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Men concerned about fertility should limit cell phone use to protect sperm quality, study says
USA Created: 1 Feb 2022
Cell phones are meant to connect people, but they might be doing the opposite by limiting man’s reproductive potential.

Men may want to limit their cell phone use if they are concerned about fertility, according to a recent metanalysis published this past November in Environmental Research, which found the radiofrequency electromagnetic waves (RF-EMWs) emitted by cell phones decrease sperm quality by reducing their motility, viability, and concentration.

​​"Male cell-phone users should strive to reduce mobile phone use to protect their sperm quality," said Yun Hak Kim, lead researcher and an assistant professor at Pusan National University.

Previous research has shown cell phones emit RF-EMWs that can be absorbed by the human body to result in potential adverse side effects on the brain, heart and reproductive function, according to the study.

Because there have been numerous published studies since 2012 on the effects of cell phones and sperm quality, the South Korean researchers conducted a comprehensive review that synthesizes these studies to discover common results, also known as a meta-analysis, to evaluate if exposure to RF-EMWs from cell phones affects human sperm quality.

Out of the 435 published studies and records that the researchers screened between 2012 and 2021, they found 18 studies with 4280 sperm samples that were suitable for statistical analyses.

The study did not find a link between the time spent on the cell phone and sperm quality, only that exposure to the cell phone itself was associated with reduced numbers, decreased movement, and how long the sperm was alive, the press release said.

Although the study reported the findings were consistent with previous studies on the topic, it had some limitations because of low amounts of data on patients and because the cell phones in the study are now outdated.

"Knowing that the number of cell phone users is most likely going to increase in the future, it’s high time we start considering exposure to RF-EMW as one of the underlying factors causing a reduction in sperm quality among the male population," the press release added.

"Additional studies will be needed to determine the effect of exposure to EMWs emitted from new mobile phone models in the present digital environment," Kim said.
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Source: Fox News, Shiv Sudhakar, 28 Jan 2022

Former ICNIRP professor James Lin criticizes ICNIRP over 5G guidlines
USA Created: 24 Jan 2022
“Health Safety Guidelines and 5G Wireless Radiation” by James Lin, IEEE Microwave Magazine, January 2022.

“Some of the updated [IEEE and ICNIRP] safety recommendations are marginal, questionable, and lack scientific justification from the perspective of safety protection.”

Lin is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago, the editor-in-chief of Bioelectromagnetics and a 12-year veteran of ICNIRP (2004-2016).
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Source: Microwave News, Louis Slesin, 08 Dec 2021

FAA Decrees 50 Airports Will Have 5G Buffers
USA Created: 13 Jan 2022
Regulators and the airlines are zeroing in on a compromise that will allow AT&T and Verizon to light up their mid-band 5G networks. These vital wireless bands were supposed to be online late last year, but the FAA expressed concern that the “C-band” frequencies could interfere with aviation. The carriers have grudgingly complied with the delays, but we now expect the new network to be live later in January. However, it won’t be active around 50 airports identified by the FAA as potentially vulnerable to 5G interference.

This disagreement stretches back almost two years. The FCC warned the aviation industry that it was going to auction C-band frequencies for cellular network usage. These waves are in the 4GHz range, just a few hundred megahertz from the frequencies reserved for radio altimeters. These devices are an important part of automated landing systems, which can compensate for poor visibility during descent. There was some concern that even with the buffer, older hardware could pick up interference from the C-band.

So, AT&T and Verizon weren’t able to open up the new C-band frequencies in December, and the FAA secured another delay earlier this month. The wait is only supposed to be two weeks, which gave the FAA time to determine which airports needed special protection from the C-band. Now, we have a list of 50 airports including New York’s JFK, Miami International, and Chicago Midway.

AT&T and Verizon have agreed to turn off transmitters and make other adjustments around these airports. These 5G buffers will be active for six months, at which time the carriers and regulators will be able to reassess. The FAA says it chose these airports for various reasons, including the number of low-visibility days per year and the equipment used at each airport. In some cases, airports are outside the carriers’ proposed C-band markets, and others don’t have the equipment to allow low-visibility landings.

