#it's like the least intuitive pattern drafting I have ever done

[tj-crochets]

Crafting update: I have discovered I am probably mildly allergic to Thin Mints but only after allergy-ing myself multiple days in a row* so I have had multiple daytime benadryl for multiple days so I am not functioning super great, which led to today's attempt to draft a new pattern I was trying to make a crow and I solved a plushie construction issue that's been a problem for me for four years without measuring anything or remembering to add a seam allowance to the extra bit, but somehow made the head like two sizes too small? I'll fix it tomorrow lol *less ridiculous than it sounds, because I can apparentely tolerate some Thin Mints but not a lot of Thin Mints so I did not react the first few days

[bgeurotrash]

Board game review - Remember our Trip

As both American style and European Style games a becoming every larger, longer and more complex, there has opened up room for a new style of game to take foothold in the hobby. Japanese Style games distinguishing themselves by returning to basics and focusing on simple yet unique system that, when done correct, allow players the same depth that you would find in an European style game, with only a fraction of the rules overhead.

Japanese style games have been on the rise for quite a while, with the smash 2012 hits Love Letter (by designer Seiji Kanai) and Trains (by designer Hisashy Hayashi) marking the start of a slow and steady growth ultimatley ending up where we are today, with Japanese games being such a huge and defined genre that I would dare to say it should be one of the "styles" up there with American and European. With great designers like Shinzawa and Sasaki (of Oink fame) there is no wonder why. Among these great designers sit Saashi, originally becoming popular of their push-your-luck game Coffee Roaster (2015). Today ill be reviewing on of their games; Remeber our Trip; a game about collectivelt trying to remember a trip.

CORE GAMEPLAY

Remeber Our Trip is a sort of odd polyomino game where you are allowed a large amount of flexibility, as the tokens you draft cover only a single square. Though it is not until you've put enough matching tokens next to eachother you may claim them as a "polyomino". When you do so you get a base amount of points (larger polyominoes giving more points) and then you check the shared map. If there is already a polyomino in the location matching where you just constructed a polyomino on your map, you score points if your tokens match that polyomino; one point per token that matches. If there is no polyomino though, you're in luck! You get to place a new polyomino and then score points for all your tokens, as they will match the newly placed polyomino.

So far so good! You draft tiles, race to construct polyominoes or try to match the ones already made. Here's the twist that's going to throw a spanner into your works: every turn you're only allowed to place your tiles within a very specific area, greatly restricting how you can place. Often, come late-game, you'll find yourself throwing away quite a few of your precious drafted tiles. They do not fit into this turns pattern on your already overcrowded tiny board.

COMPONENTS

I love Saashi's visual style. It's stylish in an incredibly charming way and it's simplicity leads to a board that is beautifull, yet incredibly easy to parse; making sure that you never lose because you missed a detail.

The cardboard is good quality, and while the strips of paper you use to cover up the board in the hard mode can be a bit flimsy, the thinness of them almost makes the component seem to dissapear as you play the game (a good thing). The box is also about as big as it needs to be, so it won't take too much shelf space and is easy to transport.

FLOW

The structure of this game is a work of art itself, starting hopefull. You'll place tokens willy nilley all over the place, making a mental note that you'll come back and finish that polyomino eventually. But as the short (12 rounds) game inches ever closer to the end you slowly but surely start to panic. Plans get ruined as you are forced to place suboptimally, always doing ever larger tradeoffs to try and at least squeeze some out of this terrible system before the game abruptly ends. It flows so well, both round to round and game to game.

TURN-OFFS

Spoiler alert: I adore this game. These are things that aren't necessarily bad, but if some of these turn you off it could be an indication this game isn't for you:

The game is hard and punishing. Small mistakes may cascade into huge problems later in the game, if not fixed carefully early.

The game can be somewhat counter-intuitive. It's by no means a rules heavy game, but it can still be somewhat difficult to teach; especially to non-gamers.

CONCLUSION

As already stated, I adore this game. I think it's pretty damn perfect in just about every way. Witty and innovative gameplay, a charming and unique theme (complimented wonderfully by amazing artwork). This is absolutely one to get if you like short, relatively abstract, difficult games.

Music pairing:

For this game I would reccomend the album "Good Morning" by No. 9.

