Bioelectromagnetics

[MRC_Hans]

Moulder’s question 5 reads:



5) Do power lines produce electromagnetic radiation?

His answer reads as follows:
"To be an effective radiation source an antenna must have a length comparable to its wavelength. Power-frequency sources are clearly too short compared to their wavelength (5,000 km) to be effective radiation sources. Calculations show that the typical maximum power radiated by a power line would be less than 0.0001 microwatts/cm^2, compared to the 0.2 microwatts/cm^2 that a full moon delivers to the Earth's surface on a clear night. The issue of whether power lines could produced ionizing radiation is covered in Q21B.
This is not to say that there is no loss of power during transmission. There are sources of loss in transmission lines that have nothing to do with "radiation" (in the sense as it is used in electromagnetic theory). Much of the loss of energy is a result of resistive heating; this is in sharp contrast to radiofrequency and microwave antennas, which "lose" energy to space by radiation. Likewise, there are many ways of transmitting energy that do not involve radiation; electric circuits do it all the time".

Moulder appears to be saying here that ELF power lines do not radiate, and though there has been some dispute about this I am inclined to agree with him. This is not to say that their effects cannot have action at a distance, however.

Power lines do not radiate EM waves, for the reasons Moulder mentions. But they are surrounded by electromagnetic fields. Energy can be, and is, coupled out of the power lines, but, as Moulder notes, not to an extent that it is considered when calculating the losses in a line.

Energy coupling through electromagnetic AC fields can happen in two ways:

Capacitive coupling: This is the electric field; any conductor near the power wire will form a capacitor together with the wire, and an AC current is coupled from the wire, through the capacitance, and to ground.

Inductive coupling: This is the magnetic field. In any conductor that is inside the magnetic field, an EMF (electromotoric force) is induced. If the conductor is so rranged that the EMF can make a current run, the energy used for this is coupled out of the power wire (slightly increasing its impedance), like in a transformer.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

To EHocking: Are you mad? Measuring the level of water left in each bowl is a useful surrogate for standing there all day to count the visits by the animal. I would hate to have you design a scientific protocol! Unless of course you fancy spending the time seeing how many times dogs drink from bowls: on the other hand maybe you have nothing better to do.

On the other hand, maybe you have no better evidence for your claim?

Seems you are refraining to answer my earlier question (I'll try to get the typing right this time ):

Do you agree that any health-damaging effect from exposure to an AC electrical field can only come from the currents it causes in the body, or do you suggest some other mechanism, and if so, which?

Hans

 

[EHocking]

To EHocking: Are you mad? Measuring the level of water left in each bowl is a useful surrogate for standing there all day to count the visits by the animal.

No. Simply measuring the water level in the bowls and *assuming* that the subject animal visited and/or drank from it does not support the claim regarding the Pet Counter. All it measures is a lowering of the water in a bowl. Do you account for evaporation, spillage, other animals using the bowl, visits where the animal doesn't drinke or any other agencies etc? If you do not observe the subject animal drinking you *cannot* assert that a simple lowering of water level is a true indicator that the animal has drunk. Pedantic? Perhaps. But at least I'm not allowing personal bias to influence my conclusions.

Let's reiterate, the claim is:

"your pet will always choose to drink magnetic water"

Observing a lower water level in a bowl does not test this claim, as all it indicates is that there is less water in the bowl, not the mechanism for it's removal. *ALSO* and most importantly, it does not measure whether the "non-magnetised" water bowl is being used.

As I said previously, if we are testing the premise that "your pet will always choose to drink magnetic water" and the animal drinks from the other bowl (which you admit in your previous post), your premise is immediately disproven and the advertisement is misleading. I quoted the relevant summary the Trade Descriptions Act for a reason. You may also wish to reword your advertisement in light of Para (5) in Section 6 of The Control of Misleading Advertisements Regulations 1988:
"(5) The court shall not refuse to grant an injunction for lack of evidence that...
... (b) the person responsible for the advertisement intended it to be misleading or failed to exercise proper care to prevent its being misleading."

I would hate to have you design a scientific protocol!

No doubt, since you seem to have difficulty indentifying the premise that you are attempting to test. As indicated by your next comment.

Unless of course you fancy spending the time seeing how many times dogs drink from bowls

Since the premise is, "your pet will always choose to drink magnetic water", that is exactly what you need to be measuring. I have already put forward a possible solution using a simple "catflap" isolating each bowl with a counter attached. This could be complimented by a £20 webcam to ensure that it was an animal moving the flap and not some other agent. Surely not much of an outlay for a lab boasting £1M worth of gear?

: on the other hand maybe you have nothing better to do.

