> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of The Fool > Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 5:08 PM > To: Killer Bs Discussion > Subject: Re: Cell Phone Signal Excites Brain Near the Cell Phone > > > I realize that you think that, but it raises an obvious question. What > do > > you do when different studies produce different results? How do you > think > > the results of the studies should be weighed against each other? > > > > First who funds the respective studies?
OK, I'll agree that studies funded by someone with a clear financial interest, such as cell phone companies funding a cell phone safety study, are suspect. Studies funded by groups with political interests should also be taken with a grain of salt. >Second, which study has a larger correlation? (Isn't that the n value?) I'm not sure what you are getting at here. If there isn't a correlation, then studies which show the largest correlations are the most wrong. Maybe you are talking about ones with the smallest backgrounds against which to measure results. Thus, looking at a subset of tumors that occur close to the cell phone's location would be a good idea. >Third, size and time scale of the study. That's fine >Fouth, additional related studies that show simmilar / dissimmilar >findings. In the case of cell phones, there are a number of studies, by various groups, most of which do not show an effect. Indeed, the variation is larger than what expects from statistics. Methodology comes into question. The Swedish study which reported a large effect involved self selection because it was a mailed survey. This opens up the possibility of generating a false positive. Other long term studies did not have this methodology and did not report such a result. From the FDA, we have: <quote> Several studies have been recently published on the risk of long term cell phone use (> 10 years) and brain cancer1. The results reported by Hardell et al. are not in agreement with results obtained in other long term studies. Also, the use of mailed questionnaire for exposure assessment and lack of adjustments for possible confounding factors makes the Hardell et al. study design significantly different from other studies. These facts along with the lack of an established mechanism of action and absence of supporting animal data make it difficult to interpret Hardell et al. findings. <end quote> I've seen discussions of the problems with the methodology on websites from European researches that confirm this, so it's not just the FDA. Another point is how directly one can relate the results of a study to the question at hand. For example, simply because a rat fed with an amount of X equal to X times it's body weight develops problems doesn't mean that a human who eats 0.001 X it's body weight of the same substance will also develop problems. Or, we cannot assume, because blood cells on a slide exposed to a flux density of X coagulate, that a flux density of X/A in the brain will cause any problems. > Not all molecules are stationary. Some are more fixed in place than > others. Sure, a lattice structure, such as seen in salt, is much more fixed than water. But, there is thermal conductivity between the atoms in salt. The interactions on the molecular level are very fast, because they are very small. > Transient cells and fluids would probably be less likely to have such > localized heating. But, when we are talking about cells, we are talking about sizes many orders of magnitude greater than molecular sizes...a human cell's mass is ~ 2*10^-9 g, while a molecule of water's mass is ~ 3*10^-20 g. >Not all molecular bonds are at angles that resonate well with those >frequencies. The reason microwave ovens use those particular frequencies >is because they tend to resonate the bonds of water molecules in > particular. By superheated, I don't mean millions of degrees, but enough > of a differential to have an effect (which could in fact be positive in > some cases). I think your analysis is ignoring both scales and the Maxwell distribution of energies at a given temperature. At the molecular scale, water molecules collide many times a second. They don't have time to become significantly more energetic than their neighbors at a different angle before they interact. By significant, I mean noticeable compared with the normal distribution of energies of molecules....if the Maxwellean spread goes from 1 to 1.000001, that's not noticeable. I'm doing just back of the envelope calculations, but I don't think it's even close to that large of a difference. Second if we consider molecules that are fixed, they are fixed only by their connection to a chain of molecules...which offers a means of transmitting energy. So, the idea of a superheated molecule is inconsistent with the basic physics of heating molecules. One way to look at this is to consider the temperature difference between adjacent molecules. Let's assume we have a great insulator with the density and molecular weight of water. If the temperature gradient is 1000 C/cm, then the molecule to molecule gradient is about .0003C /molecule. If the molecular weight is 10x that of water; it's still just .003C/molecule....and this is for an insulator that is far far better than the brain. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