Verizon says it will activate the C-band network on January 19th with coverage for more than 100 million people. AT&T hasn’t announced a new date yet, but it will probably be around that same time. The carriers are anxious to get started as they’ve been severely lacking in 5G spectrum — C-band has a mix of range and speed that makes it ideal for 5G. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has absorbed Sprint and is now sitting atop a pile of mid-band spectrum like a 5G dragon.
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Source: ExtremeTech, Ryan Whitwam, 11 Jan 2022

Aviation groups ask White House to intervene in 5G safety dispute
USA Created: 4 Jan 2022
WASHINGTON, Jan 3 (Reuters) - Groups representing US airlines, aircraft manufacturers and airports urged the White House late on Monday to intervene to delay the use by wireless carriers of C-Band spectrum for 5G, which they warn could cause dramatic disruptions for air travel.

"Time has run out and it’s imperative that the White House intervene today to delay the imminent rollout of C-band 5G signals," the groups said in a statement, issued just hours before the spectrum is due to come into use.

"Starting Wednesday, the disruptions to our country’s aviation system are going to be incredibly challenging, especially at a time when the industry is currently experiencing COVID-related operational issues," the statement from the Aerospace Industries Association, International Air Transport Association, Regional Airline Association and others said.

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Source: Reuters, 04 Jan 2022

U.S. airlines warn 5G wireless could wreak havoc with flights
USA Created: 28 Dec 2021
Major US air carriers warned on Wednesday that plans by wireless carriers to use spectrum for 5G wireless services starting Jan 5 could disrupt thousands of daily flights and cost air passengers $1,6 billion annually in delays.

AT&T (T.N) and Verizon Communications (VZ.N) must delay the plans to use C-Band spectrum for 5G wireless services, United Airlines (UAL.O) Chief Executive Scott Kirby said following a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing, saying it could delay, divert or cancel about 4% of daily flights and impact hundreds of thousands of passengers.

"It would be a catastrophic failure of government," Kirby told reporters.

The aviation industry and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have raised concerns about potential interference of 5G with sensitive aircraft electronics like radio altimeters

Last week, the FAA issued new airworthiness directives warning that interference from 5G wireless spectrum could result in flight diversions, but did not quantify the impact. read more

"Coming Jan. 5 -- unless something changes -- we will not be able to use radio altimeters at 40-something of the largest airports in the country," Kirby said. "It is a certainty. This is not a debate."

Kirby said it would mean that at major U.S. airports in the event of bad weather, cloud cover or even heavy smog "you could only do visual approaches essentially."

Trade group Airlines for America (A4A) said Wednesday that if the FAA 5G directive had been in effect in 2019, "approximately 345,000 passenger flights, 32 million passengers, and 5,400 cargo flights would have been impacted in the form of delayed flights, diversions, or cancellations."

Southwest Airlines' (LUV.N) chief executive, Gary Kelly, told the Senate hearing that if the FAA directive takes effect it "would be a significant setback" to its operations.

The wireless industry defended the technology.

"The aviation industry’s fearmongering relies on completely discredited information and deliberate distortions of fact," CTIA, a wireless trade group, said.

It said that 5G operates safely and without causing harmful interference to aviation operations in nearly 40 countries around the world.

The Biden administration is eager to see the issue resolved. White House National Economic Council director Brian Deese met with Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on the issue Wednesday, sources told Reuters. The White House and the Transportation Department did not comment.

Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn at the hearing urged airlines to work with the wireless carriers to reach agreement.

Rosenworcel, who did not comment Wednesday, has said she believes the issues can be resolved and spectrum safely used.

In addition to agreeing to delay the commercial launch of C-band wireless service until Jan. 5, AT&T and Verizon in November adopted precautionary measures for six months to limit interference.

Aviation industry groups said they were insufficient to address air safety concerns and have made a counterproposal.

United's Kirby said the FCC and FAA "need to get in a room and talk to each other and solve the problem," adding that the issue "cannot be solved on the back of airlines."

A4A said the FAA directive would "materially disrupt airline operations" and said cargo operators estimate it "would have cost them $400 million annually."

The group said "the annual impact cost to passengers to be approximately $1.59 billion" of travel delays.

Wireless carriers have shown no interest in further delays to using the spectrum, which the industry paid more than $80 billion to acquire.

