Nexus - 1601 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

GLOBAL NEWS CHILDHOOD USE OF MOBILE PHONES RAISES BRAIN TUMOUR RISK FIVEFOLD A analysis of data, from one of the biggest studies carried out into the risk that radiation from mobile phones causes cancer, was presented by Professor Lennart Hardell of the Orebro University Hospital, Sweden, to a September 2008 conference held at the Royal Society. The research revealed that "people who started mobile phone use before the age of 20 had a more than five- fold increase in glioma"—a cancer of the glial cells that support the central nervous system. The extra risk to young people of contracting the disease from using the cordless phone found in many homes was almost as great, at more than four times higher. Those who started using mobile phones young, the professor added, were five times more likely to get acoustic neuromas—benign but often disabling tumours of the auditory nerve, which usually cause deafness. By contrast, people who were in their twenties before using the handsets were only 50 per cent more likely to contract gliomas and just twice as likely to get acoustic young people may suffer an "epidemic" of brain cancer in later life. (Source: The Independent on Sunday, UK, 21 September 2008, via EMFacts, http://www.emfacts.com) There are many unanswered questions. Why do the portals form every eight minutes? How do magnetic fields inside the cylinder twist and coil? (Source: NASA, 30 October 2008, http://tinyurl.com/67uvh2) MAGNETIC PORTALS CONNECT SUN AND EARTH bm the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn't believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the Sun 93 million miles away. Tonnes of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the DOES RAINFALL VARY WITH SUNSPOT ACTIVITY? hough most scientists reject the assertion that the Sun's activity can explain global warming, many have wondered whether it can affect rainfall. No one has been able to test this, though, as it has proved difficult to collate rainfall measurements over long time-scales and areas large enough to rule out local variations. Pablo Mauas of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and his colleagues decided to take a different tack by studying the 4,000-kilometre- long Paranda River in South America. It has the fourth-largest streamflow in the world and so acts as an indirect indicator of rainfall right across the continent. The researchers found that over a time-scale of decades, the streamflow in the Parana increased and decreased in accordance with the number of page. "It's called a ‘flux transfer event’ or FTE," says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn't exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible." On the dayside of Earth (the side closer to the Sun), Earth's magnetic field presses against the Sun's magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect", forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. sunspots. "There is less than a 0.01 per cent chance that this correlation is by chance," says Mauas (Physical Review Letters, vol. 101, 168501). (Source: New Scientist, 8 November 2008) neuromas. The study raises fears that today's WEWE SOTA RPwecu Tie Mew! pRUG THATS TETALLY ofA, AYP rll come Yeu Baw ¢ CAP UER. THERE'S _ THAT awe A\sive £7 EF FEET. GHOSTLY VISITORS APPEAR INSIDE PARTICLE COLLIDER nexplained "ghost particles" are mysteriously appearing inside a US-based high-energy physics experiment. The finding is so controversial that about one-third of the 600 people who detected it are refusing to put their names to the 69-page paper purporting this discovery. Whatever the spectres may be, their effect has been seen in roughly 100,000 events—enough to make it 8 ¢ NEXUS www.nexusmagazine.com DECEMBER 2008 — JANUARY 2009