In a world increasingly reliant on technology, a pressing question arises: can our dependence on gadgets, particularly mobile phones, be affecting our health in unexpected ways? A growing body of research is now pointing towards a startling trend – declining sperm quality in the human population – with mobile phones emerging as a potential culprit.
Recent studies have been sounding the alarm over a noticeable decline in sperm counts and quality across the globe. This decline isn’t just about quantity; it’s about the vitality, motility, and overall health of sperm cells. The implications of this trend are profound, affecting fertility rates and possibly even the long-term viability of populations. The situation is murky and complicated, but new studies suggest that cellular phones could have a role to play.
Ring Ring
Since the development of the microwave, the cellular phone, and WiFi, people have espoused fears around the invisible waves from these technologies. Ultimately, conventional knowledge says there aren’t really a lot of dangers from these devices, which output non-ionizing radiation. This means the radio waves output from these devices are not strong enough to remove an electron from atoms or molecules, and thus they theoretically can’t have a major negative impact on our body’s cells.
However, scientists never presume to know everything, and thus cellular phones have once again come under the spotlight as a potential cause of declining sperm quality. Given the unexplained decline in sperm quality and sperm counts across the globe, which appears to be accelerating, examining a wide range of potential causes only makes sense. Looking at the wireless radiators that we carry in our pockets is perhaps a very worthwhile target. While nothing conclusive has yet been proven, there’s somewhat of a smoking gun that has become apparent across multiple studies.
In a research paper published in the Central European Journal of Urology in 2014, 32 healthy men with “normal semen parameters” provided samples for a study. Each sample was split into even portions, in A and B groups. The A group was maintained in a thermostatic incubator for 5 hours, while the B group was treated the same, but with the addition of a mobile phone in the test chamber.
The sperm samples were then inspected for quality to determine whether they were potentially effected by the mobile phone. Sperm counts did not change significantly, nor did it differ between the two groups. Nor did the number of dead sperm show any grand difference. However, the group exposed to the mobile phone showed a significantly lower number of sperm displaying progressive movement. In fact, this B group also showed a greater number of sperm displaying non-progressive movement. Levels of DNA fragmentation was also higher in the mobile phone exposed group. It bears noting that DNA fragmentation and lower motility are not what you want for good fertility outcomes.
Another study in 2015 was published in theInternational Journal of Fertility & Sterility, finding similar results. In this study, 124 semen samples were similarly split, with one group exposed to cellphone radiation for 1 hour, while the other was left alone. This study similarly detected elevated levels of DNA fragmentation in the exposed group, along with varied gene expression and protein levels. Sperm motility was also decreased in the exposed group.
More recently, a study hunted for a link between self-reported phone use and semen quality in young men. The sample size was a healthy 2886 men from the Swiss population, aged 18 to 22 years old. The researchers found that higher frequencies of phone use (over 20 times per day) were associated with lower sperm concentrations and lower total sperm counts. Analysis found a 30% and 21% increased risk respectively for sperm concentration or sperm counts to be below WHO reference values for fertile men. Interestingly, the study also looked at the impact of phone storage locations, with men who stored their phones in their pockets found not to be at increased risk of poorer performing sperm. The study also didn’t find any impact on motility with regards to frequency of phone use.
Taking a broader view, meta studies have found a growing indication that there is some kind of negative impact on sperm from phone use. It’s unclear the extent of the problem, or the direct impact on fertility, but studies taken in 2014 and in 2021 both concluded that phone use was harmful to sperm quality.
There is a caveat though. Some research has indicated long-running trends in which sperm quality has been declining in certain populations for many decades – as much as 40 or 50 years. The problem here is that cellular phone use has really only been a major factor for maybe the last 25 years. After all, you can go back to any late 90s sitcom and note that the storylines are often completely free of cellular phones which might have otherwise impacted the proceedings. It was the early 2000s when the cellphone became a default item for adults and youths in the developed world.
In any case, it seems apparent that something is going on when it comes to male fertility and the ubiquitous use of cellphones. The problem is at this stage, data remains limited, and causal factors aren’t yet clear. Other factors, like smoking, diet, exercise, and general health seem to play a larger role, and it’s hard to disentangle these from cell phone use in the survey studies.
If there is indeed a link between the two, is this a problem we can fix by changing how our cellphones work, or are we just that sensitive that our sperm can’t be easily protected from this scourge? For now, we don’t know, so it’s probably not time to break out the tinfoil underwear just yet.
The intersection of technology and health is a complex and evolving field. As we become more intertwined with our devices, understanding their impacts on our biological functions becomes increasingly crucial. The potential link between mobile phones and declining sperm quality is a wake-up call for more research, better public awareness, and a thoughtful approach to our use of technology. Only then will we get a full and proper answer to this confusing mystery.
“The researchers found that higher frequencies of phone use (over 20 times per day)”
Well, I’m fine, then. I only use my phone three times a day:
From breakfast to lunchtime, from lunchtime to suppertime, and from suppertime until bedtime.