[icharchivist]

A3 x Sleeping at Last

I have a fondness for the musician Sleeping at Last and i decided to have fun associating at least one of his song per A3 Characters. Under the cut are songs as well as some highlight lyrics to justify my choice. Some of them i feel more strongly than others so anyone with a comment is welcomed as well.

Thus here i go:

& Spotify playlist of all those songs in order if you want to go through it

Mankai Company : North

We will call this place our home, The dirt in which our roots may grow. Though the storms will push and pull, We will call this place our home. We’ll tell our stories on these walls. Every year, measure how tall. And just like a work of art, We’ll tell our stories on these walls. Let the years we’re here be kind, be kind. Let our hearts, like doors, open wide, open wide. Settle our bones like wood over time, over time. Give us bread, give us salt, give us wine.

Spring Troupe: From The Ground Up

It took me 27 years to wrap my head around this- To brush the ashes off of everything i love. Where courage was contagious, confidence was key. Right as rain, soft as snow, It grows and grows and grows, Our home sweet home.

We'll try to document this light, With cameras to our eyes, In an effort to remember What being mended feels like.

We're home sweet home.

Sakuya Sakuma : The Projectionist

When I was young I fell in love with story, With the eleventh hour, with the blaze of glory.

When hands are tied and clocks are ticking An audience convinced, we're leaning in, holding our breath again Just when we thought the game was over The music lifts and our dying soldier lives And we breathe a sigh of relief The theater lights dim and all goes quiet. In the darkest of rooms, light shines the brightest.

We’re leaving, we’re leaving our shadows behind us now. We’re leaving, we’re leaving it all behind for now. But even dust was made to settle And if we’re made of dust, then what makes us any different? I guess we give what we’ve been given: A family tree so very good at giving up When we’ve had enough. Though truth is heavier than fiction, Gravity lifts as the projectionist rolls tape. And it makes us brave again

Masumi Usui : Venus

At first I thought you were a constellation. I made a map of your stars, then I had a revelation: You’re as beautiful as endless, You’re the universe I’m helpless in. An astronomer at my best When I throw away the measurements.

I was a billion little pieces 'til you pulled me into focus. Astronomy in reverse, It was me who was discovered.

Tsuzuru Minagi : Page 28

Have you read the script? Could you picture it? ... is it worth the risk?

Here in the second act I'm living in repair. Strange how the heart adapts when its pieces disappear. And there, on page 28, I'm so tired of drying glue, I begin my grand attempt at building something new. Though I tend to write the epiphany more immediately, I guess I'm trusting that there's such a thing as elegance in dissonance. God, I'm skeptical of pulling scenes. Was it something that I said? was it something that I did? Please don't get me wrong - I still need your help As history repeats itself Here in the aftermath, I'm pulling at the seams. Strange how the heart adapts in the absence of routine. And there, on page 29, I find “new” and make it mine. But I can't help casting shadows on all I leave behind. Maybe I could afford to change a bit... Even let go of the reigns? Every torn out page was worth the risk Now that the stakes have been raised. So here in the final draft, I've given all I have. Strange how the heart expands in the absence of a plan. There's nothing left on the page, but I'm okay with that, For I found my resolution Was designed for stronger hands.

 or Body

There's magic in our bones, A north star in our soul That remembers our way home. There's magic in our bones. No, I don't have a script for this. But I know the right words exist Somewhere, And I just need more time. I know, I know, I'm asking for the moon, But I must listen to intuition Believe me, I only want what's right.

Itaru Chigasaki : Pluto

I woke up from the same dream: Falling backwards, falling backwards ’Til it turned me inside out. Now I live a waking life Of looking backwards, looking backwards; A model citizen of doubt. Until one day I had enough Of this exercise of trust. I leaned in and let it hurt, And let my body feel the dirt. When I break pattern, I break ground. I rebuild when I break down. I wake up more awake than I’ve ever been before. Still I’m pinned under the weight Of what I believed would keep me safe. So show me where my armor ends, Show me where my skin begins. Like a final puzzle piece It all makes perfect sense to me… The heaviness that I hold in my heart belongs to gravity. The heaviness that I hold in my heart’s been crushing me.

