from Hacker News

DNA is a fractal antenna in electromagnetic fields (2011)

by DreamScatter on 7/17/21, 12:00 AM with 6 comments

• by jiggawatts on 7/17/21, 5:28 AM

  This is 100% snake oil bullshit, right up there with anti-vaxxers and 5G conspiracy theories.

  Even if true that DNA behaves as a "fractal antenna", which this paper does not establish in any way, the scales are all wrong.

  The paper itself contains this little table of fractal sizes:

      DNA level       Diameter
      Double helix    1 nm
      Chromatin fiber 10 nm
      Solenoid        30 nm
      Hollow tube     200 nm 
  

  Notice what it omits? The matching frequencies, which are trivial to compute thanks to the speed of light[1]:

      DNA level       Diameter     Frequency       Type
      Double helix      1 nm      300,000 THz    Soft X-Ray
      Chromatin fiber  10 nm       30,000 THz    Extreme Ultraviolet
      Solenoid         30 nm       10,000 THz    Far Ultraviolet
      Hollow tube     200 nm        1,500 THz    Ultraviolet
  

  Then most of the rest of the paper talks about frequencies as low as 60 Hz, which have wavelengths about 25 trillion times longer than the ones in this table!

  The conclusion -- of course -- is that WiFi which uses 2.4 to 6 GHz is dangerous:

  > The proliferation of mobile phones, WiFi (wireless communication technology), etc. could lead to a large increase in mutations over a very short period of time.

  This isn't even remotely science. It's a bunch of quacks that got their garbage published in PubMed, which is a low bar. There's nothing to see here until it turns up in Nature, and is replicated.

  Read the paper for yourselves: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.3109/09553002.2011.538...

  [1] I've ignored the index of refraction of water, because it's a small, largely irrelevant difference. We're talking orders of magnitude here, and the paper is off by about 15 of them!

• by version_five on 7/17/21, 12:52 AM

  The consequence of this would be heating, which is how radiation safety is already established. I'd be curious to see how the absorption of EM into DNA differs from other tissue (or I guess molecules) more than the specific observation that it can absorb EM over a broad band. That's all "fractal antenna" really means in this context (broadband absorbtion and therefore potential for heating), it is not some special feature

  I remember many years ago there was a bit of a fractal craze, in signal processing and antenna design. The idea for antennas was that self similarity gave a broad resonance because there was always some fractal element that was the right size. In practice I never saw any indications they were better than other antennas.

  I'd be much more concerned if DNA had a resonance somewhere in common radio bands where it absorbed a lot of EM, that would be much more likely to be dangerous.

• by 1MachineElf on 7/17/21, 12:12 AM

  I'm glad some actual reaearch has been done on this.

  Reminds me a bit of the far-fetched claim by mystic pseudo-scientist David Wilcock that biological viruses could be transmitted via EMFs.

• by CamperBob2 on 7/17/21, 5:57 AM

  Yes, a fractal antenna in a bag of salt water. Good luck getting more than 2 or 3 bars with that. :-P