Seriously. “Frequency of use” is a useless metric.
My phone is always in a holster on my left hip. Does that count as “using it?” It should certainly count as exposure since the WiFi and cellphone parts are active at all times.
You need to track the exposure time if you are trying to pin anything on the RF signals from the phone.
If there’s a culprit, I expect it is to be found in the food we eat, the things we drink, and the materials we are exposed to. More likely, a combination of all of the above.
——
The reference paper actually mentions “number of hours per week” as the needed metric, but then says that the survey on asked for “frequency of use.” The analysis is also based on the “frequency of use.”
Oh, well. So much for that study.
Add “lack of physical activity” to the environmental influences.
yeah I’m a more concerned with all the decomposed telfon that I’ve consumed. On the bright side, I’m upstream from the freakin Manhattan Project dump site in my county
Back in the early 2000’s Nokia came out with the 8890, that little slider phone. Their SAR report said that to safely carry it you needed the hip holster. The problem is that the hip holster was not an available accessory and it didn’t come in the box! Ericsson made a phone of similar size and their holster worked, so that’s when I started carrying my devices on my hip, antenna side out. Been doing that for over 20 years now.
Well you’re still gonna need your brain when you’re 60, so good choice!
Nature has finally come up with a viable method of establishing equilibrium in the human population. When I was in middle school, I learned there were 6 billion people
infestingliving on Earth. Today, that number has increased to (or even surpassed) 8 billion. We are running out of space, running out of food and clean drinking water, and we are generating so much pollution that it affects people on OTHER CONTINENTS!Back in the old days, all it took was a plague or other widely spread disease to even out the population. But now we’ve cured damn near everything but cancer and the common cold.
You are completely wrong. There’s plenty for everyone, we could have several billion more people and be fine. Currently, the bigger issue is people aren’t marrying or trying to have kids. Likely due to issues related to despair and apathy. Weakening sperm is part of the problem for those few who are having children. Humanity is set to decline as birth rates plummet at accelerating rates. I hope you’re happy that we’re slowly beginning to fade away.
We need to “fade away” for a bit, honestly. The only reason you don’t think we’re overpopulated is that we’re rapidly burning through earth’s remaining resources trying to hide that fact. Earth’s natural carrying capacity is roughly one billion. Once the oil runs out we’ll start seeing catastrophic famines, which could easily be avoided if we decided to pump the brakes a little while we still have time. Excessive breeding is irresponsible. Humans should know better.
>Earth’s Natural carrying capacity…
Not really true as the lifestyle of these people makes a huge difference to the resource consumption and so generation they require. If you assume everyone has to live like the worst offending Stereotypical portrayal of an American that overeats while eating almost nothing but beef and cheese, and then driving everywhere in vehicles where its easier to count gallons per mile than miles per gallon even a billion might be overstating it. But the same is true the other way as well, though the required lifestyle to make double digit billiions plausible…
I do agree oil running out now would be problematic, but it seems to me in the race between the major climate events that prevent normal crop cycles and running out of oil the clear winner is the climate change right now… There are so many areas serious oil exploration hasn’t been done, and huge known reserves that haven’t been tapped as it was cheaper to import Arab oil – oil will run out eventually, but I think the wonky growing seasons will impact humans harder and faster – even if you discount this one year that has been preposterously record breaking as a blip rather than trend the predictably of the weather hasn’t been following a norm nearly as well to be good for growing crops most years since the turn of the millennium (and quite possibly longer than that).
If we had a lower population, we wouldn’t have to limit our lifestyles at all. With a million people on earth, we could all drive monster trucks every day and burn piles of coal recreationally and the environment wouldn’t flinch. I’d rather live in a world of abundance with less people than try to cram ten billion sardines into one can.
>With a million people on earth, we could all drive monster trucks every day
This claim is absolutely divorced from reality. Try doing a ballpark headcount of the people servicing the supply chain of a large automobile manufacturer, and you will see why.
I don’t own one streetable car that gets less than 1 mpg. Trailer queens don’t count. The worst street car is the 6 mpg 1960 land yacht.
Only beef and cheese?
Where ‘one magical animal’?
Where beer?
We are way past copper age ‘carrying capacity’. Boo, ‘Organic’ and other hippie woo. Yeah, engineering and capitalism. Darwin is bitch.
>Earth’s natural carrying capacity is roughly one billion.
I find that hard to believe unless you are demanding that we conserve enough of every resource to last until the sun burns out.
It’s quite reasonable to think that even with current technology we could support half our current population for the foreseeable future as long dramatic changes were made (those changes won’t happen, but, that’s dumb humans, not the planets capabilities).
It’s a fact, and not even a controversial one – note that the claim was for a *natural* carrying capacity.
Natural biological processes simply can’t fix sufficient nitrogen in order to feed more than that, and so we artificially create hundreds of millions of tonnes of ammonia every year via the Haber-Bosch process in order to grow enough food.
you first
No.
