Part of me wants to spam every genpop I know now with this link and the phrase: "scientists prove cellphone radiation makes you live longer!".
Take e.g. anti-oxidants, which fight ageing agents (free radicals) but cause cancer to spread faster.
Take reducing the role of telomeres, which stops putting a limit on cell division (thus allowing cell replacement on old people as it happens on young people), causes any appearance of cancer to spread way more quickly.
ex-biologist here. Re: the last statement, if radiation is actually affecting tissues (I don't personally really believe the data shows a de-facto effect) then there is a hypothesis among some scientists that study radiation exposure that small chronic doses actually prime your body for dealing with minor changes in genetic structure (if you're into it, the mechanism is hypothesized to be via epigenetic up-regulation of DNA-repair protein coding genes[1]). Since Sprague-Dawley rats are known to develop spontaneous tumors after one year regardless of treatment, this is my hypothesis for explaining the apparent effect of shortened life in the control group.
[1] - just google scholar the keywords "radiation upregulation dna repair". there are tons of papers on this effect.
Regarding survival, I also noticed it, surprising. Could you define "survival rate" for someone who's not in the field? Does it mean what it looks like it means, i.e., survival rate is higher when rats die at an older age in average?
Edit: actually LTE uses OFDM, which is mathematically distinct from CDMA, but a naive receiver is unlikely to notice the difference.
Instead it refers to the CDMA2000 family of telephony protocols (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDMA2000), which are a series of whole stack (radio modulation all the way up to text encoding schemes) protocols. Calling it "CDMA" is a branding thing than rather than having anything to do with multiplexing.
I immediately correlated the electromagnetic feelings in my body to this signal. And never trusted GSM phones again.
What do you mean by this? And also, I'm sure I won't be the only one to point out the lack of a link between correlation and causation.
Key points:
- The rats were exposed in utero and throughout their lifetimes
- They did pilot studies to find what radiation level did not cause a body temperature rise to remove that as a confusing factor
- 900MHz CDMA and GSM signals
- SAR of 0, 1.5, 3, 6 W/kg. For comparison the FCC limit is 1.2 W/kg in 1 gram of tissue. In the UK/EU it's 2 W/kg.
- 18 hour cycle each day, 10 minutes off, 10 minutes on (i.e. a 9 hour 50% duty cycle)
- 90 rats per gender per group (I think 1260 total)
- 106 week study
- Litter weights were slightly lower in exposed groups (~10%), but over time there was no significant weight difference between the exposed and control groups
- For the things they studied, the exposed rats had a defect rate of a few percent compared to control values of zero. Historic control values were (in my opinion) comparable to the exposed group and it seems to be barely statistically significant. The exception seems to be heart schwannomas which were as high as 7%.
- More will be published this and next year.
Here's a fun statement:
At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR. Survival was also slightly lower in control females than in females exposed to 1.5 or 6 W/kg GSM-modulated RFR. In rats exposed to CDMA-modulated RFR, survival was higher in all groups of exposed males and in the 6 W/kg females compared to controls.