce, reuse, recycle is a hierarchy. Reduction is far more effective than the other two.

Constantly replacing antennas, smartphones, having large datacenters, network infrastructure that consume a lot of energy is bad for the environment. Video is a big offender. Instagram and facebook feeds also consume a lot of memory and energy.

Even storing document as PDF instead of paper might be worse after all.

If at least smartphones would be designed to last 4 or 5 years it would make a big difference.

Wirth's law is also an excellent way to describe how computer software is most often horribly designed, and it also plays a huge role in how we could have cheaper and eco-friendly devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

> You're probably one of those people

Lowering yourself to snarky comments is not helping your argument.

Allegedly streaming a single 2 hour HD feature length movie online consumes the same amount of energy as boiling "10 kettles" of water - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/energy-used-in-streaming-...

How much water does it take to purify the silicon used in your phone?

>I can't understand that race towards higher bigger everything.

I think it's called growth-economy. Solving things creates new exciting possibilities, which have problems that need solving. We're never satisfied, and that's a good thing. Otherwise we would've stayed in caves

We need to get smarter about the damage our progress does though. I am not saying we need to stop looking to better our lives. But the life we have now is at great cost to the environment and indeed our own species. The electronic gadget abundance specifically comes at a great human cost to those in third world countries. To say nothing of the environmental cost.

> I think it's called growth-economy

More like "growth-economy with massive hidden externalized costs" - from the obvious like pollution and climate disruption, to subtle ones like economic pato-incentives that distort markets and prevent them from doing their jobs...

> Otherwise we would've stayed in caves

Yeah, but we're long past that state. A cave man can safely externalize stuff like recycling, and even most of food production to NATURE. We can't.

I love growth-economy per se, but our current brand of it is messed up, and markets don't seem to be good enough at pricing all the nasty externalities. We need to invent quickly some extra devices that price this stuff in at a global scale (doing it per country CAN'T work!) IF we want to keep our beloved growth-economy!

Otherwise we'll default to the crappy solutions of ducktape-enviro-socialism + state-capitalism + islands of "free" markets here and there, dragging ourselves through a new f dark age from war to war...

5G is really replacement for a WIFI.

What do we do instead then? Just give up and stick to using 4G?

If it is truly unsafe, yes. And develop a new next-gen wireless technology. Just because someone developed it does not mean we have to adopt it.

The serious issue here is the inability to opt-out. There is clear doubt about it's safety. Do those with doubts get to opt-out? Definitely not.

So my summary from the comments here is that almost all scientific study is junk, except when one is certain themselves it isn't.

Bias in research is real, and now there's a list of things that make you crazy, including:

- Evidence that cell phones might not be the best thing for you

- Evidence that a vaccine might harm some people

- Evidence that some medical convention is wrong

All of these are things that we absolutely need to know if true, but even good evidence towards these points is dismissed as noise because there's a pseudoscience culture surrounding them.

It's really frustrating to see both social and scientific progress hampered by idiots acting as such.

Why not have carrier executives install 5G base stations on their houses as a publicity stunt?

The mantra of radiation safety is reduce the risk.

In that sense, an improvement in the energetic profile is potentially helpful.

An xray or a plain ride is completely fine, but pilots as well as patience have some upper limits. xray is hard alpha radiation, but do you know how xrays are created?

X-rays are not alpha radiation. Alpha radiation is composed of alpha particles, aka helium nuclei. X-rays are EM radiation.

For others (like me) to whom the name of the author (Joel Moskowitz) is unfamiliar:

He is a wifi / cell phone radiation "truther" who thinks the EMF in everyday devices causes cancer

https://www.acsh.org/news/2007/02/16/cell-phone-dangers-stil...

The fact that this is in Scientific American, even in the Opinion section, is simultaneously a testament to the openmindedness of science, and quite sad.

After reading his ideas, I think we should all feel a little lucky that Trump hasn't made hime the head of the FCC.

This is the second article I've read on SciAm's _blog_ platform that has disappointed me with its pseudo-scientific tone. The previous was a rant[1] against GMO which prompted considerable dissent[2]. I get that the blogs authors have more editorial freedom, but opinions that stray so far from the scientific mainstream puts the fine magazine's reputation at risk.

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/broccoli-i...

[2] https://kfolta.blogspot.com/2019/08/scientific-american-dest...

is simultaneously a testament to the openmindedness of science, and quite sad.

That brings to mind the old saying, "don't be so open-minded your brain falls out."

Also, I'm pretty sure Trump is very much not in the group of "cell phones/EMF/etc. cause cancer" believers.

Or the classic aphorism of the Space Marines: "An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded."

To be fair, his views don't have enough of a pro-business bias to them for the current (or most) administrations.

Speaking of a pro-business bias, the ACSH: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_on_Sc...

fair enough.

it's a true statement, though, that conventional scientists and experts in EMF don't feel there is any real risk of these wavelengths.