Or  East

I set out to rule the world With only a paper shield and a wooden sword. No mountain dare stand in my way, Even the oceans tremble in my wake. The tide is brave, but always retreats. Even the sand, it cowers under my feet. My kingdom towers above it all, While I sleep safe and sound in my cardboard walls. Now I bear little resemblance to the king I once was. I bear little resemblance to the king I could become. Maybe paper is paper, maybe kids will be kids- Lord, I want to remember how to feel like I did. So I draw my sword with the morning sun, I summon the moon as soon as the day is done. The clouds march on, on my command. Even the rain, it falls according to plan. The trees bow down and give their leaves. I humbly accept their offerings of peace. The years wore on and changed my heart, The leading role for a smaller part.

Citron : Noble Aim

Chances are we are the same, against the odds, against the grain We lean, like gardens toward light but we wait, Like evening for night, Don't we? Chances are we are alike, against what better judgement writes We ache, like children for love For a purpose worthy of such a noble aim as love.

Chances are we bruise the same; a family tree desperate for rain. A thirst only deserts know best. a hurt so at home in our chests. Call it stubbornness or bravery, To let our branches continue to reach, With such a noble aim, With such a noble aim as love. Every broken branch and loosened leaf that we've grown to ignore, Is now a part of something greater than before. Every nest that rests upon our limbs, Seeking shelter from the storms, Is a purpose worth being broken for.

Chances are we are the same, against the odds, against the grain We lean, like gardens toward light, We reach with all of our might For such a noble aim as love

Chikage Utsuki : Neptune

Pitch black, pale blue, It was a stained glass Variation of the truth, And I felt empty handed. You let me set sail with cheap wood. So I patched up every leak that I could, 'Til the blame grew too heavy.

Stitch by stitch I tear apart,  If brokenness is a form of art, I must be a poster child prodigy Thread by thread I come apart If brokenness is a work of art, Surely this must be my masterpiece

I'm only honest when it rains If I time it right, the thunder breaks, when I open my mouth I wanna tell you but I don't know how

I'm only honest when it rains An open book, with a torn out page, and my inks run out I want to love you but i don’t know how...

           Or South

Some truths, over time, can learn to play nice. Some truths are sharper than knives. Some truths we only see in the corners of our eyes. Some truths we wish we could hide. Some truths can save us, Some take our lives. Some truths are fire and some truths are ice. No matter what category you fit into, Truth’s got its sight set on you. If truth is north, then I am true south. I can’t figure it out- God knows. Always looking up 'Til my eyes give up. That’s how I lost touch of who I am and who I was.

Summer Troupe : Joy

The clumsy start of adolescence, The glue that mends our broken remnants, An overwhelming sense of reverence, It's a glimpse of light in a mine of gold. A silver lining spilling over, The rumor of buried treasure, The starting line of an adventure, It's a glimpse of light in a mine of gold. It's an afterglow, it's an echo Still ringing out in spite of me. It's the faint outline of the divine In the hiding place of my periphery. So I let go and in this moment, I can breathe. I can breathe. The countless stars we're sleeping under, It's the brightest sparks that we remember. When our eyes are closed, we still see embers, A glimpse of light in a mine of gold. It's a glimpse of light in a mine of gold.

Tenma Sumeragi : Three

Maybe I've done enough, and your golden child grew up Maybe this trophy isn't real love, And with or without it I'm good enough Maybe I've done enough, Finally catching up For the first time I see an image of my brokeness Utterly worthy of love

And I finally see myself, Through the eyes of no one else. It's so exhausting on this silver screen Where I play the role of anyone but me. I finally see myself, Unabridged and overwhelmed, A mess of a story I'm ashamed to tell, But I'm slowly learning how to break this spell. And I finally see myself. Now I only want what's real, to let my heart feel what it feels. Gold, silver or bronze hold no value here, Where work and rest are equally revered. I only want what's real, I set aside the highlight reel, And leave my greatest failures on display with an asterisk; Worthy of love anyway.

Yuki Rurikawa : Hope

There is hope in our eyes when we truly see each other Like the light of countless stars We are not afraid of the dark 'Cause there is hope in our hearts And every single beat, we feel it To the ends of the earth, our echo carries on We are sacred, we are strong, We are beautiful, we belong Please hear our unheard song There is hope in our voice when we listen to each other Barriers disappeared with every story told We are sacred, we are strong, We are beautiful, we belong Please hear our unheard song There is hope in our eyes, When we truly see each other We raise our flag, lift our voice This is our moment, We are sacred, we are strong This is our moment, We are beautiful, we belong This is our moment, We are worthy, we are true This is our moment, There are no borders from this view Please help us raise our flag There is hope in our eyes when we truly see each other

Muku Sakisaka :  Daughter

I want to see your happily ever after, That you know in your heart that you matter, That you are royalty. This is your kingdom, This is your crown, This is your story. This is your moment, Don’t look down.