:^)
the Earth can sustain a very large population, much, much larger than currently. but how societies treat the plan needs to change
Your obviously not living in Africa are you? Come visit it will change your mind
Sharing the Haber-Bosch process was one of the biggest mistakes in history
Humans are in overshoot condition in Earth ecosystem since 1971.
> In 2023, Earth Overshoot Day falls on August 2. Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year. For the rest of the year, we are maintaining our ecological deficit by drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
We are running on phantom carrying capacity, the real (sustainable) carrying capacity of Earth for humans is estimated to be around 4 billion. Human population collapse in the near future is inevitable unless literally a miracle from God happens.
No good news and I get no pleasure from sharing this. But maybe it’s better if some people here are a bit more prepared for the future.
See https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-already-too-late-to-save-civilization-e834cb4ec694
Better to live in hope humans will actually demonstrate some intelligence as a whole than assume the worst to that extent, and to a reasonable degree of precision we can’t calculate the carrying capacity anyway – as there are far far too many variables to a humans resource consumption making the demand side have a really really wide variance and the technologies to supply that demand continue to ‘improve’ (in quotes because some improvements are either definitely short term gain or lack sufficient evidence of stability/efficiency with the cohabiting technologies before mass roll out).
You only have to look at one narrow element like current food waste levels in the developed world – stop being so woefully inefficient and you can feed millions maybe even billions more people to a decent dietary level without any change to the demand on the environment, and it gets even better if the developed worlds stops on average overeating compared to their needs.
If you want to narrow it down enough to say with exactly x lifestyle, provided for with these methods you can get an estimate that will at least be close enough to the nearest billion and probably closer than that, but life is way more complex than that in general and humanity being ‘intelligent’ even less predictable – folks lifestyles are forever changing usually in reaction to the social and economic norms of their societies anyway.
No we could not add several billion more people and be fine. This kind of anti-Malthusianism is based solely on ideology and uses overly simplistic models to figure how much of this and that we need to maintain each person, then multiplies that to get a figure of how many Earth could support. This is clever stupidity and ignores enormous numbers of variables and factors which are bottlenecks.
You want a realistic model? We are an existing model, we are already encountering very serious malfunctions in our biosphere. Limit is reached. No, pretending we have some kind of ideal technology in the next 15 years that eliminates inefficiencies is not going to work.
We are already over-extended and we are currently supporting the current population by borrowing against our own future. It WILL contract eventually, and the more we borrow in our stubborn foolishness to always prove Malthus wrong, the more horrific that day will finally be. The global supply and economy of fertilizer alone should be extremely concerning to anybody who is actually paying attention and not deep in faux-humanistic denial.
“When I was in middle school, I learned there were 6 billion people infesting living on Earth. Today, that number has increased to (or even surpassed) 8 billion. ”
“Infesting” living on earth.. I see.
Well, the analogy between a virus and human expansion isn’t new.
But same can be said about green plant life “infesting” a desert eco system (I think there was such a comparison in Dune movie).
Anyhow, by all understanding of disliking human nature, there’s one notable thing to also keep in mind.:
Humans developed admirable things like art, music and math.
Without humanity, there’s no one left to keep this things alive, to admire things.
There will be beauty in nature, still, but no one to admire and dream about things.
Another thing is that humans didn’t always were a threat to earth.
There used to be native tribes who lived in harmony with their surroundings for a long time.
Monks in far places on earth still do.
So it’s not really fair to think of all humans the same.
Some of them are indeed non-destructive, some have a positive influence on their surroundings.
I wonder how many things wildlife has learned from living next to humans.
Some may had interactions with out domesticated animals and got more empathy or progressed in certain ways by learning from them.
Also, eco systems come and go. Things change over time, species do change.
It’s no excuse of course, for our environmental pollution or the climate change. Things go change so fast that there’s little time to adapt for everyone. That’s one difference to natural changes, maybe.
Anyway, that’s another story, maybe. If we can learn anything from human history, then that genetics aren’t the most import things. Humans are social beings and able to act reasonable, if they want to. Even if it’s not exactly in harmony to their genetic blueprint.
Alas, we’re living very sarcastic and pessimistic days. Our current society (or societies? maybe just the west?) is a social problem, though, not a genetic one. If everything breaks, though, there are still banks with genetic samples. The people who come after us might be able to reverse some damage, maybe.
Maybe. Hope is a good thing, it makes the unthinkable possible.
The power of the mind is a great thing (“faith that moves mountains”
, “mind over matter”).
Even Einstein (a cool dude, btw) is said to have told that he’d rather be an optimist who’s wrong, rather than a pessimist who’s right.
Anyway, at the end of the day we all have to ask our self if we want to be the good guy or the bad one.
For some reason, though, the majority of humans prefers to see itself as being “good”.
So there’s hope. As long as people want to be good, they aren’t bad.
Since when does nature “need” to be admired?
It’s about the mind, consciousness, my friend. There are so many wonders in this world, like pieces of art in a gallery.
