How much science? Can you have too much? Well yes, in the wrong place.
We want you the visitor to find this site both welcoming and instructive. Repeated references to arcane and indigestible physics treatises and the finer points of long-running controversies, not to mention refined and specialist vocabulary with technical terminology is an obstruction to the ordinary concerned inquirer.
Likewise, unsubstantiated assertions and hysterical rants playing fast and loose with the facts are uninviting and prove quite unprofitable over the long-haul.
Visiting a website for relevant and valuable factual information should neither be a daunting, ignorance-revealing prospect requiring a degree and a large dictionary, nor metaphorical ear-plugs.
So balance and a middle way as the Bhuddists have it.
Philosophising about science for some of us is engaging and exciting, almost unlimited in its scale and scope due to the protean consequences of its application as technology, especially in the fast moving world of Information Technology, IT. However we do not want footnotes and references all over these pages.
A website confident in its scientific foundations does not need to flaunt scientific credentials but there must be constant and targeted allusion to respected authorities to underpin its claims. Some of these are easily accessed on the web, others are available in the printed word, both constantly evolve. Such sources and relevant references to them will be made on this page, they will vary in level of generality or specificity and issue will doubtless on occasion be made of their credibility and validity, that is the proper course of science.
For a fully scientific, well argued and backed by research viewpoint, that does not conform to the overarching, cosy, industry and regulators consensual ‘conventional wisdom’, media researchers and editors should take note that there is available a distinguished physicist, researcher and expert on the dangers of electromagnetic fields from powerlines. Professor Denis Henshaw is available for interview; please contact the University of Bristol Marketing Office, tel. no. 0117 9288896 or 0117 9260353. Information may also be found on Professor Henshaw’s Group website: www.electric-fields.bris.ac.uk
Here is an update from New Scientist The World’s No.1 Science & Technology News Service
Cellphones may boost forces on biological tissue
Mobile phone radiation may cause a massive increase in the forces that living cells exert on each other, suggests a new study from Sweden.
The research could be important in answering the question of whether the radiation from mobile phones cause cancer or other health problems. Many researchers fear the answer is yes, yet they have been unable to come up with any plausible way that radiation from a phone could affect, let alone harm, biological tissue.
The conventional view is that the only way radio waves could damage a cell would be if they were energetic enough to break chemical bonds or heat the tissue, like microwaves. Yet the radiation given off by handsets is much too weak to produce either of these effects.
Finding an alternative mechanism is the “holy grail” for those who believe the radiation is harmful, says Camelia Gabriel of Kings College London, who is carrying out research into microwaves as part of the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme (MTHR) funded by the UK government.
Ideas have been put forward, she says. “But there are no proven mechanisms.”
Positive and negative
Now Bo Sernelius, a physicist at Linkoping University in Sweden, has a new lead. He modelled the dielectric properties of cells. Water molecules have poles of positive and negative electric charge that are known to create attractive forces between cells, known as van der Waals forces.
These are normally extremely weak, typically around a billion-billionth of a newton. Using a highly simplified mathematical model of two red blood cells, Sernelius calculated what effect electromagnetic fields created by different frequencies of radiation would have on the forces.
He found that the water molecules inside the cells attempt to align their positive and negative poles with the alternating field produced by the radiation. They all end up pointing in the same direction, and this strengthens the van der Waals forces.
According to Sernelius’s figures, in fields of 850 megahertz – around the frequency used by mobile phones – the attractive forces appear to leap to micronewton strength. That is a huge jump of around 11 orders of magnitude, and completely unexpected, says Sernelius.
Sernelius’s investigation is only theoretical, and adverse effects from cellphone radiation are unproven. But if the effect could be confirmed experimentally it could form the basis of an explanation for tissue damage: stronger attractive forces between cells might make them clump together, for example, or cause blood vessels to contract.
The finding is important, says Katie Daniel, deputy editor of the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, which has just published the study (vol 6, p 1363). “It highlights the idea that electromagnetic radiation might act on cells by affecting the attractive forces between them rather than simply causing heat damage to tissue.”
Gabriel agrees that the new mechanism is plausible. But she points out that Sernelius’s model is extremely simple, and what applies to two cells may not necessarily apply to more. “It needs to be tested experimentally,” she says.
Sernelius suggests checking the dielectric properties of different types of biological tissue during exposure to radiation across the range of frequencies normally used by mobile phones, which is exactly what Gabriel and her colleagues are working on for the MHTR. Their results will be published in December.
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It suits many interests to deny both the existence and reality of the ES condition and the sufferers stories any sense or truth. Our intention is the encouragement of sufferers of electrical injuries to speak from their often bitter experience. Some are convinced of the general validity of their unique experience and it is not for us to gainsay them or it. Personal anecdote is not in itself necessarily unscientific, indeed it is frequently the source and precondition from which the scientific spring of inquiry flows and hypotheses are derived. There are problems, I am in pain, I need help and answers, suggestions are made and criticised ergo hypotheses. The next step is making theoretical propositions and then the application of experimental tests. Provided the will is there.
Unfortunately in the real world outside this idealised process it is here there is often a breakdown. Dangers and threats to health are distinctly unattractive research areas for profit-seeking corporations or technology and investment-promoting government departments. Sums like twenty-three billion pounds, say it slowly, the amount paid by one company for its license for mobile phone rights and one hundred billion in a Euro-takeover have a salutary and chilling effect on potential researchers pointing to even quite well established hazards.
Military Applications
Meanwhile the military applications of harmful potentialities proceed so that pulsed microwave weapons able to disorientate, confuse and even stun are traded on the world weapons market. The Pentagon publicly demonstrated their latest jeep-mounted high powered version in 2001. This can drop people to the ground at 500 metres believing all their skin is on fire. Nice. Tasers use high voltage directly as a stun baton or down a stream of ionised water for crowd control.
That these effects exist is undeniable. That universities and research institutions feel trepidation confronting such massive and entrenched mind-sets is also undeniable, let alone contradicting such orientations and asking the holders of these perspectives for finance or support with awkward questions in their contemporary cash-strapped state. Nevertheless there is a more than substantial body of evidence to support our cautionary stance on this topic within the UK and even more from more enlightened otherstates.