You’re ready. born ready, And all you gotta do is put one foot in front of you. Our ceiling is your floor, And all you gotta do is put one foot in front of you. If only you knew

Misumi Ikaruga : Seven

How nice it'd be if we could try everything? I'm serious, let's make a list and just begin What about danger? So what, what about risk? Let's climb the mountain before we cross that bridge! 'Cause I'm restless, For whatever comes next

How wonderful to see a smile on your face It costs farewell tears for a welcome-home parade A secret handshake between me and my one life: I'll find the silver lining no matter what the price 'Cause I'm hungry, For whatever comes next Let me tell you another secret of the trade- It feels like sinking when I'm standing in one place So I look to the future and I book another flight When everything feels heavy, I've learned to travel light But I want to be here, Truly be here To watch the ones that I love bloom And I want to make room To love them through and through and through And through the slow and barren seasons too

I feel hope deep in my bones... And tomorrow will be beautiful.

Kazunari Miyoshi : Nine

Who am I to say what any of this means? I have been sleepwalking since I was fourteen Now as I write my song, I retrace my steps Honestly, it's easier to let myself forget

Still, I check my vital signs, Choked up, I realize I've been less than half myself for more than half my life

It looks like empathy to understand all sides But I'm just trying to find myself through someone else's eyes So show me what to do to restart this heart of mine How do I forgive myself for losing so much time?

A little at a time I feel more alive I let the scale tip and feel all of it It's uncomfortable but right We were born to try, to see each other through To know and love ourselves and others well Is the most difficult and meaningful work we'll ever do

Kumon Hyodo : Intermission

I'm so tired but I can't sleep. My mind is full but I can't speak. Among the dust of the hard-to-reach, I'm stuck Right here, somewhere between side a and side b. I could call it compromise, or just an intermission. Some kind of consolation prize for the race I never finished. I want to turn these tired gears. I want to feel the follow-through, Some kind of equilibrium... Something to set my watch to.

I'm here, somewhere between victory and a white flag. Caught in this purgatory dream, I'm stuck.   But I want to set the record straight, I want to retrace my every step. If I could just rewind all the tapes, Then maybe I'd find my loose thread.   Call it a compromise, or just an intermission. Some kind of consolation prize, so close, but never finished.   I want to turn these tired gears. I want to feel the follow-through, Some kind of equilibrium... Something to set my watch to.

 Pluto works for him too

 Autumn Troupe : The Sea of Atlas

We once felt safe, like no cure was needed. Our vocabularies had no room for “defeated,” But we grew up quick and became connoisseurs of it. There's a fine line, a fine line in between Our progress and our instability. We can't help ourselves but hunt for more. A design flaw? or the olive branch that proves the shore- The catalyst we've waited for.

Banri Settsu : One

Hold on for a minute, 'Cause I believe that we can fix this over time That every imperfection is a lie, Or at least an interruption Now hold on, let me finish,  No, I'm not saying perfect exists in this life But we'll only know for certain if we try

The list goes on forever of all the ways I could be better in my mind As if I could earn God's favor given time Or at least congratulations Now I have learned my lesson The price of this so-called perfection is everything I spend my whole life searching desperately To find out grace requires nothing of me I... I wanna sing a song worth singing I'll write an anthem worth repeating I... I wanna feel the transformation A melody of reformation I hold it all more loosely, and yet somehow much more dearly 'Cause I spend my whole life searching desperately To find out that grace requires nothing Grace requires nothing of me

Juza Hyodo : Taste

I am alive, I am awake. I am aware of what light tastes like. The curtains drawn, the table's set, I wanna be, I wanna be, at my best.

I'm on my knees and only scratch the surface.

Out of the woods, out of the dark. I’m well aware of the shadows in my heart. I wanna feel, tectonic shifts; I wanna be, I wanna be, astonished. I wanna be astonished. So I propose a toast: To fists unraveling, to glass unshattering. To breaking all the rules, to breaking bread again. We’re swallowing light, we’re swallowing our pride. We’re raising our glass, ’til we’re fixed from the inside. 'Til we're fixed from the inside. We're nothing less than a work in progress. Sacred text on Post-It notes. We only speak of a world in pieces. Let's make a map of what matters most: Where every fracture is a running river. Leading us back to our golden coast.