Without humans (or a similar advanced species) there would be no visitors. The gallery and its exhibitions would “just exist”, for no one to be ever seen again.
Or let me put it this way, nature, as such, would be an abandoned machinery without a purpose, running endlessly. Life/death/life/death. No humor, no fun, no rock&roll. That’s where advanced species such as humanity make a difference in the big picrure. They design, they enjoy, they think of life itself. They’re more than machines following nature’s lead. But once they’re gone, will there ever be a successor?
Sounds like you need nature to admire. Nature, it couldn’t care less about us. As is the premise of this subthread, best case is that nature actually is trying to rid itself of the horrible people infection it has acquired over the centuries.
The meaning of life:
‘Half of us are here to squirt. The other half are here to ooze.’
Mothersbaugh. The SubGenius Movie. Side 2.
IIRC.
There’s something else to consider.
Humans do have a conscience.
We’re blaming ourselves for so many things we have done or not done, not seldomly for a lifetime.
Let’s just think about it. How often did we wish we could change the past, undo certain things?
Also, humanity is the only race, on earth, who tries to actively save other spacies, who worries about them.
Even if it’s just a local firefighter who’s saving a kitten on a tree.
This way of thinking, of acting is very noble.
Empathy is a sign is a character trait of an advanced species.
Don’t get me wrong, there are certain things that aren’t okay.
But it’s not because humans as such are bad.
Considering how many we are, we do cope with conflicts rather well.
If we only want to, we can be the good guys we always wanted to be. It’s all a matter of our mindset.
“..humanity is the only race, on earth, who tries to actively save other species, who worries about them.”
Why are you so sure about that? Ask yourself the question if that “caring” is based upon empathy or really about self preservation (fear of change, the need for controlling). Plenty of creatures “care” for their environment, the Atta colombica for instance, takes care of a fungus that feeds the colony, both thrive. Bees take care of the reproduction process of the flowers and crops, if the decide to stop, we’d all die eventually. The only real reason why humans seem to care is because they have it so good that they can afford to care. It’s not that humans care because they need to. Let’s level the playing field, strip humans of their food and shelter and see how much they care bout their environment then. It’s all about survival. Humans and animals are not the same but stop with the crap of calling yourself better than animals because this and that. We humans are just slightly different animals because we are on top of the food chain. You forget to mention the simple fact that despite all the positives there are still plenty of negatives that define humans for which the truly are. For instance humans are the only species that are able to kill or hurt for pleasure and capable to destroy their own environment. And there are plenty of wars where both parties were convinced that they were the good guys and that some higher power (insert religion of choice here) would help them win that war and would not care about the killings of the other party.
Okay, I’m sure that somebody now thinks, hey… foxes and wolves kill other animals without eating them, okay, you’ve got me. But I hope you’d get the point. Stay focused, humans are just like animals, not better not worse, just on top of the chain…
1. Except we’re not running out of space nor food.
2. If you really believe it’s a problem, you can leave – one less mouth to feed is one less mouth to feed, in it? But you don’t actually believe that, hence why you stick around.
1. The less people, the more each person has available to them. There isn’t necessarily a threshold for overpopulation, just a gradual decline in living standards. Have people forgotten that land used to be free and natural resources unregulated (because with a lower population they were inexhaustible)? Or do they just accept living in an increasingly micromanaged world, in which people have to follow increasingly byzantine rules in order to not step on each others’ toes?
2. Or he can stay and advocate for change. That works too, you just don’t like it.
2. He is directly advocating for the reduction of human population. He is explicitly stating there is no other solution for the problems he is pointing to other then the reduction of the human population. As such the only actions he can take which work towards that goal are what Agammamon proposes or him forcing that onto others. Since he is obviously doing neither he is expressing some pointless platitude he takes no action on. As Agammamon pointed out.
Propaganda works, otherwise advertising wouldn’t be profitable. Not sure what else to tell you. The “advice” being given here is just the educated version of “KYS”. If you want people to have less children, the most effective thing you can do is advocate for it.
There were only a million people during the Stone Age. They lived short, brutal lives. Your hypothesis is, therefore, disproved…. million people today would also live short, brutal lives because all the other people supporting them in various ways would be gone. Unless you prefer Skynet “utopia”.
That’s not necessarily true. Maybe it took a few billion people to figure out technology, but it definitely doesn’t take that many to maintain it. Unless we somehow manage to forget how electricity and radios work, a billion (or less!) people will surely be capable of running things for the foreseeable future. Population decline isn’t population growth played backwards, it’s a different game entirely.
Anon. Labor lean society. Nobody takes job of telephone sanitizer. We know how that ends.
Miroslav. A million people. A billion robot slaves. That all look and act like Harry Mudd’s wife. FTL travel by end of week. Earth is hell.
Seriously. A million should be plenty. Not that much specialization. But too few people politically, some ass would take charge, then someone would have to shoot her.