I personally just think we could live without 5G.

I was hoping for some security implications....

We also have no proof it is not safe..

Maybe 5G is the Great Filter!

Check at the bottom

> ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

> Joel M. Moskowitz

Anything about him worth mentioning? After a quick search online, at first glance, he looks like a reputable researcher.

Does he have industry ties that we should be aware of, reputation issues, conflicts of interest, something else?

> at first glance, he looks like a reputable researcher.

The man been trying that "cellphones give you cancer" since at least 2009, with his earliest attacks being closer to some new age metaphysical bullshit, and only later he started to pull some scientific argument.

He has no real science background, no medical background, he is a psychologist. His "academic network" includes people going into homeopathy, antivaxing, GMO and something bordering on new age and conspiracy cults.

Why UC Berkley still keeps him around, I have no idea.

I am also unaware of this topic, but this[0] is the second google result when you search his name.

[0] https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/28/uc-berkeley-psychologis...

Genuine question: what is the point of this comment?

What's the point here?

He's been spreading arguably misleading information about this topic for ages.

For others (like me) to whom the name is unfamiliar:

He is a wifi / cell phone radiation "truther" who thinks the EMF in everyday devices causes cancer

https://www.acsh.org/news/2007/02/16/cell-phone-dangers-stil...

After reading his ideas, I think we should all feel a little lucky that Trump hasn't made hime the head of the FCC.

edit: posting as primary reply, because the point is important, but was downvoted because of how obliquely it was made.

Is it just me or are all the links people are posting in this thread to debunk this scientist from the same domain?

I hadn't heard of ACSH, so checked their about page:

> a pro-science consumer advocacy organization

A consumer advocacy org. Not a scientific research council, as —I would argue—their name highly implies.

Their about page also says:

> We do not represent any industry. We were created to be the science alternative to “news”

The top-3 links in the references section of their Wikipedia page that seem to contradict this line:

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/0...

- https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/american-counci...

- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/09/magazine/obam...

well, I was curious about the New Zealand "researchers", first on the list

Tracy Chandler, BSc (Hons) MBChB FRNZCGP FNZSCM, PGDipSEM, Cert Dermoscopy, Cert Homeopathy, MACNEM member.

Homeopathy? ummm...red flag.... ok... maybe an anomaly.... who else from NZ?, huh, no one from any credible research org.

I assume you're North American and so upset mainly by the absence of an 'MD'. MBChB is an equivalent.

Having an additional 'Cert' in homeopathy would be like having a CS degree but also certifying in AWS or Azure products, for example, which wouldn't even necessarily say that I endorse them, perhaps just that I have clients that might like to see that certification.

A cert in homeopathy would not be like certifying in AWS or Azure products. It would be like having a CS degree and then getting a cert in computer shamanism where you were trained in the proper chants and symbology to fix computers just by shouting at them.

Equating certifying in a stack or methodology like AWS or Azure with homeopathy lends it 1000X more credit than it deserves.

By all means certify in herbology or natural medicine but if you are a real (equivalent or otherwise) to a medical doctor and you certify in homeopathy you are legitimizing fake bullshit and you should be judged for it. Homeopathy preys on the sick and desperate and deserves no slack.

Maybe this seems overly harsh but people I care about have paid thousands for this bullshit and the smooth talking bullshit salesmen had way to much ""science"" on their side.

wrong assumption, I'm from New Zealand and am aware of most of the reputable (mainstream scientific) research orgs here. The original article made a big deal about those who are supporting a call to action to give legitimacy to the concern. While I have no problem with further research, I was interested in seeing research from credible researchers that have some link to a credible research organization that I'm aware of. None of the New Zealand people meet that criteria (though they may still have done legit research).

Is 5G tech at the same Millimeter waves frequencies as those used in airport scanners? I've heard mm scanners as considerably safer than the old backscatter x-rays (although full of false positives and no better than random chance at actually detecting things).

Yes, sort of. Backscatter X-ray is ionizing (much smaller than mm - about 0.0000001 millimeters, so something like EHz - ExaHertz). While 5G new radio is 60 GHz (5 mm), like WiMax supposed to be.

Airport mm-wave machines are somewhere around 24-30 GHz (so around 10mm). (source: https://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_l... )

So far concerns are about insects (heating) and bacterium (antibiotic resistance "could" develop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261425 ). Though the heating effect is probably negligible compared to how cities already radiate a lot more heat and insects are loving it.

Furthermore, if there is any serious new/strange/second-order effect on biology we would have already seen it, as people blasted lab animals with every kinds of EMF and we got only the coincidental expected flukes.

I don't know about other people, but unless it's proven to be safe beyond a doubt, I'd be worried about deploying 5G. I don't think the small benefit outweighs the possible risks.

We have no reason to believe that any computer system and/or software is safe because bugs always pop up... I know of no software that is perfect.

The usual luddite/neoDruid garbage, all of it. The market for FUD is always a bull market, you might say.

the usual luddite garbage.

