One suspicion I've always have is that high frequency radio waves can induce microcurrents in supercoiled DNA. It's been speculated by the Barton lab¹ that the base excision repair error-correction mechanism actively surveys DNA by injecting electrical current into the DNA and 'searching' for lesions which disrupt the conductivity of DNA. Some circumstantial evidence for this is that a major "base excision repair" component has a redox-active iron-sulfur cluster, and at least one study shows that the oxidation state of this iron-sulfur cluster can change how well it attaches to DNA.
The mantra that we always hear is that if the radiation isn't ionizing it's harmless. While this mechanism for worrying about non-ionizing radiation doesn't directly cause harm, it's not quite 'harmless' either.
This mechanism would render quite a few results not surprising. Biologically, there are many stages where not having DNA error correction could be more catastrophic than usual. It makes sense that seed germination is one of these; temporarily decreased sperm count in human males would be another.
The experiment to check this hypothesis is pretty obvious, and I'll probably be doing it sometime in the next few years, especially if I can get my nonprofit research org. up and running.
I find this pretty unlikely, for the same reason that nanobots have difficulty communicating: it's hard to make an antenna at those size scales that can receive a signal, much less contribute to chemical-level energy changes.
At the point where the wavelength of the EM radiation is small enough to get detected by DNA-scale antennas, it's probably already classified as ionizing radiation.
DNA molecules are pretty long. And this isn't a Nyquist law issue (I don't think) because there isn't a need to transmit coherent information. You just need to apply enough of a voltage to kick over the redox state of two iron atoms (midpoint potential ~ -20 mV) every so often.
Very, very interesting. Evolution has been trying things for billions of years, and chances are it exploits all kinds of very subtile properties of matter. It's probably found all kinds of uses for quantum effects too.
It would be a rather bad thing if this were the case, though what I'd want to know is: what's the required dose? Radiation diminishes with the square of the distance, so do you have to be right next to the emitter? Or will just having WiFi within, say, 10ft do it?
That being said, there is a solution: use lower frequencies. The frequencies used by WiFi are very high largely because all the lower frequencies are being squatted on. In particular, many devices uses the 2.4ghz band because this is the wide-open "water absorption band" that is only lightly regulated by the FCC. This band also turns out to be the band most likely to be biologically active, as it resonates with the hydrogen bonds in water.
wow, since there seems to be quite a bit of interest in this, I'll definitely be writing up a project prospectus. Check back in January of 2014, which is when my 501(c)3 status will clear. It's a reasonably easy experiment and a yes/no answer can be figured out within two years (that's an overestimate).
some things are better not rushed? I'm planning on doing kickstarter-like campaigns, for sure. The paperwork for 501(c)3 is in the hands of the IRS, so, no reason not to wait.
When I was in 8th grade I did an experiment that found that mold grew better nearer a cathode ray tube computer monitor. I had, however, in retrospect, failed to control for the CRT monitor being a source of heat and light (if not much). I also did not verify it wasn't just due to the one side if the table being closer to something unrelated in my basement. I did very well in the science fair anyway (I have a plaque somewhere, and I think I had gotten it for the state-wide level), as for a "school experiment" the competition bar is quite low, and there are a ton of other factors on which you are being judged than "scientific accuracy". This kind of research is really no better than the people reporting homemade experiments constantly whom we often label "crackpots".
At that level, the experiments have little value beyond getting kids interested in science, which ultimately provides massive value. So let them field their massively flawed experiments by all means...
Here's a crazy thought. What if they use this opportunity to teach kids about the processes of scientific discovery and how it is sometimes based on pure chance. What if they then teach those kids about the scientific method and how to conduct a controlled experiment. Even if the story turns out to be a dud I guarantee the experience would make the students much more excited about science than growing some cress in a window sill.
Or we could explain how a bunch of scientists are crackpots for even thinking such a thing.
I feel like you are arguing with me. I am saying this because a some people are commenting here about what the ramifications of this discovery is; others, asking "serious" questions about the quality of the research, as if they should have taken certain things into account. I am pointing out that this isn't the right context for that analysis.
Also, that education is not news to post here in the first place. This is not a website where children are learning about science. There are tons of "discoveries" made as school experiments: I don't expect to see them on the front page of Hacker News (unless, like, there is some kind of serious interest in the larger science community). ;P
Nevertheless, HN is not a highschool science fair. The reason this story is making the rounds on the internet is very plainly not to get children interested in the scientific process, but rather because wifi somehow being dangerous is a provocative concept and therefore a good way to get pageviews.