Ah yes, the utopian dream of lots of people dying off. But not, like, _your_ family, right? Other people’s?
Everyone dies off eventually. The key is to not replace each one of them with two more.
I find it deeply disturbing that any human being could regard the cure of “…damn near everything but cancer and the common cold” a BAD thing.
Furthermore, while a person who refers to the totality of humanity as an “infestation” may well visualize themselves as some kind of enlightened champion for the ecosystem, what I see instead is the victim of obvious brainwashing. It’s remarkable that a person can be trained to hate their own species.
I concede that we live in a closed biological system with resource limits. However, most countries with robust economies and high-tech (which translates to surplus food, high standards of living, disposable income, and sufficient leisure time to be able to sit around and worry about human “infestation”) have populations that are already in decline.
“If there is indeed a link between the two, is this a problem we can fix by changing how our cellphones work, or are we just that sensitive that our sperm can’t be easily protected from this scourge?”
Bring back the nut-cup. Protects sperm and reduces the number of groin shot videos posted to social media.
I agree, we need Faraday cage cups these days.
(un)surprisingly, there are faraday underwear on the market.
Doing this may crack my skull and my brain will bee all over the place. I should better keep on doing that but I will put a nut on my skull.
A cup-shaped “Faraday cage” is not a Faraday cage at all, because it does not fully enclose the “shielded” asset.
Ironically, at cell frequencies, it may well approximate a “dish” antenna with… shall we say… an unfortunate “focal point.”
Aluminum foil loin cloth.
Lead codpieces do sound fashionably modern.
Could be a lot of other correlating factors. I would guess it has something to do with our sedentary lifestyles, and diet full of preservatives and pesticides. Maybe is reduced testosterone due to lack of physical fighting and the stigma against male aggression? Who knows. But I think we all know the way we’re living right now isn’t what our bodies are evolved for, that’s bound to have some negative effects.
People *are* weirdly dismissive of the danger cellphones pose. A 3W transmitter is no joke, especially if you hold it 1cm from your brain for hours. I was doing EMC testing a few years ago and asked the owner of the test lab if he holds his cellphone up to his head. “Hell no” was his answer. That sealed the deal for me.
Effecting sperm quality is a little more far fetched. Don’t most people carry their phone in their pocket, regardless of how often they use it? Plus there’s like 10cm between pocket and testicles, and your quad partially in the way. I would think that would reduce the power level to negligible levels.
the sun deposits orders of magnitude of energy on you…also the 3W is peak power, not average
phones get their battery life mostly from really tight control of low power modes. the radio will transmit only as “loud” as it needs to, running the transmitter at full power all the time is a good way to drain your battery. the tower will provide feedback about your transmit power at the receiver and your phone will decrease power output to be as low as it can be without the signal becoming unintelligible.
” A 3W transmitter is no joke, especially if you hold it 1cm from your brain for hours.”
Other options are:
– jacket internal pocket (near hart)
– jacket external pocket (near liver)
– belt pouch (near kidney)
– trousers pocket (near nuts)
:D
Phones will have a ngeative effect but as you said food and physical activity as well.
preservatives, pesticides, microplastic, softeners, and bad diet/fast food which too much sugar/fat
mental health with play a huge role and social meadia has reduces the mental health of alot of people especially jounger ones.
and obesity is also rising so yeah, fertility will go down.
Yeah, we likely have a whole gaggle of effects which are collectively pushing both fertility and life expectancy down. A corrective event is going to eventually happen whether we do anything or not. Nature has its ways of curtailing certain processes if they get too out of hand.
“I was doing EMC testing a few years ago and asked the owner of the test lab if he holds his cellphone up to his head. “Hell no” was his answer. ”
Ah. This explains “pizzaphone”, where people hold their cellphones flat in front of their mouths like they were nibbling on a nice slice of deluxe.
pizza phone is due to the location of the speaker.
Yeah, that’s what I do if I’m somewhere I can use speaker. Keeps the mic close to your mouth, but gives the transmitter some space from your head.
Increasing the distance from 1cm to just 10cm cuts the power by a factor of 100.
It depends where the antenna is in the handset. Some are near the bottom.
“Effecting sperm quality[…]”
“Affecting…” =]
Actually the maximum power output of handheld phones <600 mW, and only when at the fringe of coverage; that 3W figure was for the old mobile and bag phones. Still…
Who examined the vaccines I called this. Best way to handle climate change.
If cellphones were a casual factor then there would need to be an explanation as to why the constant exposure to low level EMF from your home power lines and appliances had no effect for generations.
And there would need to be some sort of explanation by which microwatt emitters (at 2 feet) of non-ionizing radiation at levels not even high enough to heat anything can cause issues with sperm motility – but no other physiological issues.
