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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (2155)	9/22/2000 7:55:55 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12229

<font color=blue>M + X = C Here are the sources of rem for most Americans. I suppose it's similar for most people in OECD countries. physics.isu.edu Radon is the biggie - over half the total dose. Gee! I'd have guessed about 20%. We can discount medical x-rays since people won't use cellphones while they are getting medical x-rays, few of which would go into brains anyway. So people could use cellphones while having chest x-rays. Same for nuclear medicine. I'm looking for energy levels which need that extra M boost to reach ionizing energy. These all seem to be ionizing without M. Certainly Radon decomposition is. So are medical x-rays which I suppose are over a relatively narrow spectrum. Same for nuclear medicine since those doses are also intended to be ionizing to smash up cells. That leaves consumer products, other, cosmic, terrestrial and internal. Total = 33% of the total. Most of that 33% will be ionizing in it's own right, not needing the M energy to bust a bond. Normal background risk: epa.gov <For the entire dose of radiation we accumulate over a lifetime from natural background radiation, the risk of developing cancer is estimated to be about one in one hundred. > ...contd

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (2155)	9/27/2000 12:28:37 PM
From: Richard Belanger	Respond to of 12229

Maurice, my ionized friend, I think we’re beating a dead horse, but since it is the “write what you like thread” . . . <I don't see how there can be no 'molecular' effects with 10 rem. There must also be other molecular, organism and population effects at 10 rem.> OK, you got me there. I misspoke. What I should have said is that no effects have been discernible at the population (epidemiological) level. Molecular and even cellular effects are discernible at lower levels. But we don’t know what happens between that level and expression in the whole organism. There is even some evidence to show that small doses are beneficial in that they induce an “adaptive response” that make the creature less sensitive to additional doses. <So we know that 360 mrem does the doings. But you say that 10 rem does nothing.> We don’t know that and I didn’t say that. It is certainly very likely that 360 mrem/yr has an effect on the overall background mutation rate, although there are other factors at play (chemical, thermodynamic, biological malfunctions, etc.). <The quality factor is required to convert rads to rems because, for example, a microwave signal will not absorb into the electrons, even with watts of dose, so there won't be ionizing until thermal molecular cracking is caused.> No, the quality factor is required because biological effects are too complex to be quantitatively predicted by simple M+X formulae. If I zap a cell culture with, say, 10 rads of alpha particles, I will observe a higher mutation rate than if I zap the same cells with 10 rads of X-rays. That’s because there is a lot going on at the molecular and cellular level that cannot be predicted by energy deposition rates averaged over a whole gram of material (definition of rad is “per gram”). The quality factor is necessary to relate observed effects with dose. That is precisely why you will not get the Nobel Prize for some 1+1=2 postulation that completely neglects the complexities of biological systems. <What we need is the quality factor for M + X radiation.> Yes, that is the whole point. The quality factor must be determined by measurement. My guess is that (assuming we had perfect measurement systems) it would be a very small fraction of one. A very, very small risk factor, like a zillion other things we encounter each day. <Anyway, what's a Hugo? I think I prefer 4x Nobels.> Some would argue that 1 Hugo is worth 4 Nobels: wsfs.org 'The Hugo Award, also known as the Science Fiction Achievement Award, is given annually by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS).' Rich

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (2155)	12/26/2000 9:04:56 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12229

MQ + X = 2C M = microwave radiation Q-factor = quality factor of microwaves X = ionizing x-rays C = how many brain tumours form Useless Medical study too small and poor quality to detect the low level of MQ effect on brain tumours. planetit.com They counted only 469 people with brain tumours and compared them with 422 people who use cellphones who didn't have brain tumours. If one of those people with a brain tumour had it because of their use of a cellphone, this study would not find them. If there were 4.69 million people with brain tumours, that would be 10,000 people with brain tumours due to cellphones. That is a LOT of tumours. Since there are about 4.6 billion people who will be using cellphones in a few years, and 1:1000 with brain tumours is a reasonable sort of approximation to how many people get brain tumours, [that's a wild guess and I suspect it's more than that since I know of a couple of people] then we could expect about, need calculator...um... 9808 people to get brain tumours due to cellphones. Maybe those 10,000 people don't matter in the grand scheme of things, but they will if you are one of them. People get excited about far fewer people than that dying in commercial aeroplane crashes. They don't fly! Since the numbers could be much bigger - maybe 10 of those 479 had tumours from cellphones and that might be possible within the margin of error of that study. And if 1:100 people get a brain tumour in their life, then we are dealing with much, much bigger numbers of people with brain tumours due to cellphones. So, I guess we need the study, because the report sure doesn't prove to me that there are no brain tumours from cellphones or even that the numbers are trivial [which is what I think the case will be when they actually know the effects]. Regarding the comment "There is no evidence...blah, blah, blah"> That calls for the old reply; Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. Which always bears repeating. Mqurice planetit.com <Study: No Link Between Cell Phones, Cancer by Kim Renay Anderson [ December 21, 2000 ] Cell Phone use does not cause brain cancer, according to a new report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study compared cell phone use of 469 brain-cancer patients to 422 cancer-free cellular users and found found that there was no increased risk of developing tumors, said Joshua E. Muscat, research scientist at the American Health Foundation, the lab that conducted the study. AMF's findings agree with those of a U.S. radiation expert who last year said there was no evidence of a link between mobile phone use and cancer. Muscat noted that longer studies must be done from the moment a person begins using a cell phone to the moment actual symptoms of cancer show up, especially for cancers with certain characteristics. The International Association for Research on Cancer is conducting a continuous study, and future tests are in the planning stages at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he said. Funding for the study was provided by the National Cancer Institute's public health grants and the Wireless Technology Research LLC, Washington, D.C., a group supported by the wireless industry. On the other side of the Atlantic, a group of researchers have warned against cellular use. A British consumer group recently reported that hands-free mobile phones could actually more than triple the brain's exposure to radiation. In the United States, headset use by motorists has already been legally mandated in some cities, including Brookline, Mass. Some observers expect the rest of the state to follow suit. "In the future, an increased number of cell phone users will be using headsets, but right now most cell phones don't have this capability," said Tole Hart, analyst at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn. But the latest report is unlikely to comfort the skeptics, said Larry Swasey, analyst at Allied Business Intelligence, Oyster Bay, N.Y. "If a connection is found between wireless and cancer, the public will claim that the industry knew it and covered it up," said Swasey. Reuters contributed to this report. >