The FAA directives order revising airplane and helicopter flight manuals to prohibit some operations requiring radio altimeter data when in the presence of 5G C-Band wireless broadband signals.

The FAA plans to issue further notices to airlines before Jan. 5 offering more detail on the potential interference and is in discussion about which altimeters could be used under the current mitigation plans.
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Source: Reuters, David Shepardson, 16 Dec 2021

5G now means some flights won’t be able to land when pilots can’t see the runway
USA Created: 10 Dec 2021
Verizon and AT&T are hoping new swaths of C-band cellular radio spectrum will help make the 5G hype closer to reality, but the big mid-band 5G rollout may have a side effect. Airplanes rely on radio altimeters to tell how high they are above the ground to safely land when pilots can’t see, and the FAA is now instructing 6,834 of them to not do that at certain airports because of 5G interference.

The FAA ruled on Tuesday that those thousands of US planes (and some helicopters) won’t be able to use many of the guided and automatic landing systems that are designed to work in poor visibility conditions, if they’re landing at an airport where there’s deemed to be enough interference that their altimeters aren’t reliable. “Landings during periods of low visibility could be limited due to concerns that the 5G signal could interfere with the accuracy of an airplane’s radio altimeter, without other mitigations in place,” FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford tells The Verge.

That likely means flight delays: “These limitations could prevent dispatch of flights to certain locations with low visibility, and could also result in flight diversions,” reads a portion of the FAA’s written explanation.

“We are engaged with the wireless operators, as well as our interagency partners, to do everything possible to make sure the mitigations are tailored to prevent disruptions,” Lunsford tells us.

The FAA ruling does give airlines and pilots an out — if they can prove their airplanes have altimeters that are protected or are otherwise not going to be affected by interference. No airline would comment to The Verge on expected delays, nor would the Airlines for America industry group that the airlines pointed us to.

It’s not yet clear which specific airports might restrict low visibility flight, but you can imagine that they’d likely be in the same places where the carriers are deploying mid-band 5G — with a few exceptions, they’re the United States’ most-populated cities. As of December, the planned rollouts (PDF) are in 46 markets designated as Partial Economic Areas (PEAs), including 1-4, 6-10, 12- 19, 21-41, and 43-50. (You can see a full list of PEAs here (PDF).) The FAA plans to issue notices for specific airports later.

Verizon and AT&T did agree to push back the launch of C-band by one month (to January 2022), and also offered to dial back the power of 5G towers for six months past that to address concerns. Carriers and their lobbying group, the CTIA, have suggested that there isn’t a valid reason to fear interference, but the FAA has so far not been convinced. Nor was an aviation lobbying group, the Aerospace Industries Association, which sent a letter to the FCC on Monday suggesting that AT&T and Verizon’s proposed power limits don’t go far enough for safety. The FCC, not the FAA, is the entity that regulates wireless interference.

While C-band 5G and these radio altimeters don’t actually operate in the same band, the bands are close enough that the fear exists. One possible solution is a band filter for those altimeters, but organizations like the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) have warned (PDF) that it might take years to certify them and retrofit all the planes.
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Source: The Verge, Sean Hollister, 7 Dec 2021

Medical and tech experts warn against gifting smartphones and wi-fi enabled toys to children
USA Created: 24 Nov 2021
This holiday season, “Choose safe toys for your children, not wi-fi connected toys or smartphones,” is the message the Environmental Health Trust is sharing after recently winning a victory in the US. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit. The court ordered the Federal Communications Commission to explain why it ignored scientific evidence showing harm from wireless radiation. Included in the evidence that the FCC ignored, are studies on the impact of wireless exposure to children.

Because children’s skulls are thinner and their brains and bodies contain more fluid, they will absorb more cell phone microwave radiation. The American Academy of Pediatrics has made recommendations that parents should limit cell phone use by children, keep the phone away from the head and instead of streaming wirelessly, pre-download games and videos so children can use the technology more safely in airplane mode.

Studies at National Institutes of Health National Toxicology Program found cell phone radiation led to cancers in the hearts and brains of male rats. DNA damage was also found. In 2021, a study by the Environmental Working Group published in Environmental Health, analyzed the NIH NTP study and concluded that U.S. safety limits needed to be 200 to 400 times stronger to protect children. A Yale Medicine study found that mice prenatally exposed to cell phone radiation had increased hyperactivity and impaired memory.