OR Mercury

No one can unring this bell Unsound this alarm, unbreak my heart new God knows, I am dissonance Waiting to be swiftly pulled into tune

I know the further I go The harder I try, only keeps my eyes closed And somehow I’ve fallen in love With this middle ground at the cost of my soul Yet I know, if I stepped aside Released the controls, you would open my eyes That somehow, all of this mess Is just my attempt to know the worth of my life

Made of precious metals, precious metal inside

Taichi Nanao:  Sadness

It feels like falling, It feels like rain,  Like losing my balance, Again and again It once was so easy, Breathe in, breathe out But at the foot of this mountain I only see clouds

I feel out of focus, or at least indisposed As this strange weather pattern inside me takes hold Each brave step forward I take three steps behind It's mind over matter, Matter over mind

Slowly, then all at once, A single loose thread And it all comes undone

Where there is light a shadow appears The cause and effect when life interferes The same rule applies to goodness and grief For in our great sorrow We learn what joy means

I don't want to fight, I don't want to fight it But I will learn to fight, I will learn to fight 'Til this pendulum finds equilibrium

Slowly, then all at once, The dark clouds depart And the damage is done, So pardon the dust While this all settles in, With a broken heart Transformation begins

or Bright and Early

The sun comes pouring in. Filling glasses up with diamonds, Stirring where I've been But it's all trigger and effect. Dominoes at their best. In the end I'm told, It taught me everything I know. That the wreckage left behind, will somehow make me grow.

In the end I'm told It taught me everything I know. But when the fire took our home, I lost part of my soul. From the ground up I'll keep building houses into homes. 'cause if trust is ribbon, Then patience ties it in a perfect bow.

Omi Fushimi : Aperture

Happiness is somewhere I have been before- A blurry photograph that I have since ignored. I'll carefully adjust the aperture once more, Until I set the record straight. I'll brush aside the dim, make room for the bright. I'll be an editor, no, a curator of light. I'll let my better angels always set me right, Until I even out the score. Until I even out the score. God, it has been quite a year- I've lived a little bit and I've died a little more. I know that I've asked it before, But please let the scale tip here in my favor. What was once the sweetest melody I've heard Is now a memory reduced to little words. I'll tune the orchestra and play the overture, Until I pinpoint every note. Give me the heart of an archeologist, That I may dig until I prove that I exist. A subterranean cathedral in my midst, Where echos come to rest.

Sakyo Furuichi : Touch

When will I feel this as vivid as it truly is, Fall in love in a single touch, and fall apart when it hurts too much? Can we skip past near-death clichés Where my heart restarts, as my life replays? All I want is to flip a switch Before something breaks that cannot be fixed.

Invisible machinery, These moving parts inside of me Well, they’ve been shutting down for quite some time, Leaving only rust behind. Well I know, I know - the sirens sound Just before the walls come down. Pain is a well-intentioned weatherman Predicting God as best he can, But God I want to feel again, Oh God I want to feel again.

Rain or shine, I don’t feel a thing, just some information upon my skin. I miss the subtle aches when the weather changed, The barometric pressure we always blamed. All I want is to flip a switch Before something breaks that cannot be fixed. Down my arms, a thousand satellites Suddenly discover signs of life.

Azami Izumida : Anger

Like wildfire, it starts in my chest The silence grows louder, ringing out in my head

I feel the Earth shaking under my feet I feel the pressure building until I can't breathe And it takes everything

And it all spills out, reckless but honest words leave my mouth Like kerosene on a flame of doubt, I couldn't make it right

Alarms will sound, but it's too late for holy water now Sooner or later the fire dies down, I'll open up my eyes

And I'll try and find the image of God In mountains made of ash and clouds of smoke It's fight or flight, buried in my mind, It's fight or flight It keeps my mind cold

But I feel it break, With just one misstep down a fire escape And suddenly I'm someone that prays, a last minute man of faith But I'll leave behind miles and miles of jagged lines Upon the surface of the Divine, I wish I could set them straight

