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BBC Rules That Wi-Fi Radiation Findings Were Wrong
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Dec 04, 2007 01:03 PM
from the gee-that's-unexpected dept.
from the gee-that's-unexpected dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "A Panorama programme claiming that Wi-Fi creates three times as much radiation as mobile phone masts was 'misleading', an official BBC complaints ruling has found. The team involved in the research came under fire from the school where the 'investigations' were held for scaremongering, but now the BBC has come out with an official ruling. 'The programme included only one contributor (Professor Repacholi) who disagreed with Sir William, compared with three scientists and a number of other speakers (one of whom was introduced as a former cancer specialist) who seconded his concerns.'"
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Ask Slashdot: How Bad Can Wi-fi Be? 434 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Sunday night in the UK, the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested wireless networking might be damaging our health. Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation', along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations. They rounded-up a handful of worried scientists, but ignored the majority of those who believe wifi is perfectly harmless. Some quotes from the BBC News website companion piece: 'The radiation Wi-Fi emits is similar to that from mobile phone masts ... children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults'. What's the science here? Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation? The wifi signal is in the same part of the EM spectrum as cellphones but it's not 'similar' to mobile phone masts, is it? Isn't a phone mast several hundred/thousand times stronger? Wasn't safety considered when they drew up the 802.11 specs?"
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Science: BBC Kicked out of School Over Wi-Fi Scaremongering 279 comments
h2g2bob writes "Ben Goldacre reports that the BBC Panorama team, while scaremongering over the dangers of Wi-fi, were told to leave the school because even the kids could see it was dumb: 'When the children saw Alasdair's Powerwatch website, and the excellent picture of the insulating mesh beekeeper hat that he sells (£27) to protect your head from excess microwave exposure, they were astonished and outraged. Panorama were calmly expelled from the school.' Should we be pleased that the kids can out-think TV producers?"
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The BBC you say... (Score:5, Funny)
Peter Griffin: We'll move to England, huh? Worst they got there is, you know, drive-by... arguments...
[Meanwhile, in England]
Englishman: I say, Jeremy, isn't that Reginald B. Stifworth, the young upstart chap who's been touting the merits of a united European commonwealth?
Jeremy: Why yes, I daresay it is.
Englishman: Oh, let's get him.
[They drive up]
Englishman: Oh Reginald... I disagree.
[drives off]
Can't these people do maths?! (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as possible interactions with the human body go, the 900 MHz to 1900 MHz spectrum is roughly the same. Both WiFi and cell phones use bursts of transmissions with approximately the same spectral characteristics. So we can simplify the problem and focus only on intensity.
A cell phone that is far from the nearest tower can transmit up to one watt. A typical home router transmits 100 mW (one tenth of a cell phone). A very powerful cell tower transmits 1000 W. However, signal intensity per surface unit decreases as the square of the distance. So if you are 100 meters (300 feet, one-half furlong for our US friends) from a 1-kW cell tower, you get the same exposure as if you are one metter (0.005 furlong, 3 ft) from a wifi router. And of course, all of this is dwarfed by the intensity of signal you get a few centimeters away from a 1-W cell phone.
So test cell phones. If they don't fry your brain, forget about wifi routers and towers, their effect is negligeable next to a cell phone's signal flux. And cell phones were innocented by several studies.
Attention journalists: When you cover technology, either learn the basics of what you're talking about or go back to freelancing for people rags.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Um, not anywhere on planet earth. Typical output power from
Re:Can't these people do maths?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Generally speaking, the higher the frequency the more is absorbed by air. So higher frequencies are actually _less_ dangerous.
Note that that's also why so many businesses are interested in the 700 MHz spectrum licenses for sale over at your side of the great pond. Less absorption means less base stations, repeaters and transmission power needed.