Indeed humans have been bathing themselves in an RF soup for a very very long time now, coupled with plenty of natural RF as well. Seems highly unlikely that these Wi-Fi devices are significantly different enough to really cause problems now. And to some extent with how prevalent these wireless devices are the initial ‘control’ samples should be just about dead for it to matter by definition even before putting them in the A-B testing chamber – direct unsheltered exposure apparently did something (assuming its not a flaw in experimental setup) but they came out the pipe functional, so would still be functional after deposit unless you are smuggling prison phones or something that degree of exposure just won’t happen.
I’m in no way claiming a causal relationship, but the clear difference over the last few decades is the frequency of the “RF soup” which only recently started to venture into the GHz range where it starts to excite dipoles in the um range.
I don’t know much of modern cellular transmission limits but the FCC regulates wifi transmitters to less than 1W, however the directional gain of the antennas can allow significantly more power in any given direction. Given that phones often live in front pockets with only a few cm seperation to the testis, I wouldn’t confidently say there can be no impact.
The drop in sperm counts has existed for decades. It was first noticed in the 50s, if not earlier.
Recent article suggested pesticides; there’s another possibility as well.
Under ideal biological conditions sperm counts may naturally reduce until it hits a point low enough to be a problem and will then stabilize. You don’t need to produce a trillion sperm to have 5 kids over your lifetime.
The stuff general consumers are getting has gone up in frequency, but those frequencies (or at least nearby high frequency ones) have been used for a long long time by the nations and individuals with deep pockets. The trend to higher frequency deliberately in everyone’s day to day lives has accelerated of late with cheaper faster microprocessors, but at the same time the transmission power on the whole has dropped. Also remember that shielding of RF noise wasn’t exactly a high priority when the noise was in bands ‘nobody’ could run at. So I’d suggest that high frequency RF intensity hasn’t on the whole changed that much, at least if you are talking about most of our lifetimes as folks old enough for that to not be true are getting to be a dwindling people group.
I agree I’d not confidently say there can be no impact, the evidence rather suggests there absolutely can be (though deliberately microwaving something is rather extreme exposure). So as these swimmers were not DOA in the control sample and yet the samples came from regular people not folks living so deep in the middle of nowhere there is no mobile telephonic systems or Wi-Fi says it can’t be that significant. I’d like to see that same sort of testing done on some folks that have spent a prolonged period away from the wifi soup, but the evidence as presented seems to strongly suggest there is no harm to normal exposure levels, which really makes sense as how deep can a high frequency signal actually get into a human?
They followed 1960s American military early warning radar techs to the grave.
Those guys manned bases north of the arctic circle and were known to stand in front of the radar dishes, but inside the domes to warm up.
No extra cancer. No extra three headed kids. Normal families.
For losers that get posted north of the arctic circle…They did, in fact, lose to get that post vs Hawaii.
What I’m saying is: ‘Dumber than average, lots of kids’.
no one said it (mains power electromagnetic fields) hasn’t had an effect for generations, quite the contrary in fact. The difference is in the field strength with higher frequencies being better coupled with greater voltage gradients and thus greater electromotive force… now if they’d only taught us something useful like electrodynamics in school perhaps all this wouldn’t be such a problem, but then again I think perhaps that’s exactly why they didn’t….
If you’re looking for a mechanism, consider that proteins and other biomolecules have very large dipole moments. I haven’t done a survey of the literature, but did see a couple papers that used molecular dynamics to examine the effects of alternating electric fields on proteins. They saw an effect on protein stability. I’d like to see some spectroscopic work on this question but didn’t spot any in a quick and dirty search.
The ‘Scientific method’ is :
Describe a question
Propose a possibility
Devise an experiment to test that possibility
Analyse the results
Rinse & repeat
What it isn’t
Eliminate any possibilities that are inconvenient for your lifestyle on the basis of apocryphal statistics
Design an experiment.
Establish a hypothesis.
Run tests to disprove that hypothesis.
If you disprove the hypothesis, your hypothesis is false.
Or because more phone usage means less physical activity, weight gain, high blood pressure and other collateral effects.
I went to DeVry institute of technology in the very early 90’s. One of my professors said one time that 60 cycle A.C. power was the cause af all cancer. In no way am I saying he was right. His hypothesis was that the 60 cycle AC caused all your molecules to vibrate and this was the problem. I became an amateur radio operator in 2000. At that time the Motorola Nextel had just come out. I was given one for work and during a meeting on safety I pointed out that according to documentation that came with the phone you exceeded the maximum exposure limits after only three minutes of talking on it. Our safety commitee basically said I was wrong and there were no concerns with the phone. (Motorola Nextel was an analog phone that basically transmits then receives in millisecond pulses). Like others have pointed out we live in an even bigger soup of R.F. exposure than ever before. I’m typing on my computer sitting on my lap on WIFI thats transmitting to an extender that is in my living room that is transmitting to the base in the sunroom. Every time a new frequency group comes out for WIFI or cellular a gcoalition of scientists comes out to declare the plan a bad idea. They get hushed up and the product come out on the new frequency anyway. Original cellular frequency was 800-950 MHZ. 2G 3G and LTE went to 1.2GHZ-2.4GHZ. This was when the scientists started saying that multiples of 1.2 were bad. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/ This is but one study and I always suggest to do your own research.