This is pretty off topic, but this reminds me of a weird thing that happened to me:
Over the weekend, I rearranged the furniture in my computer room in my home, and had just settled in to this new layout. Everything was working fine: my computer and my internet connection were all good to go. I booted up Counter-strike to play some rounds. However, the in-game server browser failed to find any servers. I closed the game and checked my internet connection: everything was fine. Maybe the master server was down? I went to bed.
The next day, I tried it again, and the same thing happened. No one else reported an issue. I tried playing TF2, and the same thing happened: all online functionality was nonexistent. It seemed like it must be a router configuration issue, but I hadn't messed with that in a while, and my games all worked fine last week.
I was able to play the same games on other computers without any issue. But as soon as I loaded up a game on my primary computer, I noticed the internet would go out for every system in my room. Maybe it was something with Source engine games? I tried a completely different game (some 2D indie puzzle game), and the same thing happened. Every game! The internet would go out, and turn back on as soon as I closed the game. It wasn't Steam either: non-Steam games did the same.
And it ONLY happened with games. Almost every other application worked fine. I was about to reformat, but I first tried booting into a separate OS on my computer and the SAME THING happened.
Finally, I noticed it failed with Unity and also with Photoshop. These programs all had one thing in common: they were GPU accelerated. How did that affect anything? Well, it only started happening after I rearranged my furniture. I had moved my router to sit on top of my computer. I moved it away by 1 foot, and then everything worked fine. It turns out, my laptop has Nvidia Optimus, which toggles between the discrete GPU and integrated graphics chip. When I launched a GPU accelerated program, my GPU would kick in, and I guess its operation emitted some electromagnetic field that interfered with my router.
Back when I lived in the dorms in college, I had a metal loft bed. My desk, with computer and monitor, was underneath it.
At the end of the year, I gave back the loft. The next time I turned on my monitor, the screen was messed up. Distorted with purple waves. I stared at my monitor for a few moments, baffled.
Then I hit the degauss button, and everything was fine. My monitor had been normalized to the presence of a metal frame around it, distorting the magnetic field.
Sometimes even in a room made of wood no large metal objects nearby and then moving a CRT monitor 90 degrees is enough to mess it up requiring it be degaussed.
I'd say the metal frame had ferrous metal in it which is magnetic your monitor was affected by it, I can't see if fixing it. Once removed the source caused your monitor to require degaussing because a large source of nearby magnetism was removed.
As to why it wasn't affected right away when it was new my guess is a lot of monitors have built-in degaussing each time it is powered on, so gradually the metal nearby was affected by the degausing coil in the CRT monitor. When metal bed frame was removed the loss of such a large piece of nearby magnetism was too much for the normal start-up automatic degaussing to handle.
Most new fans use brushless DC motors which have much less EM noise than most older brushed ones (also tend to be quieter). If the motor of the fan is brushed that would explain another source of EM interference.
Did you have a self-assembled machine? This is one of the big reasons for all the shielding in big-brand computers: mitigating the potential for weird interference like this.
Well, when I work on my game, it doesn't feel game-like at all. I'm just coding pretty abstract stuff about voxels and packing cubes for 8 hours. Nothing really feels gamey (yet). It's still a joy to come home and play a few games to relax.
How did they control for factors other than the router? Did they again attempt germination when the 2 devices were completely off? I'm not convinced when entirely separate rooms were used.
Because it's extremely easy to make mistakes during experiments, and people usually underestimate that. Bad experiment design. Uncontroled variables. Strange statistical results dew to small numbers. I'm probably guilty of all of them! Go and find out any physics student/graduate and ask about his/her stranger laboratory "result".
To analyze a completely different example, to proclaim that a new elementary particle has been discovered, the community ask for a 5-sigma (i.e. if they are only measuring noise, the probability that the noise generate a similar signal is only 1/2000000.) The problem is that there are many many many running experiments and a 1-sigma and 2-sigma "discoveries of particles" are usual, but most of the just disappear when more data is collected. And that is done by experts, so the probability of a mistake or error in the design is smaller, but not 0 (remember to check the wires.)
The problem to give too much importance to a not reproduced, not peer review result is that many times it's interesting and feed the people's fears. Probably someone will propose to ban the wifi near the botanical garden and kindergarten because everybody knows that they kill seeds!
It could be good to discuss about these preliminary results, but with a very big warning signal that sais "STILL UNCONFIRMED". The problem is that in most of the press releasses and discussions the warning is just dropped.