Re:Can't these people do maths?! (Score:4, Informative)
[1] For a good demo of this, put a lump of refrigerated butter in the microwave for 30 seconds without the plate spinning. When you take it out, it will be melted (and possibly under quite high pressure) in the middle, but still cold on the outside. Note that this will only work with microwaves where the food is rotated, not those where the magnetron moves.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As a ham radio operator I have to point out that RF radiation exposure limits are a function of frequency and time, and the higher the frequency you deal with the less time you should be exposed to it!
Some helpful stuff on that for the concern
Re:Can't these people do maths?! (Score:4, Interesting)
So that's 5 anecdotes to your one, take it as you will. Brain tumors have been around for far longer than wireless transmissions, as has almost all types of cancer. Perhaps there is a statistical significance, but anecdotes can't prove that.
Is a headcount the best way to decide balance? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the BBC shows a rerun of Sesame Street that claims that 1 + 1 = 2, do they have to give equal time to mathematicians who claim that it isn't? (Where would they find them?)
If the program was wrong, it wasn't wrong because they had the wrong number of scientists on each side.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
OT: Panarama is getting pretty bad (Score:3, Informative)
I love my BBC but when I have to step back and become objective, not because of the topic, but because of the way information is inappropriately portrayed, I'm a little sad inside.
Matt
Only two people complained? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since this report was published Panorama was broadcast as usual on Monday night. There was no trailing "we got the wifi program badly wrong" apology, so I've complained again about that - we'll see what happens.
It's worth mentioning that the BBC is going through a sustained period of navel-gazing at the moment, ever since the Hutton Report. Among the items for consideration have been such earth-shattering topics such as the name of the Blue Peter cat http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/09/it_fair_knocks_your_socks.html [guardian.co.uk] and whether two pieces of film about an unelected German woman had been reversed between the programme and the trail http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7079070.stm [bbc.co.uk]. In among this, ensuring basic scientific accuracy in a flagship current-affairs program clearly isn't very important.
"Radiation" (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, never mind that 1W of radiation coming out of your phone or Wifi router. There's maybe 100W coming out of your light bulbs (or less if you have Al Gore-compliant lightbulbs). And what's more, that radiation doesn't pass straight through you, a lot of it is intercepted by the body! I think we need a campaign to stop radiation in the 400nm to 700nm wavelength range from infecting our children! Ban it now! That, and Dihydrogen Monoxide...
Bad Science [badscience.net] has lots of info on this and other science quackery.
Misunderstanding Lithium (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact Lithium is highly toxic, and the therapeutic margin (doses at which it can be used in meds without causing the toxic effect) is pretty narrow.
That's why it is forbidden in product that will be consumed by humans.
Also I have some doubt about 30-to-60T and 60Hz being the correct parameters needed, and I have also serious doubt the 60Hz AC current found in houses generates a strong enough emission to have an impact on lithium. But I'll give you the benefit of doubt.WTF ? Lithium - as a ion - is charged, whereas the blood-brain barrier is hydrophobic. Moving the ion around won't make it cross the barrier, it would just get stuck against it and refuse to move further (the size orders aren't the same : the lithium would have to cross a width several order of magnitude it's own radius. And path has defavorable properties on its whole length).
What you need is either
- changing the properties of the barrier (for an example see how electric fields are used to transfer transgenes inside bio-engineered cells. It's not used because it makes the genes move (like in a electrophoresis gel) but because it makes the properties of the cell surface change and it becomes transiently permeable to the gene. Similarly ultrasounds are used in needle-less injectors to make the skin permeable to the drug)
or
- special transporter (that what may be the case with lithium, because it mimics closely enough Sodium, and may sometimes be using the same channels).
In fact the "get stuck against the barrier instead of forcibily crossing it" effect is used in some medical NMR image techniques like tractography (imagery of nervous fibres inside the brain). To explain it in a simple way : you make the water vibrate along a specific direction, if there's room for the water to move, you'll get a signal, if the water encounters a barrier, you get none. Thus you can know if the fibres are oriented in the same direction (because water can move along them) or not (because water can't easily cross their borders). Do it for a lot of different directions and you can get a nice map of the overall fibers directions in the whole brain.