On the other hand, you do not seem to be able to grasp the fact that anecdotes are not evidence, nor how to design an experiment or study to test an hyphothesis, NOR grasp that by your unsupported claims you may be in breach of the Trade Descriptions Act.

As I suggested before, you probably need to reword your advertisement for this product, or provide scientific evidence to support your claim.

Hint: "my predictive belief" is not scientific evidence.

 

[EHocking]

To EHocking: Be gentle with him, he hasn't heard of video cameras!

It's the fact that a qualified scientist is unable to identify the premise that he is attempting to test/support nor devise a study or experiment to test it that worries me...

 

[BillHoyt]

To EHocking: Be gentle with him, he hasn't heard of video cameras!

Apparently so. Also apparent is a problem with alternate hypothesis spinning when critiquing experimental design...

 

[BillHoyt]

Ah, I see the stars have aligned...

 

[Pragmatist]

Power lines do not radiate EM waves, for the reasons Moulder mentions.

Hans, Roger: At the following link: http://people.howstuffworks.com/blackout.htm

is the following:

"At a high level, the power grid is a very simple thing. It consists of a set of large power plants (hydropower plants, nuclear power plants, etc.) all connected together by wires. One grid can be as big as half of the United States. "

 

[cogreslab]

I was asked for my own protocol, I thought, and I made it clear that my anecdotal evidence was not being regarded by me as a publishable experiment. Suddenly my entire academic capacity is being challenged for telling you my anecdote with my own pet, including the genuineness of my academic degrees! Some of you guys build castles in the air then attempt to live in them.

Nevertheless, video cameras (and the need to sit and watch them for hours to chronicle the results) and the other paraphernalia you mention were not appropriate for my simple test on one subject. We have not done any peer reviewable work ourselves on this issue, but I will get on to the manufacturers about this to see what they say (apart from branding you as overly skeptical of course).

It makes me wonder what you ask when you buy a loaf of bread: do you demand proof that the flour was white?

 

[cogreslab]

To Hans:

Good question:

"Do you agree that any health-damaging effect from exposure to an AC electrical field can only come from the currents it causes in the body, or do you suggest some other mechanism, and if so, which?"

I must do other things right now, so will come back hopefully this evening on this one. It is not a simple answer.

 

[cogreslab]

Thanks EHocking, btw, for elevating my wealth for me by hundreds of thousands of dollars at a stroke. Sadly for me, a million dollars is not the same however as a million pounds: is this the kind of accuracy you would bring to your experimental protocols?

 

[cogreslab]

Hans asked:

"Do you agree that any health-damaging effect from exposure to an AC electrical field can only come from the currents it causes in the body, or do you suggest some other mechanism, and if so, which?"

This is an excellent question,. because it challenges those arguing for weak (i.e. non thermal) ELF EM field effects to put forward a mechanism/mechanisms by which adverse health effects might occur. But the way it is framed it only possits one solution, (e.g when did you last beat your wife?) and since there are more than one mechanism the straight answer must be "No I do not agree that any health-damaging effects are so caused. But nor do I exclude that mechanism among others". So a fuller exposition is required of me.

Why more than one mechanism? I answer that by pointing out that during most of our evolutionary experience we have never had exposure to relatively long wave alternating electric fields of any chronicity. We have however had exposure to quasi-static magnetic fields, e.g. geomagnetic fields which "wobble " a little all the time by a few nanoTesla. (J. C-M has a purple passage about that in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Vol 2). Nature is smart and subtle. What smarter idea than to choose for the control of life processes a communication or other systems which optimise the signal-to-noise ratio?

Given the previous absence of AC electric fields Nature chose that environment for regulatory growth control among multicellular life. Monocellular creatures (e.g. listeria, legionella) probably are not so badly affected, and can endure more comfortably in such environments, since they do not need to communicate with fellows in the same way. Colonies however do need ionic calcium for their integration, a discovery made I think in 1907.

So the heart’s beat rate is controlled by electric fields emanating from the sino-atrial node; the brain uses electric fields created from currents flowing between the great pyramidal cells on either side of the cerebral hemispheral cortex ("Betz cells") via the corpus callosal nervous transmissions into the third and lateral ventricles; the cellular immune system is programmed to understand the differences between self and non-self by characterised electric fields at the thymus; the synthesis of ATP is achieved by electron transport in oxidative phosphorylation; and I am sure there are other mechanisms equally dependent on charges or the control of cations like calcium, rather than upon magnetic fields which are diffuse and to which the body is transparent. With nervous conduction the passage of ions across the membrane can be reliably inhibited by devices such as TENS machines in a similar way for pain relief.

