A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

cell biology: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

March 12, 2013

Are Magnetic Fields in Incubators Confounding Cell Culture Studies?

Lucas Portelli just ran over the Cheshire cat. He didn't know it was there. He's too young to appreciate how this fictional feline has held sway in the EMF-health controversy.

A little background for newcomers: the Cheshire cat is a metaphor for the lack of reproduciblity of EMF effects observed in some laboratories —but not others. It’s a favorite of those who see the study of EMFs as pathological science. The effects come and go, like the Cheshire Cat. Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don’t. EMF effects are not thought as being robust. Or more plainly, they are not to be believed.

But what if there was an unregognized confounding factor that was playing havoc with the EMF experiments? Portelli may well have found such a confounder.

May 18, 2012

Dead in the Water

We haven't posted many new items recently because we've been too busy fixing up the new Web site. In the process, we've been rereading many of our old stories. Last night, we came across an item from five years ago under the title "Cell Specific Responses to RF." It highlighted some new research from Finland, which found that cell phone radiation affected the activity of ODC, a biologically important enzyme, in...

May 29, 2007

Cell Specific Responses to RF

Every now and then a new paper comes along that gives hope that one day we'll make sense of the conflicting results that have become the hallmark of EMF research. A team of Finnish researchers from the University of Kuopio has published such a paper. It's in the June issue of the International Journal of Radiation Biology.

Anne Höytö, Jukka Juutilainen and Jonne Naarala have shown that the type of cells used in in vitro studies can determine whether they will respond to RF radiation. They ran the same experiment with primary cells —those taken directly from an organism— and with secondary cells —those that have been grown in a petri dish. They exposed both types of cells to two different RF signals, CW and modulated (GSM), at various intensities (SAR =1.5, 2.5 or 6 W/Kg) for various amounts of time (2, 8 or 24 hr), and then measured the activity of ODC (ornithine decarboxylase), an enzyme related to cellular growth and differentiation.