Ah, yes. Autumn has arrived, and with it has come the time for the leaves to turn to all shades of yellows and reds and fall from the trees, decorating the streets and drainage pipes with wonderful, wonderful stuff. The days grow colder and shorter, and the nights are crisp and cold. All vegetation is going into hibernation, resting for its glorious return next Spring. That is, unless you have a WiFi network nearby, if a Dutch study is correct.
WIFI? WHY NOT?
WiFi, or "Wireless Fidelity" (similar to "Hi-Fidelity") is a catchy name for a wireless system of delivering data between devices. These devices can be anything from a wireless phone to a refrigerator or, more commonly, a personal computer. WiFi hasn't been around as a consumer product all that long. I remember the days of dial-up. Falling prices and more efficient delivery technologies have caused a boom in its use. I know tons of coffee shops and hotels have WiFi networks for internet access for their customers. Almost all of my neighbors have a wireless network set up at home. I have one too. Cities are now moving into creating city-wide WiFi "hotspots" for their residents to use without having to buy a router for home. Basically, it's the wave of the future.
If you believe a Dutch study reported in the UK Mail Online (and in other media), we're killing trees left and right.
GOING DUTCH
First of all, let's clarify that the study has not been published yet, so I haven't had a chance to read it, but this is what the Mail Online says about it:
The researchers took 20 ash trees and exposed them to various kinds of radiation for three months.The trees were exposed to six sources of radiation with frequencies ranging from 2412 to 2472 MHz and a power of 100 mW at a distance of just 20 inches.Trees placed closest to the Wi-Fi radio developed a ‘lead-like shine’ on their leaves that was caused by the dying of the upper and lower epidermis.This would eventually result in the death of parts of the leaves, the study found.Researchers also discovered that Wi-Fi radiation could slow the growth of corn cobs. In the Netherlands, about 70 per cent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms, compared with only 10 per cent five years ago, the study found. Trees in densely forested areas are not affected.
That's right, folks, "radiation" is killing trees. I can predict now that several people will blow a gasket when they find out that WiFi networks are exposing them to "radiation".
SO THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT NUKES, RIGHT?
No, they're not. In the scientific community, radiation refers to energy traveling in space. That's all. Now, we then break down radiation into two classes: ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. The radiation we've been afraid of all these years is ionizing radiation. Ionizing is a fancy way of saying that the radiation messes with the structure of an atom. So it is possible for ionizing radiation to cause damage to DNA at such a level that the damage cannot be repaired, leading to tissue damage, mutations, cancer, and all that other bad stuff.
Non-ionizing radiation, on the other hand, is not strong enough to cause that damage. That kind of radiation includes visible light and radio waves (which are also a form of light). Guess which radiation pertains to WiFi?
GOING NUTS
WiFi uses non-ionizing radiation. Granted, this kind of radiation can cause heat to build up (like in microwaves) and cause damage that way. But it would be a hard sell to say that WiFi gets the trees hot enough to cause damage. I'd put that on the sun, actually. That's not going to stop the nut cases, though. No, they're already bought into the notion that cellphones cause cancer. (Cellphones also use non-ionizing radiation.) There is no evidence of that, and any research showing some evidence is yet to be conclusive (mostly because the scientific plausibility is hard to overcome).
THINK WITH YOUR HEAD
Folks, it's easy for anyone to conduct a "study" and publish the results in an era where there are plenty of blogs and legitimate news sources who will pick up the story. What is hard to do is to counter physics and science. If the physics prescribe that non-ionizing radiation is too weak to cause genetic mutations and/or excessive heat damage, then any notion blaming those phenomena for any detrimental effect is really without reason. So think with your head, and don't give in to the scaremongering. We have bigger things to worry about, pun intended.
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