“Cell phones were never pre-market tested for long-term safety,” said Devra Davis, Ph.D., president of the Environmental Health Trust, a scientific think tank that promotes healthier environment through research, education and policy. “Safety limits for radiation were set 25 years ago, based on 35-year-old science and using a model of a large, adult male. Over a dozen countries inform parents to limit their children’s exposure because they are more vulnerable and will have a lifetime of exposure,” Davis explained. “Parents assume they’re buying devices and toys that have been deemed safe but no U.S. health agency has ever completed a systematic evaluation of the health risks of wireless radiation.”

While all cell phones have fine print warnings about keeping a distance between the phone and the body, the instructions are easy to miss. For instance, the Apple iPhone 13 should not be closer than 5 mm. The Amazon Echo has a distance of 20 cm, or about 8 inches. Laptops and many wi-fi toys advise keeping an “8-inch distance” from the body. When cellphones and wi-fi devices are held close to the body, the wireless radiation absorption can exceed U.S. safety limits that were set for adults more than two decades ago.

Here are EHT’s recommendations for parents this holiday season to keep kids safe:

Gift toys, dolls and games without cellular and wireless connection.

Hold off on getting your child a smartphone.

Choose a regular watch— wi-fi free instead of a smartwatch.

Ensure cameras have a setting to turn the wi-fi antenna off.

Teach children to set devices onto airplane mode so wireless antenna are OFF.

Avoid drones as gifts.

Set up laptops, tablets and computers on a desk and do not let the child use them on his/her lap.

Connect devices with ethernet rather than wi-fi.

Because smartphones, smart toys and other smart home devices have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, we rarely think about how this technology works. But it’s not holiday magic—it’s wireless microwave radiation. All wireless devices from smartphones to wi-fi and connected dolls and stuffed animals, are two-way microwave radios that send and receive a type of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation called radio frequency or RF radiation or microwaves.

Many physicians are cautioning about how this daily exposure will affect children’s health in the long term. Before buying your child a wi-fi toy or a cell phone this holiday, be sure to learn the facts. EHT has resources for parents on how to reduce exposure at home.

Sources:

Environmental Health Trust

Founded in 2007, Environmental Health Trust, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, is a think tank that promotes a healthier environment through research, education and policy. EHT conducts cutting edge research on environmental health hazards and works with communities, health, education professionals and policymakers to understand and mitigate these hazards. Currently, EHT works with scientists, policymakers, teachers, parents and students to promote awareness on how to practice safe technology. EHT was created to promote health and preventing disease one person, one community and one nation at a time. For more information on Environmental Health Trust, visit www.ehtrust.org.

Devra Lee Davis, Ph.D. MPH

Founder and President of Environmental Health Trust, also was the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences. Among the NAS reports she directed were those advising that tobacco smoke be removed from airplanes and the environments of young children.

Exclusive content from CARE magazine
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Source: The Island News, 17 Nov 2021

Satellite Internet-of-Things dreams are crashing into reality
USA Created: 23 Oct 2021
Several IoT startups that have built business plans around combined terrestrial and satellite networks have given up on the satellite portion of their dreams. Most recently, Hiber, a European satellite IoT provider, said this week that it will partner with Inmarsat’s new Elera network for the space-based portion of its network, using LoRaWAN for the rest.

Last month, Hiber filed with the FCC to drop plans to launch its own constellation. Meanwhile, Myriota, another startup, has partnered with a company called Spire rather than launch its own birds. We also saw Swarm agree to be acquired by SpaceX after proving out its business model and launching 120 small sats.

What on earth is going on with this space? I reached out to Tim Farrar, an analyst who covers the satellite industry, for his insights. Y’all may remember Farrar, who is the president of TMF Associates, from a bearish interview he gave on the podcast back in August 2019, when he warned that the economics of providing low-cost connectivity for IoT devices and the costs of operating a satellite network were out of whack.

Indeed, that’s what’s driving companies such as Myriota and Hiber to change their plans, and is what’s behind the acquisition of Swarm. Even with smaller satellites, building a profitable wireless network is hard. On one side, there’s a capital-intensive phase that requires establishing connectivity (in this case, by building and launching satellites) and on the other, these companies must establish a market for the connectivity.