Say

they impose the endless fight to always be perfect it seems they have been chosen to be above the rest

but the contradiction stands between these perfect lives and the words that they've misread there was no reading say all the things that you really want to say the truest of forms will show finally you'll find your soul

Bonus: Sakyo & Azami: Uneven Odds

I once knew your father well He fought tears as he spoke of your mother’s health I guess a part of him just couldn’t return Forgiveness is a lesson he cursed you to learn As your guardian I was instructed well To make sense of God’s love in these fires of hell No I don’t expect you to understand Just to live what little life your broken heart can Maybe your light is a seed And the darkness the dirt In spite of the uneven odds Beauty lifts from the earth As the years move on these questions take shape Are you getting stronger or is time shifting weight? No one expects you to understand Just to live what little life your mended heart can You’ll always remember the moment God took her away For the weight of the world was placed on your shoulders that day You’re much too young now so I write these words down, “Darkness exists to make light truly count.”

& Heirloom

You try your hardest to leave the past alone. This crooked posture is all you’ve ever known. It is the consequence of living in between The weight of family and the pull of gravity. You are so much more than your father’s son. You are so much more than what I’ve become. Long before you were born there was light Hidden deep in these young, unfamiliar eyes. A million choices, though little on their own, Become the heirloom of the heaviness you’ve known. You are so much more than your father’s son. You are so much more than what I’ve become,

You pressed rewind for the thousandth time When the tapes wore through. So you memorized those unscripted lines, Desperate for some kind of clue:

When the scale tipped, when you inherited,  A fight that you were born to lose. It’s not your fault, No, it’s not your fault, I put this heavy heart in you.

You remind me of who I could have been, Had I been stronger and braver way back then. A million choices, though little on their own, Became the heirloom of the heaviness we’ve known. You are so much more than your father’s son. You are so much more than the wars you’ve won. You are so much more than your father’s son. You are so much more than what I’ve become.

Winter Troupe : Homesick

Our resignation only comes on beaten paths When the world was flat we dreamt of its edges If love's elastic, then were we born to test it's reach? Is it buried treasure or just a single puzzle piece? It's poison ivy beneath our brave and trusting feet All revelations come to us in recovery Cry wolf, cry mercy, Cry the name of the one you were raised to believe Cry heart, cry yourself to sleep, Cry a storm of tears if it helps you breathe It helps you, if it helps you breathe

 Or Hourglass

We're taking turns at shattering apart. At least we're taking turns. How did we get so good at dismantling these hearts? How did we ever get so good? We dress our best to receive their sympathy. At our worst, we dress our best? “time heals all” According to these greeting cards. Oh how we'd rather time resets. If we could turn the hourglass, we would. If we could move a grain of sand, we would. If we could find our way back, we would.

Tsumugi Tsukioka : Clockwork

There is glass between our touch, phantom limbs of former love... and the truth is that I am so terrified that the callous is deeper than the surface of our skin. and it takes us twice as long, it takes us twice as long to heal. we'll lift up the ground to see the system of roots beneath. gears turn, endlessly, to bring the world back to life like clockwork, when it dies. the cadence of beating hearts, the click of its moving parts grows louder and louder from this restless earth... future gardens wait patiently below  and somehow we smell them blossom through the snow.

still unsatisfied, we chase what we're denied. as generations wait, we can't resist the taste of possibility. gears turn, endlessly, to bring us back to life again. like clockwork, we begin.

Tasuku Takato : Porcelain

The door broke when you slammed it shut, and the cracks kept reaching long after you left. through the floorboards, branching towards the hall, like vines that never rest... climbing like fire through the walls. a single spark that claims the whole forest - I know, I know... it's all for the best. but honestly, I would rather be safe from a distance than here... when I fell to my knees to sew the damage shut, I couldn't believe... a bright, staggering light came flooding into me from out of the seams. so I reached deeper in and pulled my whole world wide open, and for each broken mile, a billion miracles happen at once in everything... in everything. but I'm safe from a distance, right here. everything I love was made of porcelain, ready to break. but the bright, staggering light, it anxiously waits inside. like nesting dolls, the secret hides. and like every birth, it was a necessary pain... I know, I know... it's all worth the wait, worth the weight.

or Accidental Lights

On your mark, get set... A million miles past the finish line My heels lift at this imaginary starting line. The trigger slips; My heart was racing well before it's time. Time's running out, it's always running out on me, As the road up ahead disappears. Though it's all been said, and this empty dictionary is all that's left, I'll try to change the world in a single word. My hands are shaking, ready or not. Invisible ink well it's all I've got. So I'll concentrate and pick from these barren trees. Time's running out, it's always running out on me, And every road I discover disappears under my feet - Some call it reckless, some call it breathing. Have i said too much or not enough? Is it overkill or is it giving up, To measure out the distance of an echo's reach? If it's all broken mirrors and a chance roll of the dice, Then I'll risk everything for a glimpse of accidental light. Time's running out, it's always running out on me, And every road I've discovered disappears under my feet - Some call it reckless, I call it breathing.