There's no water leakage produced by this method with water forcibly crossing the nervous cell membrane (for that you would need to change their surface properties, or change the amount of water channels on the surface like killing-white-cells do).FYI, your confusing with mania & bipolar drugs, which may be based on lithium.
Depression drugs are mostly organic compounds that interfere the metabolism of monoamines (mostly serotonin in most recent product like fluoxetine/Prozac, or mostly dopamine and nor-adrenaline in other drugs).No. Although, not all the details of the Lithium effect are known in details,
the logic of lithium is putting in a substance that was never meant to be here in the first place and thus can interfere by several mean
- concurrence with sodium : it may replace it in some circumstance, but not be processed in the same way by all ionic pumps. Most of the toxicity also comes because of Lithium replacing Sodium.
OR MAYBE
- interfere with the expression of some genes.
OR EITHER
- interfere with the function of some enzymes.There's almos
Re:I have a dream! (Score:5, Funny)
Nice warm bed to get into every night? Yes please!
Re:I have a dream! (Score:4, Funny)
Nice warm bed to get into every night? Yes please!
Re:I have a dream! (Score:4, Funny)
They don't stay warm for long...
Re:I have a dream! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Gamma rays [wikipedia.org] are a form of EM radiation... so they are related (though given that they have a much higher energy I agree that it's not that helpful to compare them in this instance).
Re:I have a dream! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can't wait! (Score:5, Insightful)
1)I think A
2)People with better qualifications say A is a bad idea
3)People with better qualifications have been wrong before
4)Therefore they are wrong now.
5)Thus A is a good idea.
6)People who don't want A are opposed to good ideas, so they must be evil.
7)It is all a conspiracy to tax/ruin our morals/benefit coorporations/steal your freedom/eat babies...
Really, from Homeopaths to Inteligent Designers, it is always the same. "Qualified people are sometimes wrong, so you should listen to my wacky idea instead." It is usually commbined with some conspiracy theory or general criticism of the scientific method interspersed with emotional or irrelevant arguments "Al gore is wasteful and just want to STEAL your tax dollars, hence GW isn't real." etc...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You get a program on a computer, a programme on TV.. english is funny like that.
Re: Unscientific bunk (Score:4, Informative)
I think that's a lot of the problem... people haven't figured out that cell phones and wireless transmissions AREN'T magic. Hell, I didn't even get into wave physics until my second year in college, and that was at an engineering school... what chance does a liberal arts major or high-school dropout have of understanding it?
Re:Is BBC it for TV in the UK? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is the BBC used to offer alot of quality shows and things like Panorama and Eqinox (channel 4) used to be great for those intereting in technical things. Unfortunatly the BBC seems to be slowly deciding to cater to the lowest common denominator, so shows like Panarama have turned into complete rubbish and it seems every new BBC documentary has to repeat itself every ten minutes with flashy graphics. Its not that people want this. Heck recently the BBC editors blog asked what things he should think about when he went off to meet other TV producers at some conference. The 600/700 replies all asked for the BBC to go back to producing challenging and inteligent shows and to get rid of stupid reality tv shows.
The BBC isn't the only channel we get in the UK but it tends to be the best with the most varied tv and inteligent, when you've got the BBC producing the Planet Earth documentary compared to Channel 4's chantelle's throwing a tantrum in the recent big brother, or some old woman killing someone in corrie on ITV what do you think is going to get reported.
BTW the TV channels over here keep being hit by various scandals (From the Blue Peter people choosing anouther rabbits name and not the one people voted for, to various phone in competitions being rigged.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/terrestrial/epg/ [digitalspy.co.uk]
The first five of those are available analogue (which is currently being phased out); everything is available on a series of digital multiplexes which
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When TV got started in the UK, there was the BBC and only the BBC and it was good. This is also the source of the TV tax in the UK. Where as in the US, we had CBS,