But while the economics of building and launching satellites have changed dramatically, the demand for devices that rely on satellite networks hasn’t kept up. The biggest growth has come from people-tracking products, such as the Garmin inReach walkie-talkies, which people can wear into the wilderness and use to get help if needed. There are also rumors that Apple may include some form of satellite service in an upcoming iPhone.

While this is a real and growing market, however, it isn’t enough to justify the launch of constellations by almost a dozen companies whose goal is to be IoT connectivity providers. So former connectivity players eschew bandwidth and turn to full solutions in order to provide a service that isn’t a commodity and eke out more revenue per customer.

This is the goal Hiber is working toward by providing the sensors and software that can be used to monitor pressure, location, temperature, and even vibration. In that situation, connectivity is just infrastructure as opposed to a competitive advantage, which is why we see the company turning to Inmarsat for service. Farrar noted to me that several companies are making this pivot, and wondered how well they will do.

As he put it: “The issue is, again, if you started your company with satellite techs to make small sats and launch them, then pivoting to analytics and solutions is all very well, but are you going to win against someone who has expertise in that area?”

Another challenge for companies that are using small satellites is that they tend to degrade faster. That means a company that wants to build a viable business selling connectivity has only a year or two to get the satellites (and network) operational, with lots of coverage, and then find customers who will help fund the next capital injection required for the launch of new satellites. Whereas when the satellite companies built giant birds in the 90s, they were able to sit there for a few years (sometimes those companies filed for bankruptcy) before demand picked up to the point where there’d be enough revenue to sustain a continual refresh of the constellation.

According to Farrar, an unwillingness to fight through this cycle without a clear plan for a large customer base is what prompted Swarm to sell to SpaceX. Such an unwillingness is also what helps drive satellite startups such as Myriota and Hiber to look to larger, more well-funded players for the network.

Companies such as Spire, which is publicly traded; BlackSky, which went public last month via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC); and Planet Labs, which will raise more than $500 million via a SPAC; are the beneficiaries of this decision-making. As an aside, Spire is a good example of a company trying to offer analytics in addition to connectivity.

There’s clearly a lot of money and investor interest in funding satellite connectivity, especially for the IoT. While we’re only a few years into the wave of startups built on the premise of everything needing to be connected, some winners are emerging. And those companies are banking on more than simple connections. They need an analytics story and cash — a lot of cash.
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Source: Stacey on IoT, Stacey Higginbotham, 19 Oct 2021

THE MOST DANGEROUS TECHNOLOGY EVER INVENTED, part 1.
USA Created: 20 Oct 2021
In 1995, the telecommunications industry was preparing to introduce a dangerous new product to the United States: the digital cell phone. Existing cell phones were analog and expensive, owned mostly by the wealthy, used for only a few minutes at a time. Many were car phones whose antennas were outside the car, not held in one’s hand and not next to one’s brain. Cell phones worked only in or near large cities. The few cell towers that existed were mostly on hilltops, mountaintops, or skyscrapers, not close to where people lived.

The problem for the telecommunications industry in 1995 was liability. Microwave radiation was harmful. Cell phones were going to damage everyone’s brain, make people obese, and give millions of people cancer, heart disease and diabetes. And cell towers were going to damage forests, wipe out insects, and torture and kill birds and wildlife.

This was all known. Extensive research had already been done in the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Biologist Allan Frey, under contract with the U.S. Navy, was so alarmed by the results of his animal studies that he refused to experiment on humans. “I have seen too much,” he told colleagues at a symposium in 1969. “I very carefully avoid exposure myself, and I have for quite some time now. I do not feel that I can take people into these fields and expose them and in all honesty indicate to them that they are going into something safe.”

Frey discovered that microwave radiation damages the blood-brain barrier -- the protective barrier that keeps bacteria, viruses and toxic chemicals out of your brain and keeps the inside of your head at a constant pressure, preventing you from having a stroke. He discovered that both people and animals can hear microwaves. He discovered that he could stop a frog’s heart by timing microwave pulses at a precise point in the heart’s rhythm. The power level he used for that experiment was only 0.6 microwatts per square centimeter, thousands of times lower than the radiation from today’s cell phones.