I mean that 60 cycle power “hypothesis” is so easily disproven. Most of the world doesn’t use 60Hz power and still has cancer. The heat from the world causes your molecules to vibrate, the heat very you yourself produce causes your molecules to vibrate.
You’ve probably allayed your own fear about the Motorola phone, haven’t you? It transmits millisecond pulses, so reaching 3 minutes of transmit time would take longer than 3 minutes depending on how frequent the pulses are.
It is true that we are using a lot of different frequencies now, but we’re also using them at much lower powers than previously.
The study you’ve linked doesn’t say “frequencies bad”, it’s a meta analysis with the conclusion that there aren’t any good analyses.
You should have known it was a troll when he used ‘professor at DeVry’ as a cred.
DeVry doesn’t have ‘profs’, never did.
It has instructors, some of which have inflated opinions of themselves.
Yearly contracts. Pay so low any working professional would laugh. ‘DeVry Prof believes 60 Hz power causes cancer’…Completely believable. Instructor is ‘Doctor of chiropractic’ (DC).
Didn’t DeVry get closed by the government loan program cutting them off?
For taking Harvard money from innumerate and unqualified? Lifetime un-dischargable debt, still can’t add, subtract, multiply and divide.
Fools and money, lucky to have gotten together in first place. Serve as warning for others.
Is it possible, just maybe, that having men ingest female birth control byproducts through the water supply for their entire lives could effect reproductive health?
The thing about female birth control turning the water oestrogenous is not true. There has been this effect of oestrogens in the water but it was found to be from cattle, and not because they were being given the pill either, just natural processes, kidneys doing what kidneys do.
It’s glyphosate and atrazine that are most responsible for “turnin’ the freakin’ frogs gay.” But we should try and reduce several things, err on the side of caution. We should know by now how many decades of teeth-pulling is required to actually get scientific studies done properly which point a finger at large-scale industrial pollutants. It’s not easy to do and you encounter scurrilous opposition, even from many in the scientific community. We’ve been through this several times in fairly recent history, we should understand these lessons by now.
That’s why I only drink pure grain alcohol and rainwater.
If it was ever an issue, low dose pills and patches should have it down a bunch by now.
What I’m really saying: Asdf, do you know how much effort was involved in getting laid pre pill? I know correlation, causation. Can’t risk it.
This story keeps reappearing and just like any other non founded belief, there are those that believe it! The world has absolute electromagnetic radiation coverage. The alerting current mains supply is easily detectable by simply touching the input to a guitar (or HiFi etc) amplifier. Why does anyone believe that using a phone, that emits very low level GHz frequencies will have the power to heat up testicles enough to reduce fertility and not the rest of the body? Who uses their phone next to their gentiles? OK, I will concede, if there has been an experiment where the temperature of testicles is measured during a phone call AND the rise is high enough to be evidently damaging! If not, then PLEASE MAKE THIS STOP!
Heat isn’t the only effect of electromagnetic radiation. Also, the data is right there. You know you can read the research paper, right?
Hmmm… interesting discussion. Another good read full of interesting data is in the link below:
https://www.kdnuggets.com/2019/01/dr-data-ice-cream-linked-shark-attacks.html
Apart from [Anonymous]’s statement I also wonder why you need to ‘shout’ make it stop, why is that so important to you?
And while I’m here I take the opportunity to tell you about a word named ‘unfounded’ that you can add to your vocabulary since that ‘non founded’ is a bit odd.
Oh and the governments of all countries limit the power of cell phone signals by law since it was proven to heat up tissue. Maybe go shout at them then eh.
It used to be measured on brain tissue; but as you perhaps have noticed maybe as much as 80% of the people now talk into their phone holding it in front of them instead of against the head in my observations. I am not sure however if people do that for reasons related to that widely known research.
Oh and talking of the world and what is safe: Alll over the world people used asbestos for a long time without anybody (officially) making obvious links to the people that were dying, and the same with the entire planet allowing lead in fuel, both had researched and obvious effects years/decades before they finally accepted reality, which was a delay that to me was rather obviously related to convenience and cost.
Are you saying this is all bollocks?
“Non-founded belief” (ignores studies and evidence referenced directly above)
Yeah you won’t reach this one.
plastics…..
I can remember theories about low sperm fertility at lest one decade before mobile phone was starting to no longer be a very rare gadget. I highly suspect that the primary cause is chemical.
I agree that it’s likely chemical, we know plastics leak chemicals that have hormone-like effects for instance.
Still though, there doesn’t have to be a single cause or a single bad factor, but I too think the main factor related to sperm count is probably chemical.
And I’d like to point out to various commenters that effects don’t have to be direct, something can effect your body or brain chemistry that then affects other parts including glands.
This seems to be new and helpful info for the people working for pharmaceutical companies too it seems, since they often ignore an organism is a complex set of interacting systems…
What is needed, clearly, is more data.