It is plausible that the unexpected and novel evolutionary experience of exogenous and "incoherent" AC electric fields will perturb such systems, since electric fields or rather the individual charges of which they are composed or from which they are derived are superpositive. I expect responses to this will include a lot of physics, but I want to concentrate on the biology for the moment.

Now, how in Hell does the electric field get into the body? We have a most efficient barrier to intrusion in the form of the dermis and epidermis, specifically evolved to deflect and keep out radiation e.g. from the sun; and we have associated melanin dependent protections. The skin like hair is dead. We defend our living selves with the dead bodies of our own cells, and "fill the wall up with our English dead", to quote Shakespeare. These thicknesses have been honed by the shortness of the waves incoming such as solar UV which may be too short to penetrate past the wall of dead. But RF waves are longer and can get past this evolutionary derived barrier, and so can the even longer non-ionising fields and radiation. We need to be thicker skinned these days, (especially if joining this forum with new ideas).

So though thse barriers may have been good enough in a world devoid of AC electric fields, when electricity arrived (thanks to Westinghouse and Tesla’s AC electricity transmission systems prevailing over Edison’s DC system and his powerhouses every few miles), the situation changed for ever. The ELF AC waves were long, and very similar in frequncy to those of the brain and the heart, and for the same reason: their ability to conduct meaningful information through a physiological saline solution (0.9 percent Na+ Cl-) just right for its purpose.

The ELF project at Wisconsin and the back up at Michigan does the same job: at 76 Hz it can communicate effectively with organelles (nuclear subs in this case) well below the surface of the saline ocean. These subs have long strings dangling out behind them to pick up the signals. Cells also have long glycoproteins - a whole forest of them in the glycocalyx, each able to receive via their negatively charged sialic acid residues specific information.

Cancer cells have lost these glycoproteins, and are outside regulatory growth control for that reason. I can explain how that occurs, because it is fundamental to an understanding of malignancy and how to stop metastasis, but that has to be later in this dialogue, (perhaps when the young guy with his thirty peer reviewed papers wants to ask about it).

Hans I hope you can now see why this answer is not a simple one. I will stop at this point because the post is already over long, and take critical questions.

 

[Prester John]

the cellular immune system is programmed to understand the differences between self and non-self by characterised electric fields at the thymus

I thought it had something to do with the Major Histocompatibility Complex, you know display of internal cellular proteins etc rather than electric fields so please elaborate.........

Cells also have long glycoproteins - a whole forest of them in the glycocalyx, each able to receive via their negatively charged sialic acid residues specific information

The Glycolayx is a cells capsule or slime layer...

Cancer cells have lost these glycoproteins, and are outside regulatory growth control for that reason

again i thought it was due to mutations in the cells genome that caused the loss of regulatory proteins and hence cancerous cells. Additionally please substantiate this claim that they have lost these glycoproteins, since its seems central to your argument.

(Your metaphor about submarines trailing "strings" and cells trailing glycoproteins is to be honest awful)

because it is fundamental to an understanding of malignancy and how to stop metastasis

The million dollar question, i await enlightenment...

 

[Pragmatist]

Why more than one mechanism? I answer that by pointing out that during most of our evolutionary experience we have never had exposure to relatively long wave alternating electric fields of any chronicity. We have however had exposure to quasi-static magnetic fields, e.g. geomagnetic fields which "wobble " a little all the time by a few nanoTesla.

Not true. There are constant long wave atmospheric voltage variations, there can be differences of up to 10's of KV/m between the head and feet alone. At any fixed point typical daily electric field variations are of the order of at least 50 V/m. And frequencies, whilst concentrated maily below 10Hz can vary up to 3Khz at significant amplitude.

Here is one real example: http://www.sgo.fi/SPECIAL/Contributions/Tammet.pdf

Another here: http://147.175.143.11/ (electric Schumann resonances - look under measurements)

Another on Schumann: http://www.oulu.fi/~spaceweb/textbook/schumann.html

 

[cogreslab]

To PJ: Cancer cells and glycoproteins in the ECM. Probably the easiest reference for you is in "The Molecular biology of the Cell", by Alberts, Bray et al (one author is Jim watson of DNA structure fame, btw). This textbook has a number of editions, so the page refs will vary between edns, but in Edn 3 the description of cancer cells almost always being found to demonstrate loss of contact inhibition is given on p 1274, and an example of lack of expression of oligosaccharides on cancer cell plasma membrane surfaces is given by

Different glycosylation of cadherins from human bladder non-malignant and cancer cell lines
Ma³gorzata Przyby³o1 , Dorota Hoja-Lukowicz1 , Anna Lityñska1 and Piotr Laidler2

Cancer Cell International 2002, 2:6

Quoted from tnhis paper:


"Previously, we had established that the adhesion molecules, expressed in all mentioned above cell lines, which reacted with anti-pan cadherin monoclonal antibodies were N-cadherins except the HCV29 non-malignant ureter cell line [9]. In this cell line only trace amounts of N-cadherin were detected. Moreover, neither this nor any other examined cancer cell lines expressed E-cadherin [9]. Frixen et al. [10] found that differentiated human cancer cell lines, including bladder cell lines, generally expressed E-cadherin and were noninvasive in vitro, whereas dedifferentiated cell lines did not express this cell-cell adhesion molecule and were invasive. It is well-documented that, in a wide range of cancers, E-cadherin expression is loss or downregulated, resulting in a reduced level of intracellular adhesion, and perturbation in E-cadherin-mediated cell adhesion is involved in tumor progression and metastasis [7,11-15]. Giroldi et al. [16] showed that N-cadherin become predominantly expressed in bladder-cancer cell lines that have lost E-cadherin expression.


Must go for now, but will resume later in a separate post to set out the reaons for this lack of expression.

 

[Prester John]

Yes but you asserted that loss of the glycoproteins caused the cells to become cancerous, when the loss is rather one of the many changes that happens to concerous cells.

 

[cogreslab]

To PJ: Cancer cells and glucose need; Cancer cells are known to be glucose hungry. They "eat" three times as much glucose as the normal cell, and this indicates a fualty metabolism, as Otto Warburg and Szent Gyorgii argued long ago.

At our lab we believe the cancer cell has lost its ability to use the ox-phos pathway as a result of carcinogens blocking that pathway, thereby preventing ubiquinone from delivering electrons to cyt bc1 complex. This in tuirn prevents ATP synthesis in that part of the metabolism. It also lowers the need for molecular oxygen as a final electron acceptor: oxygen uptake by cancer cells is much lower than in normal cells.

In this situation the cell turns to the more primitive means of synthesising ATP via glycolysis, a much less efficient means of doing so. To maintain e.g. the NaK pump it needs about 40 percent of its normal supply of ATP, which clearly leaves it little extra in these circumstances.

Accordingly the cell resorbs from its plasma membrane the nearest and most convenient source of glucose. But this puts the cell outside of regulatory growth control, since its glycoproteins are essential for regulatory signal transduction. Ca2+ acts as not only a primary but also a second messenger of these signals within the cytosol. (Imposing an ELF electric field has long ago demonstrated an efflux of Ca2+ in e.g. live cat brains- (Bawin and Adey, 1976).

Out of regulatory control, and desperate for glucose to maintain ATP synthesis via glycolysis (an ineffecient process), the cell abandons contact inhibition and in its need for glucose starts invading epithelial tissue. We now have a cancer cell.

Goldblatt and Cameron (1953) demonstrated long ago you can acheive this effect with normal cells even without any carcinogens present, simply by intermittently cutting off the bioavailability to the cells of molecular oxygen, which has the same effect of preventing the cell's use of the ox-phos pathway.

At our lab we have found a way of restoring the ox phos pathway to aberrant cells using high redox potential quinones, and are testing this in vitro. The spectacularly successful Hungarian clinical trials mentioned on colorectal cancer patients in BJC last August were an example of how effective this can be on metastasis, in contrast to the "poison cut and burn" technology of modern cancer teatment, which does not address the metastasis problem.

I hope you follow the gist of this explanation.

 

[cogreslab]

Yes, good point. I forgot to deal with the issue of the Schumann resonances, discovered byn O. Schumann in 1954. These are an important zeitgeber for many seasonal effects, but we are accustomed to them by evolution also, to the extent that astronauts are provided I believe with artificial versions when in space. They are totally unlike the ELF electric fields of modern technology. I think it best, because the subject of Schumann resonances is so vast, to open a fresh thread on that issue. A good paper explaining the differences between SRs and ELF was given by Ross Adey, if of interest.

 

[Prester John]

At our lab we believe the cancer cell has lost its ability to use the ox-phos pathway as a result of carcinogens blocking that pathway,

What exactly do you mean by carcinogens blocking the pathway How do proto-oncogenes and tumour supressor genes fit into all this?

 

[cogreslab]

Up or down regulation of gene expression is often a response by the cell to circumstances. By blocking the pathway I mean the pathogen binds to the part of e.g. the cytochrome prepared for the reception of electrons from ubiquinone. We have found a way of cleaving the pathogen from that binding site or sites, using high redox potential quinones (e.g. parabenzoquinone with a redox potential of around 0.75 V) with better electronegativity than ubiquinone (RP around .012-30 V). (You will find that many carcinogens are toxic amines, btw).

 

[Prester John]

So you are saying that carcinogens interact directly with cellular processes rather than via induction of mutations in the cellular genome?