"Go and find out any physics student/graduate and ask about his/her stranger laboratory "result"."
As a high school junior, I conclusively proved the strength of Earth's gravity field was ~6.1m/s^2, give or take .2m/s^2. Or at least, if you're willing to take this story and the experiments of high school students at face value, I conclusively proved it.
This isn't a science story. It's a human interest story with delusions of being a science story.
PS: And yes having a normal router having significant effects on plant life though EM radiation is about as likely as neutrino's going faster than light. Heat, contamination, or bad seeds etc is a far more likely culprit.
how is it extraordinary? Decreased sperm count from holding a cellphone in your pocket is a well-known phenomenon and has been replicated time after time.
Your only judgment about likelihood of this is based on your limited mechanistic explanation, biased by the scientific dogma that nonionizing radiation is harmless. If you look above, I posit a quite reasonable (and testable!) mechanism for this to occur.
I would point out these are rather subjective measurements. In that a person is physically looking though a microscope and making a judgement call. Worse, sperm are highly impacted by temperature and negative studies get little attention and often don't get published.
Why such attention? Well in most cases the radiation needs to go through your freaking leg which if your cells are absorbing this em radiation should act as significant shielding for some vary weak radiation.
Compare this to this plant experiment which is blatantly obvious.
agreed (except that pretty sure radio waves will go through your leg). Also of note is that Ames tests on cellphone radiation are completely inconsistent.
It's extraordinary because people have argued about the safety of EM radiation for ages. Despite the arguments, only very weak evidence of interference was ever posted.
There is a very easy solution here. Reproduce it and control all the variables. I cannot fathom why anyone would take issue with this request.
of course a more careful repeat of the experiment is should be done. Without too much prejudice to scientific "professionals" (who very often aren't) - the experiment was done by high school students, after all.
But the post I responded to did not request a repeat, it totally dismissed it by saying it was "almost guaranteed" that other factors contribute, and that's what I take issue with.
I think mainstream media (reaching billions) should only publicize replicated scientific experiments. HN (reaching tens to hundreds of thousands) is not exactly mainstream though, at least not yet.
This is not a forum for scientific research either. This is Hacker News. We are here to read news. It's not news if it's not real, and it's not real if it's not replicated.
I mean.. I'm not going to stop using a mobile phone because of this one experiment - but it is an interesting signal, and I'm looking forward to it being either proven or disproven.
I mean, yeah, we all know, article included, that this isnt necessary conclusive results, but it is interesting. And now these girls got lots of attention for it, and by reading the article it looks like a few academics/scientists are going to pick up on the research and do "real science" on it. Also, yes, it's not like we know/read how well the experiment was controlled. For all we know, they had an excellent control, and that's why they are getting all this press. Who knows, but it happened, the researches are on it, and it was interesting. I don't got time to wait, I want my news this minute!
Google "Hindawi journal scam". These guys regularly send me spam soliciting publications, and are most likely a thinly veiled paper factory. I wouldn't trust a thing I read in a Hindawi "journal".
The RF shielded group evidenced more vigorous growth,
producing 74% more total leader length and 60% more leaf
area than the mock-shielded group, though the number of
leaves produced by both groups was nearly the same.
And
Leaves on active leaders in the shielded group were
substantially free of leaf tissue lesions (Figure 7), but
unshielded and mock-shielded leaves were all affected to
some extent by leaf tissue necrosis (Figure 8)
Would be nice if they had analyzed the spectrum to identify roughly what frequencies/equipment this area is exposed to.
Just like in the electronics-on-airplanes issue, it concerns and wonders me that there isn't more research being done in such basic areas.
A friend of mine did his duty service at an old radar site. When they were bored they'd send a pulse through antenna and the birds sitting on it would flip dead.
Granted the energies involved are not comparable, but a router is active much of the time. Also remember you deal with inverse square law here, the effect likely fades out quickly with distance.
Relevance? You, plants and animals don't live in a Faraday cage, so this would distort the results. But I agree that if they were not school children, but grown up, then they should do the same test but additionally try it again using a faraday cage.
It wouldn't "distort" the results. It would enable you to get results at all. The number of likely uncontrolled results in this "experiment" means that it was worthless for anything other than getting children excited about science.
As said I agree that an "additional" test with a faraday cage should have been done, but not by the children. I expect the scientists to come up with that idea. Having too high expectations from children is counterproductive.