Ophthalmologist Milton Zaret, who had contracts with the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as with the Central Intelligence Agency, discovered in the 1960s that low-level microwave radiation causes cataracts. In 1973, he testified before the Commerce Committee of the United States Senate. “There is a clear, present and ever-increasing danger,” he told the senators, “to the entire population of our country from exposure to the entire non-ionizing portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The dangers cannot be overstated…” Zaret told the committee about patients who not only had cataracts caused by exposure to microwaves, but also malignant tumors, cardiovascular disease, hormonal imbalance, arthritis and mental illness, as well as neurological problems in children born to them. These patients ranged from military personnel exposed to radar to housewives exposed to their microwave ovens.

“The microwave oven leakage standard set by the Bureau of Radiological Health,” he told the committee, “is approximately 1 billion times higher than the total entire microwave spectrum given off by the Sun. It is appalling for these ovens to be permitted to leak at all, let alone for the oven advertisements to encourage our children to have fun learning to cook with them!” The microwave oven leakage standard, today in 2021, is the same as it was in 1973: 5 milliwatts per square centimeter at a distance of 5 centimeters. And the microwave exposure levels to the brain from every cell phone in use today are higher than that.

The Navy, at that time, was exposing soldiers to low-level microwave radiation in research being conducted in Pensacola, Florida. Echoing Frey, Zaret said these experiments were unethical. “I don’t believe it is possible,” he told the Senate committee, “to get informed, untainted consent from any young adult who agrees to be exposed to irradiation where you are not sure of what the end result is going to be… Also, that any children that he has at some future time may suffer from this irradiation.” He reemphasized the ethical problems with this research: “I think if it was explained fully to them and they still volunteered, for this project, one would question their mental capacity right off the start.”

Scientists experimenting on birds were just as alarmed by their results, and issued warnings about the environmental effects of the radiation our society was unleashing on the world that were just as dire as the warnings delivered to Congress by Milton Zaret, and the warnings delivered to the Navy by Allan Frey.

In the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, John Tanner and his colleagues at Canada’s National Research Council exposed chickens, pigeons and seagulls to microwave radiation, and found frightening effects at every level of exposure. Chickens exposed to between 0.19 and 360 microwatts per square centimeter for nine months developed tumors of the central nervous system, and avian leukosis – also a type of tumor -- of ovaries, intestines and other organs which in some birds reached “massive proportions,” on “a scale never seen before by veterinarians experienced with avian diseases.” Mortality was high in the irradiated birds. All the exposed birds, at every power level, had deteriorated plumage, with feathers lost, broken or with twisted and brittle shafts.

In other experiments, in which these researchers irradiated birds at higher power, the birds collapsed in pain within seconds. This occurred not only when the whole bird was irradiated but also when only its tail feathers were irradiated and the rest of the bird was carefully shielded. In further experiments, they proved that bird feathers make fine receiving aerials for microwaves, and speculated that migratory birds may use their feathers to obtain directional information. These scientists warned that increasing levels of ambient microwaves would cause wild birds distress and might interfere with their navigation.

Maria Sadchikova, working in Moscow; Václav Bartoniček and Eliska Klimková-Deutshová, working in Czechoslovakia; and Valentina Nikitina, who examined officers of the Russian Navy, found, as early as 1960, that the majority of people exposed to microwave radiation on the job -- even people who had ceased such employment five to ten years previously -- had elevated blood sugar or had sugar in their urine.

Animal experiments showed that the radiation directly interferes with metabolism, and that it does so rapidly. In 1962, V.A. Syngayevskaya, in Leningrad, exposed rabbits to low level radio waves and found that the animals’ blood sugar rose by one-third in less than an hour. In 1982, Vasily Belokrinitskiy, in Kiev, reported that the amount of sugar in the urine was in direct proportion to the dose of radiation and the number of times the animal was exposed. Mikhail Navakitikian and Lyudmila Tomashevskaya reported in 1994 that insulin levels decreased by 15 percent in rats exposed for just half an hour, and by 50 percent in rats exposed for twelve hours, to pulsed radiation at a power level of 100 microwatts per square centimeter. This level is comparable to the radiation a person receives today sitting directly in front of a wireless computer, and considerably less than what a person’s brain receives from a cell phone.