What frequencies are actually having an impact? There are several radios in a mobile device, so no useful remediation can take place until an association to a specific technology/ frequency is made. If the issue is LTE I might reduce my time at close proximity to devices with cell modems, but if the issue is with 2.4Ghz my response is totally different (wired internet to everything in the house and definitely move my WAPs out of my workspace)
If future data show that something more than “use phone, bad sperm” then the commentor that suggested a faraday cup may be on to something lol
Part of my job is counseling couples trying to become pregnant. Aside from possible RF exposure, there a number of other things that negatively impact sperm. The testicles, unlike ovaries, prefer cooler ambient temperature which is why they’re located outside the body and not tucked away inside. Anything that overheats or brings the testicles up closer to the body, for example, tight underwear, frequent bicycle/motorcycle/horseback riding, hot tubs/baths/showers, prolonged sitting, frequent masturbation, etc, will decrease sperm quality.
“frequent masturbation”
Wait, wait, what?
Was the phone thermally isolated from the sperm? Or was it perhaps playing one of those mobile games that drains the battery super fast and makes the phone red hot?
I really wish stuff like this that tries to make extraordinary claims would do the leg work to give extraordinary evidence to back up their claim.
its not the radios, its the fact that you are keeping your brain distracted from the natural instinct to procreate. your body responds by reallocating resources elsewhere. guys and girls used to interact when they were out and about, usually out of pure boredom, but now you have a portable entertainment system in your pocket.
Ok, turn my phone off as much as possible when I don’t absolutely need it?
Ok, got it.
*As I sit in a Tokyo train full of hundreds of people all on their phones, for a couple hours commuting per day.
Oh…..
Well at least I already had a kid so the undercarriage is stowed away and the bay doors are closed.
Not that a bit of a decline in population is a particularly bad thing, except for the economy.
The reason lies in the lack of asbestos work and lack of lead and sulfur in the air due to more stringent pollution controls.
And the lack of cigarettes indoors, which as we know from old photos makes you look sexy and fit
If some results suggest that sperm degradation is a worldwide phenomenon, it’s advisable not to get into tunnel vision and focus only on the emitters right next around us. I mean, cellular phones have increased their bandwidth and transfer rates dramatically over the years, as did Wi-Fi, so it’s clear they are the prime suspects. There’s hardly any escaping them in closely populated areas. But it can’t be the only thing if this is a development equally distributed across earth, so there must be something bigger.
There’s more and more radiation coming from above. I’m not talking about random sunflares, even though they might be somewhat involved, but what about satellites? They can transmit hundreds of TV stations each among many other streams, and/or serve as communication relays with extreme bandwidths and frequencies, covering the majority of the planet with a constant radiation floor by now. I doubt that there is enough long-time scientific research and results to prove that all of these frequencies are harmless. No matter how little power is being transmitted, it still may accumulate to unhealthy levels.
“Other factors, like smoking, diet, exercise, and general health seem to play a larger role, and it’s hard to disentangle these from cell phone use in the survey studies.”
Which puts those studies among the far too high percentage of studies that are effectively GARBAGE.
“We evaluated 18 studies that included 4280 samples. Exposure to mobile phones is associated with reduced sperm motility, viability, and concentration. The decrease in sperm quality after RF-EMW exposure was not significant, even when the mobile phone usage increased. This finding was consistent across experimental in vitro and observational in vivo studies.”
So, more RF from phones has no effect, so what is it about “the phones” that has an effect? “Exposure” to cell phones is perhaps because they indicate cultures where males don’t do significant physical labor and eat crap? Highest testosterone levels in the world: Mongolia. How HARD is life there?
You know you actually have to pay attention to this stuff to ever disentangle all the variables and get decent data. If you simply encountered the first warning signs, said they were crap because there’s too much other stuff going on, and discarded it… You’d still be sucking TEL and DDT all day. You know how much effort it took to not only collect evidence, but fight against huge amounts of resistance and efforts to dismiss those studies? It took decades.
You need people to take this stuff seriously and investigate, or you will end up poisoning a bunch of people with something or other. Maybe not this specifically, but it will happen eventually.
Sounds good to me! There are too many humans for this planet to support already.
Microwave ovens operate at 2.4 GHz and heat food by increasing the vibrational energy of water molecules. Now, if we have wifi networks established all over the world most operating at the same frequency of microwave ovens, then couldn’t possibly that lend to an overall increase in accumulative heating of our atmosphere?
How much soy did we used to consume per capita per year.
How about now?
So EMI make spems non-progressive… hum that explains a lot… we are doomed…
No we aren’t. Either we adapt and successful generations have a resistance against this, or selection gradually favors people who shun these environmental factors and live different lifestyles. Nature does not give up easily
Newsflash: Record Label causes ‘spems’ to become more Conservative. And yes, we’re all doomed!
Here’s Mike with the weather…
“But I don’t _want_ any Spem!”
Spem, spem, spem, spem!