Hisoka Mikage : Smell

Is this the part when the brain scans show where memories reside? Some ambiguous shape in me suddenly producing light Triggered like a tripwire, every time I breathe it in Isn't it strange that a Lilac tree is what unlocks where I've been? Like a time machine rebuilds the past, our memories return Like remembering the ashes before we burn

It finishes against my will, the light goes out, my heart goes still And just like that, I believe in ghosts

Time and space are at my back, Performing disappearing acts Now I can escape the smell of smoke Research says that the only way to keep memories intact Is to lock 'em away and close the doors to countless years of past I guess that explains why the strangest things can conjure up the past And forgotten time will find its long way back

It doesn't matter, I just know I need more Cause I feel like I've been sleeping through the better part of this Laying dormant through an endless winter that doesn't even exist

It's gravity in an hourglass, responsible for the avalanche And the loudest silence that I've ever heard Memory clear as a bell, A story that I will try to tell Maybe this time without words

Homare Arisugawa :  Four

Maybe I'm hiding behind metaphor Maybe my heart needs to break to be sure One day I'll wear it all on my sleeve The insignificant with the sacred unique But I've fallen in love with a ghost I lost my balance when I needed it most And this blurry photograph is proof Of what I'm not sure but it feels like truth I'm stuck swimming in shadows down here It's been forever since I came up for air Flashlight in hand determined to find Authenticity only poetry could even begin to try to describe

What if we already are who we've been dying to become In certain light I can plainly see a reflection of magnificence Hidden in you, Maybe even in me

or Son

Show me Who I am and who I could be Initiate the heart within me 'til it opens properly

Slow down Start again from the beginning I can't keep my head from spinning out of control Is this what being vulnerable feels like? And I will try, try, try to breathe 'til it turns to muscle memory I'm only steady on my knees One day I'll stand on my own two feet And I'll run the risk Of being intimate with brokenness Through this magnifying glass I see a thousand finger prints On the surfaces of who I am

Azuma Yukishiro : Two

Tell me, is something wrong?  If something's wrong, you can count on me You know I'll take my heart clean apart if it helps yours beat It's okay if you can't find the words, Let me take your coat and this weight off of your shoulders

I know exactly how the rule goes Put my mask on first No, I don't want to talk about myself Tell me where it hurts I just want to build you up, build you up 'Til you're good as new And maybe one day, I will get around To fixing myself, too I don't even know where to start Already tired of trying to recall when it all fell apart I just want to love you, to love you, to love you well I just want to learn how, somehow to be loved myself

Or Six

What would it feel like to put this baggage down? If I'm being honest I'm not sure I'd know how I want to take shelter but I'm ready, ready to fight And somewhere in the middle I feel a little paralyzed But maybe I'm stronger than I realize I wanna believe - No, I choose to believe That I was made to become a sanctuary Fear won't go away but I can keep it at bay And these invisible walls just might keep us safe With a vigilant heart, I'll push into the dark And I'll learn to breathe deep and make peace with the stars Is that courage or faith to show up every day? To trust that there will be light, Always waiting behind even the darkest of nights

Guy : Mind

First, the ground rules get established: Memory is historically inaccurate. But repetition, repetition sings 'Til finally the melody is sacred, rooted, unchanged.

It overwhelms the nervous system, This fearful constant state of comparison. In our grey matter, all grey matters. An embarrassment of riches in our heads, We gravitate to black or white instead. We were designed to send mixed signals, One image made up of different pixels All subject to interpretation. 'Til binary systems, binary systems run And the vibrancy of everything becomes zeros and ones.

Patterns form and feel important, It's the first brush stroke of a self-portrait.

[theconservativebrief]

“Get that thing off your skull.”

