Cell tower radiation increases risk of brain cancer

From DNA India Analysis...........! 

Busting the myths about lack of evidence on harm caused by cellphone radiation, Finnish scientist Dariusz Leszczynski cancer.

on Friday said that long-term exposure to cellphone and cell tower radiation, on an average of thirty minutes a day over ten years, causes an increased risk of brain,

Cellphone radiation increases risk of cancer?
"The Interfone, Hardell and the recently concluded CERENAT studies in France have all pointed towards a common risk to increased brain cancer," said Leszczynski, adjunct professor, biochemistry, University of Helsinki. Leszczynski is one of the members of the expert committee constituted by World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). WHO has classified electromagnetic frequency radiation emitted by cellphone, cell towers and wi-fi as category 2(B) or possibly carcinogenic.

What are the associated health risks?
Apart from brain cancer, three definitive studies showed that exposure of radiation to the skin and brain caused changes in cell structure. "Changes were induced in skin cells and metabolism of glucose in the brain was affected." It is also known to cause hearing loss, infertility, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOD) in women.

Repercussions of impending 4G towers?
There are 15 lakh mobile towers in India. Most of them are in dense clusters and in non-uniform distances. Experts have raised concerns over the upcoming 4G towers. "Each tower has close to four or more antennae attached to it. Each antennae will transmit at least forty watts of power which is extremely high. At the moment, 2G towers emit close to 20 watts of power. More transmission in 4G towers may cause compliance issues," said Professor Girish Kumar, department of electrical engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). "Across Europe, power transmission of antennae is not more than 1-5 watts. Higher the power transmission, more amplified is the range of frequency of mobile tower."

Cellphone operators often increase power transmission in fewer towers to save costs of building more towers at uniform distances. "India needs 15 lakh more towers, but that would lead to incurring of Rs30,000 crore for cellphone companies. So, they are increasing power transmission which is harmful to human health," added Kumar.

How can the problem of call drops be tackled?
Experts have proposed that cell tower operators build more towers with lesser power transmission. It is proposed that if the call costs are increased by five paise per minute by operators, which is multiplied by 365 days and 90 crore users that talk on the phone on an average for 18 minutes a day, operators can recover Rs30,000 crore from users in two years. "This corpus can be used for regulation of power transmission and uniform construction of towers at shorter distances. This will also solve problems of call drops," Kumar explained.

A new smartphone app that detects text and reads it aloud for visually impaired people

A new smartphone app that detects text and reads it aloud for visually impaired people ( Watch the Video )

From San Francisco: Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son's school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple Inc iPhone.

"I couldn't believe how accurate it was," said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand.

The new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews after its first day of availability and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people.

Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom.

The $99 app is the result of a four decades-long relationship between the National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil, a well-known artificial-intelligence scientist and senior Google employee. According to its website, K-NFB Reading Technology Inc and Sensotec NV, a Belgium-based company, led the technical development of the app.

Kurzweil, who demonstrated the app on stage at the NFB's annual convention in June, said it can replace a "sighted adviser".

Taking advantage of new pattern recognition and image-processing technology as well as new smartphone hardware, the app allows users to adjust or tilt the camera, and reads printed materials out loud. People with refreshable Braille displays can now snap pictures of print documents and display them in Braille near-instantaneously, said NFB spokesman Chris Danielsen.

The app has already given some people greater independence, users said on Thursday and Friday on social-media sites such as Twitter. One early adopter, Gordon Luke, tweeted that he was able to use the app to read his polling card for the Scottish Referendum.

The app will be available on Android in the coming months, Kurzweil told Reuters in an interview. He may also explore a version of the app for Google Glass, a postage stamp-sized computer screen that attaches to eyeglass frames and is capable of taking photos, recording video and playing sound.

"Google Glass makes sense because you direct the camera with your head," Kurzweil said.

Kurzweil started working on so-called "reading machines" in the early 1970s after chatting on a plane with a blind person who voiced frustrations with the lack of optical-recognition technology on the market.

A few years later, "Kurzweil burst into the National Federation of the Blind's offices in Washington, DC, and said he had invented a reading machine," recalled Jim Gashel, a former NFB employee who currently heads business development at KNFB Reader. "It was phenomenal."

Kurzweil's first reading machine was the size of a washing machine and cost $50,000. The technology has continued to improve over the past few decades - the new smartphone app can recognize and translate print between different languages and scan PowerPoint slides up to 25 feet (7.6 meters) away - but it was not available on a mainstream mobile device until now.

Previously, it cost more than $1,000 to use the software with a Nokia cell phone and a camera.

The app's release comes at a time when the technology industry has faced criticism for being too focused on making what some deem frivolous products such as apps for sharing photos and video games, as well as for intruding into people's personal privacy.

In San Francisco, activists have blocked commuter buses operated by companies such as Google and Apple, and picketed the homes of some tech company executives for driving up the cost of living and not doing enough to help fix the city's problems.

San Francisco-based Bryan Bashin, executive director of the non-profit Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, said the KNFB app shows the positive and profound impact that technology can have.

"There are innumerable times in life that I'll have a bit of print and there will be nobody around who can help me out, and I'll just want to know something as simple as 'Is this packet decaf or caffeinated coffee?'" Bashin said.

"The ability to do this easily with something that fits in your pocket at lightning speed will certainly be a game changer."

iPhone 6 Is Already On Sale In China — And It's Available In TWO Sizes

iPhone 6 Is Already On Sale In China — And It's Available In TWO Sizes

Martin Hajek A conceptual rendering of the new iPhone 6. China’s largest mobile carrier is now accepting orders for the iPhone 6 ahead of the model’s official launch, according to China Daily. The new phone will be available from China Mobile Beijing. China Mobile is the largest mobile phone operator by subscribers with 760 million of them. (That’s equivalent to more than double the population of the U.S.) The site has already received over 33,000 orders for the new devices since yesterday evening.  China Mobile appears to have also inadvertently confirmed rumors that Apple will release two versions of iPhone 6, in different sizes. The China Mobile Beijing site is giving users the choice between a 4.7 and a 5.5-inch iPhone 6. However, the site has not released accompanying images or provided a release date. In the past, China Mobile has offered online reservations for unannounced Apple devices – it did a similar thing with the iPhone 5 last year. Apple’s media event is next Tuesday, Sept. 9, where the company is expected to officially unveil iPhone 6. Read more stories on Business Insider, Malaysian edition of the world’s fastest-growing business and technology news website.