I accidentally developed a new kind of polymer when I was in the 7th class. It becomes thin as skin when wet and hard as hard-plastic when dry plus it smelled like menthol.
The interesting part was that I didn't use oil or something else, but only minerals available in a cheap chemistry-kit.
My chemistry teacher was excited to find that out, showed it to my class, but didn't understand how it worked.
Any suggestion about relatively cheap equipment to measure the RF field with some degree of accuracy? I found many companies selling this stuff but can't judge easily what's good and what not. I'm interested in the 900mhz - 3Ghz range.
A fun experiment if you use an USB WiFi stick - put it on an USB extender cable and lay on any plant in your home. After few days the plant will most probably die in this place.
It's basically anecdotal evidence, something that I personally observed with my plant and my USB stick. Is it necessary to have sources for my own observations?
Literally the strangest thing I've ever read on HN. I've two large plants (spathiphyllum) that sit with their pots on either side of my wireless router. They're as healthy can be, though they do get a little brown when I get absent minded.
The question is probably how close they are to the antennas. In my setup, the USB stick was pasically left on the plants leaves, the plant acted as a scaffold for it. And it maybe I wasn't clear enough - the whole plant didn't die, just the exact spot when the USB stick was touching the leaves.
I don't think it could have been any more than a fluke in your case. If there was some correlation between the two, somebody else would have found it, and we'd all probably be keeping our distance from the things. It's far more likely that the pressure from the antenna resting on the leaf caused the damage, or a lack of photosynthesis caused the area to yellow.
Wow, any reason I got downvoted for this? I'm not a wireless opponent or something (I'm probably using much more wireless devices in my home than most people), just stating my observation.
Nobody knows for sure. At this point there's just a few experiments supporting the idea, no one has made any claims about a possible mechanism for action.
That doesn't mean it isn't true. I would not be especially surprised if 2.4GHz interacted in some special way with plant cells.
I objected to this statement at first, as frequency plays a big part in what electromagnetic radiation does, but then I discovered many microwave ovens do operate at 2.45GHz
Though, before you freak out that you are cooking your family, consider that a microwave oven outputs 600-1200 watts, while a WiFi antenna is typically 0.5-1 watt.
The "resonating" explanation is wrong. Please stop propagating this mistake.
From Wikipedia: "Sometimes, microwave heating is explained as a resonance of water molecules, but this is incorrect; such resonances occur only at above 1 terahertz (THz)."
If the method of action is the same as a microwave, it is just heating you. Human bodies are good at handling extra heat, so I'm not sure that warrants concern.
Dr. Adair was indisputably an innovator in studying microwave radiation, work she began in the mid-1970s while a fellow at the John B. Pierce Laboratory in New Haven. First with squirrel monkeys and then with human volunteers, she placed subjects in a chamber into which she released relatively high levels of microwaves for about 45 minutes, followed by a cool-down period. She focused on what impact the heat generated by microwaves might have — and she said she never found much more than perspiration. She said the monkeys and the people mostly enjoyed the experience.
“Particularly if the environment is cool, they love it when the field comes on,” she told The Times. She said: “It is very easy to sense it and it feels good. If they are in a warm environment, and the field is strong they may start to sweat and they may feel quite uncomfortable. They always have an option of getting out of the chamber at any time, saying, ‘I’ve had enough.’ ”
The main place this would actually be an issue is your eyes. The lenses have absolutely no blood flow, and therefor don't cool down quickly if exposed to microwave radiation. Usually leads to cataracts and such. Crazy right?
This is an interesting point! Thankfully WiFi antennas are very low power. To give you an idea of heating capability, a candle typically releases 80 watts of heat. A WiFi antenna on your mobile device is probably a half a watt, and because it is not strongly directional, your eye will only receive a fraction of this.
I don't know if the signal can affect your DNA, your cells or anything else in any way or not. This or the opposite has to be shown in studies. I think the study with cress is just the beginning.
The mantra that we always hear is that if the radiation isn't ionizing it's harmless. While this mechanism for worrying about non-ionizing radiation doesn't directly cause harm, it's not quite 'harmless' either.
This mechanism would render quite a few results not surprising. Biologically, there are many stages where not having DNA error correction could be more catastrophic than usual. It makes sense that seed germination is one of these; temporarily decreased sperm count in human males would be another.
The experiment to check this hypothesis is pretty obvious, and I'll probably be doing it sometime in the next few years, especially if I can get my nonprofit research org. up and running.
Edit: Footnote [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Barton