These were just a few of the thousands of studies being performed all over the world at that time that found profound effects of microwave radiation on every human organ, and on the functioning and reproduction of every plant and animal. Lieutenant Zory Glaser, commissioned by the U.S. Navy in 1971 to catalogue the world’s literature on the health effects of microwave and radio-frequency radiation, collected 5,083 studies, textbooks and conference proceedings by 1981. He managed to find about half of the literature existing at that time. So about 10,000 studies had proven microwave and RF radiation to be dangerous to all life, already before 1981.

Cooking Your DNA and Roasting Your Nerves

In the early 1980s Mays Swicord, working at the National Center for Devices and Radiological Health at the Food and Drug Administration, decided to test his conjecture that DNA resonantly absorbs microwave radiation, and that even a very low level of radiation, although producing no measurable heat in the human body as a whole, may nevertheless heat your DNA. He exposed a solution containing a small amount of DNA to microwave radiation, and found that the DNA itself was absorbing 400 times as much radiation as the solution that it was in, and that different lengths of DNA strands resonantly absorb different frequencies of microwave radiation. So even though the overall temperature of your cells may not be raised to any detectable degree by the radiation, the DNA inside your cells may be heated tremendously. Swicord’s later research confirmed that this damages DNA, causing both single- and double-strand DNA breakage.

Professor Charles Polk of the University of Rhode Island reported essentially the same thing at the twenty-second annual meeting of the Bioelectromagnetics Society in June 2000 in Munich, Germany. Direct measurements had recently shown that DNA is much more electrically conductive than anyone had suspected: it has a conductivity of at least 105 siemens per meter, which is about 1/10 as conductive as mercury! A cell phone held to your head may irradiate your brain at a specific absorption rate (SAR) of about 1 watt per kilogram, which produces little overall heating. Polk calculated, however, that this level of radiation would raise the temperature in the interior of your DNA by 60 degrees Celsius per second! He said that the tissues cannot dissipate heat that rapidly, and that such heating would rupture the bonds between complementary strands of DNA, and would explain the DNA breakage reported in various studies.

And in 2006, Markus Antonietti, at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, wondered whether a similar type of resonant absorption occurs in the synapses of our nerves. Cell phones are designed so the radiation they emit will not heat your brain more than one degree Celsius. But what happens in the tiny environment of a synapse, where electrically charged ions are involved in transmitting nerve impulses from one neuron to another? Antonietti and his colleagues simulated the conditions in nerve synapses with tiny fat droplets in salt water and exposed the emulsions to microwave radiation at frequencies between 10 MHz and 4 GHz. The resonant absorption frequencies, as expected, depended on the size of the droplets and other properties of the solution. But it was the size of the absorption peaks that shocked Antonietti.

“And now comes the tragedy,” said Antonietti. “Exactly where we are closest to the conditions in the brain, we see the strongest heating. There is a hundred times as much energy absorbed as previously thought. This is a horror.”

Efforts by the EPA to Protect Americans

Faced with a barrage of alarming scientific results, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established its own microwave radiation research laboratory which operated from 1971 until 1985 with up to 30 full-time staff exposing dogs, monkeys, rats and other animals to microwaves. The EPA was so disturbed by the results of its experiments that it proposed, already in 1978, to develop guidelines for human exposure to microwave radiation for adoption and enforcement by other federal agencies whose activities were contributing to a rapidly thickening fog of electromagnetic pollution throughout our nation. But there was pushback by those agencies.

The Food and Drug Administration did not want the proposed exposure limits to apply to microwave ovens or computer screens. The Federal Aviation Administration did not want to have to protect the public from air traffic control and weather radars. The Department of Defense did not want the limits to apply to military radars. The CIA, NASA, Department of Energy, Coast Guard, and Voice of America did not want to have to limit public exposure to their own sources of radiation.

Finally, in June 1995, with the telecommunications industry planning to put microwave radiation devices into the hands and next to the brains of every man, woman and child, and to erect millions of cell towers and antennas in cities, towns, villages, forests, wildlife preserves and national parks throughout the country in order to make those devices work, the EPA announced that it was going to issue Phase I of its exposure guidelines in early 1996. The Federal Communications Commission would have been required to enforce those guidelines, cell phones and cell towers would have been illegal, and even if they were not illegal, telecommunications companies would have been exposed to unlimited liability for all the suffering, disease and mortality they were about to cause.

