“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, July 5, 2010

Bees and Cell Phones

Graham Harman has posted on the possibility that bees may be affected by cell phones. Yikes.

In a study at Panjab University in Chandigarh, northern India, researchers fitted cell phones to a hive and powered them up for two fifteen-minute periods each day.

After three months, they found the bees stopped producing honey, egg production by the queen bee halved, and the size of the hive dramatically reduced.

The last explanation I read was that pollution was scrambling their sense of smell.

This link is fascinating because of the quotation from Andrew Goldsworthy of Imperial College London, speculating on what it is about electromagnetic waves. In brief, they disrupt other wavelike phenomena. In particular, cell phone waves may disturb cryptochrome, a chemical bees use that is sensitive to the Earth's electromagnetic field, and which we use to determine circadian rhythms:

[A]ny weakening of the amplitude of these rhythms means that at no time will any process controlled by them ever function at maximum power. In particular, the immune system may never be able to summon up the overwhelming power that is sometimes needed to overcome pathogens or to destroy developing cancer cells before they get out of control.

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