SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
[...] "I can see from my tractor that they are all skin and bones. It's enough to make you cry." On the other side of the small road that winds along his property, a short distance from the town of Mazeyrat-d'Allier, in the Haute-Loire department, Frédéric Salgues can spot what he considers to be the cause of his cows' problems, less than 300 meters away: a cell phone tower commissioned by Orange on June 28, 2021.
[...] On May 23, the administrative court of Clermont-Ferrand ordered the 4G antenna's cessation of operation for a period of two months.
This measure, unprecedented in France, should become effective within three months. The objective is to carry out an expert assessment in order to "establish a potential causal link between the behavior of the cattle and this antenna." The administrative court highlights "a significant drop in the quality and quantity of milk produced, a serious disruption in the behavior of the herd and its voluntary denutrition and abnormally high deaths.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Opportunist on Friday June 17 2022, @05:37PM (20 children)
From what I notice in the people who are allegedly affected by 4G and 5G, it only affects the brain negatively in humans.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 17 2022, @05:44PM (18 children)
And only when they believe there's an active tower nearby. This is why cellphone companies wait a few months after putting up a tower before installing the radio gear, so they can prove in court that their tower isn't the problem. As for the cows in the article, I'm betting that this herd wasn't doing very well before the tower went in, but now the farmer has someone to sue over it. The same thing happens with power lines running through ranch country.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by drussell on Friday June 17 2022, @06:15PM (5 children)
Citation, please...
(Score: 3, Disagree) by Opportunist on Friday June 17 2022, @08:01PM (4 children)
Here [nih.gov] you go.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by drussell on Friday June 17 2022, @11:40PM (3 children)
Your link is to a study of "exposed to GSM" vs. "not exposed to GSM" which showed no evidence of interaction with sleep patterns.
That has nothing to do with the above AC's claim that cell phone companies supposedly put up towers months before installing radio gear as some sort of legal protection in court. I want a citation for that claim.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @01:30AM (1 child)
I'm not sure you're going to find that easily documented anywhere as an installation SOP. Perhaps one could find it in a court case proceedings, but I doubt AT&T says "hey, when we put up a new tower, we don't turn it on for a while so that we can smoke out the bastards who will probably try to sue us later for something."
I can tell you that was a common recommendation to amateur radio operators (from other amateur radio operators) that when they want to put up a new long wire or tower, to not hook up the transmitter for a while. It wasn't unusual back in the day that when a new antenna went up in a neighborhood for everyone thinking that their TV reception fadeouts were because of that damn guy with the radio.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @05:48AM
That way if the guy with the amateur radio is really what's causing the problem it'll be harder for people to correctly diagnose it since the problem started months after the amateur radio antenna went up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2022, @03:53PM
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html [mybroadband.co.za]
Not a reference to SOP, but a fun story about nocebo effect in relation to cell towers. Complaints coming in when the tower is off...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday June 17 2022, @07:04PM (10 children)
I believe there is actually some evidence that high voltage power lines do in fact cause health problems: Nothing super obvious, but there has been at least one study showing that people who've lived their lives directly under them (or similarly close to them) have a statistically anomalous reduction in life expectancy.
Now, of course that doesn't necessarily imply a causal link - there could be some other third factor that correlates with nearby power lines that they didn't think to correct for. But it does warrant further investigation, especially since there are a number of ways in which living in a relatively strong fluctuating magnetic field could plausibly cause problems.
As one example - there's actually an experimental (maybe approved by now) wearable non-invasive cancer-fighting contraption that generates a strong fluctuating magnetic field to successfully kill tumors without harming (much) the surrounding tissue. The principle being that cells use internal electrostatic fields to stretch out and organize the DNA during cell replication, and the fluctuating magnetic fields interfere with that process so that the resulting daughter cells usually don't survive long. Since cancer cells replicate far more frequently than normal ones, they are preferentially destroyed by the treatment. It does still harm other cells though, and when used on inoperable brain tumors the MRI does show the development of fissures within the brain unrelated to tumor shrinkage. And it can't be used on abdominal tumors as it would devastate gut cells, which replicate fairly quickly themselves.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Opportunist on Friday June 17 2022, @07:58PM
How much of that statistically lower life expectancy is due to power lines getting damaged, falling down and electrocuting them?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday June 17 2022, @09:18PM (5 children)
there have also been studies showing an increased incidence of certain diseases in people who live, or have lived, under high-tension power lines... but, again, corelation is not causation.
I didn't buy a house that had HT lines running almost across the back of the property - not because of potential health risks, but because they were just ugly!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 17 2022, @09:29PM (4 children)
I lived basically under a big set of high tension lines (bedroom was 50' from the support tower) from age 13 through 17... and look how great I turned out!
They would pop and crackle in certain weather conditions, but otherwise you wouldn't know they were out there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 18 2022, @04:44AM (2 children)
And there are people who were heavy smokers, lived to old age, and never got cancer. Does that mean smoking doesn't cause cancer?
Now I do not believe that high tension lines have negative health effects, but your argument is bullshit.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 18 2022, @12:46PM (1 child)
>your argument is bullshit.
Sarcasm detector on the blink again?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 18 2022, @12:55PM
If that was intended to be sarcasm, it was insufficiently marked. See also: Poe's law.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @05:27AM
Are you sure that's a good citation? :-)))
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 17 2022, @09:26PM (1 child)
My parents were involved in some biological effects testing work under power distribution lines in the 1960s. Results were: ambiguous, then as now. Not enough to say they cause a problem, but not clear enough to say they don't cause a problem either.
With 8 billion humans on the planet, all the various established and newly mutated genotypes, I would not be at all surprised if some portions of the population have various sensitivities to and maladies caused by various forms of artificial EM radiation. Compound human genetic drift with the faster varying cohorts of bacteria and viruses living on/in the people, their current states of genetic expression, etc. and the variability only grows. The problem is: when a scientific study only enrolls 0.0000125% of the population, you can't really say much about sub-groups of people, you're extremely lucky if you get repeatable results in the broader population.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @08:31PM
Those who say cellphone radiation can't do anything because it's non-ionizing should go stick their heads in an oven and turn it on. We already have plenty of scientific evidence than brains are sensitive to temperature. Even a few degrees too high can cause damage. And cellphone radiation has been found to have measurable effects on the brain:
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/04/25/1621201.htm [abc.net.au]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5952570/ [nih.gov]
That said just having the phone further away from your body and head should reduce the effects dramatically.
But cellphone towers have quite high power outputs and there might be some "hotspots".
While not all of the kilowatts will be passing through your head, you definitely wouldn't want to have your head being in an accidental focal point or hotspot: https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-lot-more-energy-than-4g-base-stations-says-mtn [fiercewireless.com]
Can we really assume cellphone radiation can't get reflected or focused in similar ways?
After all similar stuff has happened for solar radiation: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/130904-walkie-talkie-building-london-melts-sunlight-physics-science [nationalgeographic.com]
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-do-skyscrapers-melt-things/ [popsci.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @05:32PM
If you are referring to the Draper study, that was debunked years ago but still gets repeated as fact. What Draper discovered is that high voltage lines are more likely to be run through poor neighbourhoods and poor people have more health problems and shorter life expectancy than wealthy people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @06:06AM
That way if their tower really is the problem it'll be harder for people to make the correlation ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @06:13AM
FTFY