But it was not to be. The Electromagnetic Energy Association, an industry lobbying group, succeeded in preventing the EPA’s exposure guidelines from being published. On September 13, 1995, the Senate Committee on Appropriations stripped the $350,000 that had been budgeted for EPA’s work on its exposure guidelines and wrote in its report, “The Committee believes EPA should not engage in EMF activities.”

The Personal Communications Industry Association (CTIA), another industry group, also lobbied Congress, which was drafting a bill called the Telecommunications Act, and a provision was added to the Act prohibiting states and local governments from regulating “personal wireless service facilities” on the basis of their “environmental effects.” That provision shielded the telecommunications industry from any and all liability for injury from both cell towers and cell phones and permitted that industry to sell the most dangerous technology ever invented to the American public. People were no longer allowed to tell their elected officials about their injuries at public hearings. Scientists were no longer allowed to testify in court about the dangers of this technology. Every means for the public to find out that wireless technology was killing them was suddenly prohibited.

The telecommunications industry has done such a good job selling this technology that today the average American household contains 25 different devices that emit microwave radiation and the average American spends five hours per day on their cell phone, has it in their pocket next to their body the rest of the day, and sleeps with it all night in or next to their bed. Today almost every man, woman and child holds a microwave radiation device in their hand or against their brain or body all day every day, completely unaware of what they are doing to themselves, their family, their pets, their friends, their neighbors, the birds in their yard, their ecosystem, and their planet. Those who are even aware there is a problem at all view only the towers as a threat, but their phone as a friend.

(to be continued)

Arthur Firstenberg
Author, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life
P.O. Box 6216
Santa Fe, NM 87502
USA
phone: +1 505-471-0129
arthur@cellphonetaskforce.org
October 20, 2021
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Source: Arthur Firstenberg, via newsletter, 20 Oct 2021

Woman requests her Amazon smart-gadget data, gets 1000s of audio recordings
USA Created: 20 Oct 2021
A woman was shocked to discover just how much data Amazon has collected about her.

She posted a viral TikTok video explaining how she requested to see the data but wasn’t expecting to receive so much.

TikToker my.data.not.yours explained: “I requested all the data Amazon has on me and here’s what I found.”

She revealed that she has three Amazon smart speakers.

Two are Amazon Dot speakers and one is an Echo device.

Her home also contains smart bulbs.

She said: “When I downloaded the ZIP file these are all the folders it came with.”

The TikToker then clicked on the audio file and revealed thousands of short voice clips that she claims Amazon has collected from her smart speakers.

She described them as “so scary” and played one of her talking about turning on a light.

There are said to be 3,534 short audio clips in that file alone.

She was also sent a “Contacts” file.

The TikToker stated: “It turns out they have a full list of my contacts from my phone and I never remember syncing that.”

“The very last thing that I didn’t know that they had, I could have assumed that they have but I don’t love that they have, is my location.”

She revealed another file that apparently showed the exact location of her Alexa smart speakers.

The social media star often makes videos about data privacy and tech.

She said: “I’m not totally comfortable with everything they have.”

The video has been viewed millions of times.

One shocked viewer wrote: “It’s scary that people with Echo Dots and Alexa’s etc don’t know that Amazon records you and keeps the recordings.”

While another joked: “Can someone explain to me why this is ‘scary’? I’m not interesting enough to care if they have my contacts or audio.”

An Amazon spokesperson said: “We give customers transparency and control over their Alexa experience.”

“Customers can easily review and delete their voice recordings, or choose not to have them saved at all, at any time.”

“Customers can import their mobile phone contacts to the Alexa app so they can use features like hands-free calling and messaging; this optional feature, which customers need to set up, can be disabled at any time.

“Finally, you can grant permissions for the Alexa app to use certain data, such as your mobile device’s geolocation, to provide relevant results (e.g., weather, traffic, restaurant recommendations), and you can manage these permissions in the app.“
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Source: New York Post, Charlotte Edwards, 19 Oct 2021

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