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New Swiss studies claim 5G increases body temperature of insects
- ducttape12 7y agoI haven't much looked into 5G. Considering that 95% of the time I'm on WiFi anyway, I really don't get this push for faster and faster mobile speeds. (especially if there's potential to damage wildlife and us with it)
- jazzyjackson 7y agoGiven that 5Ghz wifi barely goes through walls I couldn't believe when I read 5G was being tested on mm wave (24 to 86Ghz). Seems to me the point of it is to install a transceiver on every light pole to have higher resolution surveillance.
- mac01021 7y agoIf it's going to harm wildlife, the technology should be forbidden, without qualification or exception. If not, I don't feel the need for faster speeds than what I get, but I would be very interested in getting more data per month at the same (or lower) monthly price. If a cellular provider could give me internet connectivity (LTE speeds) at a price of something like $1 per gigabyte I would drop my household's cable service in favor of that right away.
- sneak 7y agoBy that logic, we shouldn’t build cities or buildings. I am pretty sure most people do not agree with this position.
- EB66 7y agoNot quite. Cities and buildings provide tremendous benefits. These benefits, presumably, outweigh the costs of harming wildlife to construct them. The OP is arguing that the benefits of 5G are objectively minor and therefore not worth the cost of causing mass harm to a broad swath of wildlife. I agree with the OP's position -- I will gladly keep my ~50Mbit 4G speeds if it means we will prevent the collapse of various insect populations.
- saagarjha 7y agoYeah, I feel that "without qualification or exception" is not a tenable position. We harm wildlife all the time: ideally, we don't excessively harm wildlife (where "excessive" is a constantly evolving standard).
- mac01021 7y agoYou're right, I articulated my position extremely poorly. The needs of people and civilization should often win out over the needs of wildlife. But almost always in a way that sacrifices only wildlife within a confined spatial region and almost never in a way that threatens an entire species. If there are species living around the globe that might not be able to continue their current role in the global ecosystem in a world where 5G is pervasive, then we should not allow the use of 5G in the vast majority of the world. The consequences, for humans, via trophic cascade or whatever, would be extremely uncertain. Are the benefits of 5G really compelling enough to brave them? Certainly they are not compelling enough to me.
- orev 7y agoA very large part of it is Marketing people dying to have something new to sell people. LTE has reached market saturation, so 5G is the only thing they can use to sell people new phones and new data plans. They don’t care that they have setup this perverse system where they sell people on faster speeds, but then add data caps to deter them from using it. A less sinister take might be that faster speeds allow each device to get off the air faster, enabling more devices to be used in the same area. But that’s mostly a technical solution and I highly doubt the advantages rise to the level that the Business side has started pushing it. Salespeople just see the commissions.
- freyr 7y ago> "Marketing people dying to have something new to sell people" Not just marketing people. Everyone at companies making the equipment (Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei), the chipsets (Qualcomm), and rolling out the networks (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint) wants a piece of the pie.
- sneak 7y agoIt’s not for faster speeds for individual users. It’s for maintaining reasonable speeds for when everyone’s default mode of communication is real-time wireless 4k video streaming; that is to say, preserving the current level of service for early adopters as our usage patterns become mainstream (and thus consume 5-10x more bandwidth in aggregate). Also, things load pretty slow right now.
- endorphone 7y agoLike you, I never feel needing more with a good LTE connection. It's faster than I've ever needed. Having said that, the promise of 5G is that it brings such an enormous bandwidth from a frequency perspective that it literally could be a broadly distributed very high speed connection technology for fixed locations. Purportedly one of the reasons Google abandoned their fiber project was that ultra-high speed for huge numbers of users with 5G would make fixed infrastructure for the last mile redundant. We'll see.
- munchbunny 7y agoI'll take actually getting LTE speeds consistently (and getting the advertised speeds from my ISP) over a move to 5g any day.
- sehugg 7y agoPaper here (not sure if this is the one cited by the article, but sounds like it): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22271-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22271-3
- cadence- 7y agoInteresting. I would like to see more research - especially with humans. That waves used in 4G cause harmful effects on humans was proved to be not true. But those mmWaves for 5G are much higher frequency, and they get absorbed by more materials. Perhaps by human body too? It wouldn’t be healthy to be constantly exposed to waves like that. I definitely would like to see more research in this.
- balp 7y agoMost, almost all animals are mostly water. About 2GHz you have a frequency that resonates with water, it's gets stopped by water, including rain. E.g. it's energy goes into the water, this is how the microwave operates. For this reason it's traditionally considers useless as radio transmission. And turned into a global free frequency span. Making this radio space used by all kinds of devices that you have at home. Wifi, Bluetooth, etc. There is tons of research of how radio and other waves effect the human body.
- gsich 7y agoAbove 20GHz you mean.
- nullbyte 7y agoInaccurate article.
- zamazingo 7y agoI cannot find a link to the study or studies mentioned.
- endorphone 7y agoBasically blog spam that cites an activist group that claims to have "published studies" that were published a year ago, having nothing to do with them. It is of course a concern that should be looked at, but we're currently in the "fear monger" stage with 5G. Those people who do the studies are the good people, but the people who take it and misrepresent it leverage fear of change/the new.
- mac01021 7y agoBut isn't it a concern that should be thoroughly addressed before any government permits any use of the technology within its jurisdiction?