Define safe.

At the end of the day I think I can agree on one thing; That we should make an attempt to definitively understand long term exposure.

He is not arguing that 5G is dangerous. He is pointing out that there does not seem to be enough research available to state as a fact that it is safe and that, as a consequence, we might want to be cautious.

That's a very reasonable general approach. Whether his proposal to stop 5G deployments altogether is proportional to our understanding of the potential risks, if any, is debatable, to say the least.

> That's a very reasonable general approach.

If made in good faith, yes. I’m not convinced that this is the case here, however, given that the author is fundamentally at odds with the scientific consensus on 2G, 3G and 4G safety, without acknowledging that he’s in the clear minority. In fact, he claims that the majority of relevant experts have signed the 5G moratorium, and this seems to not actually be the case. I actually think that disagreeing with the consensus, based on limited but potentially valid evidence, is completely acceptable. But he goes further and pretends to be in the majority, and that contrary evidence only marginally exists.

In sum, he makes demonstrably false claims about the current state of the scientific consensus, which makes me sceptical of everything else he says.

I think this is a reasonable approach in general. Whether it is made in good faith or not is a red herring and does not change anything.

What's more important, since you mention the 'scientific consensus' and his claim that there isn't enough data is: What is the consensus on 5G (I suppose that means mmWave) and what are the studies it is based on? That would allow to make a factual comment on his claims about health hazards.

Wow. We’ve been in denial about potential health risks of mobile for years. But now there’s a risk that Chinese tech companies might corner this market, suddenly its time to worry about the health risks?

> We’ve been in denial about potential health risks of mobile for years.

Citation needed.

> Cancer is not the only risk as there is considerable evidence that RFR causes neurological disorders and reproductive harm, likely due to oxidative stress.

I mean it can't be good all this radiation exposure. As far as I know, people living near large electrical wire high tension poles are at a higher risk of cancer already.

I think so much can already be done with the network bandwidth we already have available. Just using a better protocol on top of HTTP, like everything switching to HTTP2 should be a huge improvement.

How much bandwidth more do we really need, we have hit the limits in terms of video on what is noticeable by the human eye already.

> As far as I know, people living near large electrical wire high tension poles are at a higher risk of cancer already.

As far as you know from what? This might sound harsh, but this is just fearmongering.

HV power lines are, in an electrical sense, very far away from you. Even if magnetic radiation had some health effects, (which as far as we know, it doesn't, which is why MRI's are incredibly non-invasive to people without metal implants of some sort), you are not getting any of that from an HV power line.

The only people I know spouting such things are either charlatans^W salesmen trying make a buck or people that have no understanding or training in electricity. It can't "jump out at you". A power line is not a radio.

There are plenty of microwave towers and satellites and cell phones to be irrationally afraid of. But power lines? Like it just screams "I do not understand electricity or am trying to make a buck off those that don't." There's no radiation coming off that power line that gets to you.

> I mean it can't be good all this radiation exposure.

The light bulbs in your home spew out radiation. The heating of your home is all spewing out radiation. "Radiation exposure" is meaningless without considering whether or not radiation at a given wavelength will interact with your body in detrimental ways at the given power levels (of course, if you heat your home too much, or set fire to it, the infrared radiation/heat will kill you; but we don't for that reason conclude heat is inherently bad) or not.

Talking about "radiation exposure" without being specific about those things is as meaningless as suggesting eating is bad for you because some things are toxic.

Some radiation is very bad for you. Some is essential for you to some extent and dangerous for you if you get too much. Some just won't interact with your body in any way that matters.

> As far as I know, people living near large electrical wire high tension poles are at a higher risk of cancer already.

There is some very limited evidence that shows that strong electromagnetic fields may have some limited effect specifically for incidence rates of childhood Leukemia, but notably only at levels found at too few houses for the researchers to get a large enough sample size to be able to draw conclusions either way. In other words: We don't have any clear evidence of that. We have some research that may hint at some link under conditions to rare for us to have anything conclusive.

It's worth researching, because even a very minor increase in risk would have substantial long term effects, but it's not something that really has any relevance to the safety of 5G at all, any more than the fact that too much infrared radiation (heat) will burn you. They're different things.

[1] provides a detailed walk-through of different claims, sources of electromagnetic fields and radiation and what different studies say about this.

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...

There was an increase in leukemia associated with proximity to electricity pylons at one point. They found that it was caused by the herbicides they were using to stop plants from growing up around them and getting in the way of maintenance. Change the herbicide and the leukemia goes away.

The last question is interesting. Our eyes create an image with ~ 1 Gigapixel resolution at frame-rate equivalent > 120 Hz.

For real VR/AR, 5G is not fast enough, would have to work in the THz regime for wireless (wow, nature has a huge bandwidth requirement...). Interesting thing about THz is that most electronic materials breakdown and stop working.

Higher bandwidth brings us closer to obviating wired home internet.

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