Apparently mobile phones don't give you brain cancer...
Discussion
For what my ignorance is worth Srebbie, I think that the results of cell damage of ANY sort is related to age. I would argue that during youth when cells are dividing quickly, any damage is replicated throughout later life. Expose a baby to radiation or toxins of any kind and you're asking for trouble later IMHO.
In later life I believe cell division slows down. So the cancer effect takes longer to show. Witness, I believe the: "Mad Cow" effect. Who displayed the effect first.......why...........all those in their 'teens! The people with faster growing cell division.......
The British Radialogical Board are just about the only ones who dispute the facts. By En large the rest of the world says it is so........
The favorite phrase is: "There is no evidence that so and so gives rise to so and so!"
That means that if you have NOT searched for the information, then there IS NONE!......WOW!
ME?...........I'm >.....
In later life I believe cell division slows down. So the cancer effect takes longer to show. Witness, I believe the: "Mad Cow" effect. Who displayed the effect first.......why...........all those in their 'teens! The people with faster growing cell division.......
The British Radialogical Board are just about the only ones who dispute the facts. By En large the rest of the world says it is so........
The favorite phrase is: "There is no evidence that so and so gives rise to so and so!"
That means that if you have NOT searched for the information, then there IS NONE!......WOW!
ME?...........I'm >.....
8Pack said:
In later life I believe cell division slows down. So the cancer effect takes longer to show. Witness, I believe the: "Mad Cow" effect. Who displayed the effect first.......why...........all those in their 'teens! The people with faster growing cell division
Or could it be that older people tend not to want to eat putrid crap from McDonalds, or Farmfoods?
Parrot of Doom said:
In later life I believe cell division slows down. So the cancer effect takes longer to show. Witness, I believe the: "Mad Cow" effect. Who displayed the effect first.......why...........all those in their 'teens! The people with faster growing cell division
Or could it be that older people tend not to want to eat putrid crap from McDonalds, or Farmfoods?
True......
('ere, anyone know what a carrot looks like?) 
Obviously you can't say any thing is entirely safe, because all you end up discussing is what "entirely" means ... but you can put an upper limit on the level of risk. We can say with confidence that mobile phone use does not significantly raise the risk of ear cancer or brain cancer for the first 20 years of use, because there have been a lot of mobile phones in use for 20 years and not only do we not have an epidemic of new tumors, but we can't detect any rise at all. In addition to that basic chemistry would suggest it is very unlikely that mobile phones have any effect because the photons they emit aren't ionising. They are not likely to effect any chemical reactions in your head ... unlike exposure to sunlight and normal background raditation from cosmic rays, radon, etc.
scorp said:The taxis do that round here, I wouldn't worry. Ionising radiation, as mentioned, would be much more dangerous. All that will happen after someone borrows your mobile to talk with their mate in Australia for 4 hours is a slight temperature rise just below the skin. Stitches over one eye and a broken nose may arrive later, suggesting that mobile use might be very dangerous after all.
Hmm, im not convinced, call me superstitious, but a device which can cause noticable inductance in any speaker system seems a bit dodgy to me (no other device except a microwave or power drill does that normally).
turbobloke said:
The taxis do that round here, I wouldn't worry. Ionising radiation, as mentioned, would be much more dangerous. All that will happen after someone borrows your mobile to talk with their mate in Australia for 4 hours is a slight temperature rise just below the skin. Stitches over one eye and a broken nose may arrive later, suggesting that mobile use might be very dangerous after all.
I'm pretty much down with spectroscopy (whacking radiation into stuff and looking at what happens). I personally wouldn't want one of my RNA strands to recieve a powerful jolt of rotational energy whilst my cell division is taking place. Remember folks, we are not talking about the amount of photons incident on an object, we are talking about the energy of photons. It is that energy which dictates the probability of anything nasty happening. Experimental proof so far seems concerned with cooking stuff and temperature rises, not what happens on a molecular level. See, trying to pot a snooker ball with a ping-pong ball. No matter how hard you t
t it with the stick, if it doesn't have enough kinetic energy, it will hardly move the target ball.
My 2p
t it with the stick, if it doesn't have enough kinetic energy, it will hardly move the target ball. My 2p
Well, the energy of a microwave photon - and pretty long microwaves at that - is bugger all (4.1e-6 eV @ 1GHz, ie. about a million times too small to have any chemical effect). So looking at macroscopic effects like heating and finding them to be trivial seems a rational way of looking at it. It's pretty well established by now that RF fields don't harm you if you don't get them strong enough to actually cook you. There are plenty of TV transmitters operating at hundreds of kW without a ring of dead people all round them. 
It seems more plausible to me that the pulsed nature of the signal might be demodulated to some extent - transport of ions across cell membranes probably shows a degree of rectifying action, I'd guess - and interfere with transmission of nerve signals, which are a sort of PPM in a similar frequency range to the pulse rate of the phone signal. But if that effect was significant I suspect we'd see people strapping lots of phones to their head to get high, or dancing druidically round the base stations, which I can't say I've noticed happening.
It seems more plausible to me that the pulsed nature of the signal might be demodulated to some extent - transport of ions across cell membranes probably shows a degree of rectifying action, I'd guess - and interfere with transmission of nerve signals, which are a sort of PPM in a similar frequency range to the pulse rate of the phone signal. But if that effect was significant I suspect we'd see people strapping lots of phones to their head to get high, or dancing druidically round the base stations, which I can't say I've noticed happening.
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