- devoply 7y agoThough I can't say what you are saying is not true, in the case of electromagnetic issues I think it's the government which is not really doing it job because profit is more important. The NIH already showed that cancer can be caused by 2g and 3g in rats. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/high-exposure-radio-frequency-radiation-associated-cancer-male-rats https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/high-exposure-... https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/416515-theres-a-clear-cell-phone-cancer-link-but-fda-is-downplaying-it https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/416515-theres-a-clear...
- jjoonathan 7y agoThe "mice in a microwave" studies wouldn't need to resort to extreme dosages if they could cause cancer with realistic exposure levels. Yet they always resort to extreme dosages. Reading them makes me feel more comfortable around my cell phone, not less comfortable.
- endorphone 7y agoWe know, unequivocally, that high-power radio waves in certain frequency bands can cause tissue heating (e.g. it isn't ionizing radiation like what you see in UV and beyond, where photons have enough energy to displace electrons and cause unfortunate events, but just that it slightly increases the energy state). This particular study put very high power outputs right beside rats from gestation in the womb to their death, and paradoxically saw that their average lifespan was increased, though there were other cited ailments (which could be simply due to higher lifespan tissue temperature). Ideally you don't have a cell transmitter right beside you from birth to death. The average exposure is many magnitudes lower. And given that heating is the only scientifically possible outcome, it is a pretty well studied area, but we should surely keep doing more.
- ycombonator 7y agoDoes FCC work with NIH or other agencies before they approve frequencies like 5G ? There was a recent story about a WiMAX antenna near a school and the parents suspected it was the cause of high cancer rates of students in that school.
- jazzyjackson 7y agoI wonder if a good way to illustrate or dispel the harmfulness of millimeter wave radio would be to compare the wattage/sq ft covered. How much energy is carried by these waves compared to 900Mhz or 2.4Ghz radio ? Besides the 'boy who cried wolf' nature of radio causing cancer, I'd also like to know the power consumption for the extreme density required to relay gigabit+ connections across town, I think I heard the range between towers is something like 500 ft? There are, ostensibly, not lower power devices to be processing all these connections.
- devoply 7y agoNot boy who cried wolf, people just love their mobile internet and corporations and governments love their profit to care about the science: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/high-exposure-radio-frequency-radiation-associated-cancer-male-rats https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/high-exposure-...
- saagarjha 7y agoSomewhat important to point out, I think: > “The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.” > The lowest exposure level used in the studies was equal to the maximum local tissue exposure currently allowed for cell phone users. This power level rarely occurs with typical cell phone use. The highest exposure level in the studies was four times higher than the maximum power level permitted.
- devoply 7y ago> The lowest exposure level used in the studies was equal to the maximum local tissue exposure currently allowed for cell phone users. This power level rarely occurs with typical cell phone use. The highest exposure level in the studies was four times higher than the maximum power level permitted. Does this mean in trains or public building where multiple phones are present, even hundreds of phones? 4x seems rather a small margin for harm considering every human is potentially carrying a device and using it at the same time occurs multiple times during the day.
- brunoTbear 7y agoWhat I want to know is who is behind the 5G fear-mongering. I see this all the time and from different places. My poor conspiracy-minded elderly uncle in western Pennsylvania has been had by Fox News and the rest of the insane-right. He sends me stuff like this all the time. What I want to understand is who stands to benefit from 5G not coming to pass. Is it a just one of many conspiracy theories cooked by a Kremlin agency that happened to work in the public sphere? Is there a competing technology stack?
- fnord77 7y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...
- KirinDave 7y agoSo you're suggesting RT is behind a Swiss study?
- tzs 7y agoNo, he's not suggesting that. His comment is a response to the questions asked by its direct parent, not a comment on the submitted article.
- KirinDave 7y agoBuuuuut that was written with something of a suggestion that this study or this report about the study is a bit of FUD about 5g, no? It sure seems like a straight line to me.
- jaabe 7y agoWho benefits from anti-vaccination or flat-earth? Conspiracy theories are probably a lucrative industry if you get enough of a following.
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- davesque 7y agoIt seems odd to me that there are so many anti-5G stories. It almost comes off as deliberate and targeted. I would imagine that the science of what levels and frequencies of EM radiation are safe is settled.
- jonhendry18 7y agoI really doubt that much effort has been spent on determining the effect of constant, pervasive mm-wave signals on insects.
- RappingBoomer 7y agoyeah, this level of fearmongering almost certainly means that some huge business(es) is having its business model threatened by 5g...is it the ISPs that are being threatened by 5g?
- _bxg1 7y agoAnd on top of that nobody really even wants 5G except the companies themselves (and Trump, apparently). Worse range, worse penetration, more power usage, more expensive phones, all for extra bandwidth that won't even make a difference in regular usage. I wonder if it will die before it takes off?
- sergiotapia 7y agoBirds have started chirping like hell at 3am -- never seen that happen before ever. Who knows how the hell all this radiowave, wifi, and now 5g is raping nature. How can we allow this to happen?
- jazzyjackson 7y agoI often walk home around 3 or 4am and I've noticed birds start chirping around this time since about 10 years ago, what timescale are you giving me? I always thought it was the streetlights, but now I live in a less well lit neighborhood and still hear the early risers about 3:30am. This would be a pretty cool dataset to look at ... I wonder if anyone living in a radio quiet zone could give us a data point !
- sergiotapia 7y ago13 year timescale.
- connorcodes 7y agoI'm not surprised. Millimeter wave can do that among other things.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]