That’s something my mom says just about every time she sees me with a cellphone pressed against my ear. She also worries about cellphones in pockets, telling my brothers that they’re “frying their testicles” with their devices.

My mother is voicing something many cellphone users, or parents of cellphone users, intuitively feel: that these devices are somehow making us sick.

Though I have never been particularly concerned about cellphone radiation and cancer, my phone makes me uneasy. It commands too much of my attention. It sucks up too much of my time. And it feels unwise to have its heat so close to my brain.

But as anyone who’s had suspicions can tell you, it isn’t easy to find clear answers. Over the years, reports on the science of cellphone radiation and health haven’t been very satisfying, especially on cancer — the ultimate cellphone health concern.

Single studies have alternately suggested cellphones are driving up cancer rates and that they pose no health threat at all. In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the devices are a “Class 2B carcinogen,” meaning they possibly can cause cancer in humans — but that’s also a distinction they share with pickles, aloe vera, and being a carpenter.

A much-anticipated series of studies, released in draft in February 2018 by the National Toxicology Program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), went to great lengths to study the effects of cellphone radiation in rats and mice. The researchers had an equally difficult time forming conclusions. (More on that below.)

A fringe group of science deniers occasionally captures attention for voicing concerns about cellphones and other types of non-ionizing radio-frequency radiation exposure, such as the energy emitted from wifi routers in schools. They’re routinely debunked, and the debunkers rightly note that cellphones are also just one of many radiation sources we all live with. (Even the Earth itself, the air we breathe, and the sun and stars in our galaxy constantly give off radiation.) Adding to the confusion: Wireless companies have reportedly attempted to shape cellphone research and discredited researchers whose findings are inconvenient.

Yet as cellphones have become more and more ubiquitous in the US over the past decade and a half, brain tumor rates — both cancerous and benign — have not been going up.

But there is also some ambiguity about cellphone radiation’s health effects. As Dr. John Bucher, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and a co-author of the NIH studies, told me, “[Our results] go against the notion that non-ionizing radiation is completely harmless.” In other words, he’s found that the type of radiation cellphones give off could cause biological changes, like promoting tumors, at least in animals.

As I started poking around on cellphone radiation, many researchers expressed the same concern: We can’t fully understand its potential impact on human health because the way we live with these radiation-emitting devices keeps changing.

Our cellphone dependency now starts in childhood, and “nobody has looked at this issue in kids, where their brains and skulls are developing,” said Otis Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society, though studies are underway.

Welcome to Show Me the Evidence, where we go beyond the frenzy of daily headlines to take a deeper look at the state of science around the most pressing health questions of the day.

We’re also exposed to radio-frequency radiation from the networks that connect our phones. And while the coming rollout of 5G, or fifth-generation, wireless networks is expected to transmit data faster than ever, it will also increase the number of antennas sending signals to mobile devices, and potentially our exposure to radiation, with unclear health effects. (That’s why 180 scientists from around the world signed a petition in September 2017 asking for a moratorium on the rollout of 5G networks in the European Union until the health effects of the networks are better understood.)

With the help of clinical epidemiologist Dylan Collins, I scoured the best available medical studies on cellphone radiation and head and neck cancers or benign tumors, as part of Vox’s Show Me the Evidence series.

As Jonathan Samet — the dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, who advised the World Health Organization on cellphone radiation and cancer — told me, you can argue anything based on the science we currently have “because there’s not enough evidence to start with.” Actually, there’s not enough high-quality evidence. Before we get into why, and what we know, we need a quick primer on cellphone radiation.

The reason we’re talking about cellphones and cancer — why there’s a concern here — is because they emit radiation, the invisible waves of electric and magnetic energy, of varying power, organized on the electromagnetic spectrum. You can see in the graphic below that less powerful (or lower-frequency) types of radiation are on the left, moving to the more powerful (or higher-frequency) types of radiation on the right.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

You’ll notice radiation is split into two categories here: ionizing and non-ionizing. The waves emitted from radios, cellphones and cellphone towers, Wi-Fi routers, and microwaves are referred to as “radio-frequency” radiation. That’s a type of “non-ionizing” radiation, since it doesn’t carry enough energy to “ionize” — or strip electrons from atoms and molecules. (Other sources of non-ionizing radiation, as you can see in our chart, include visible and infrared light.)

When it comes to ionizing radiation — which we’re exposed to in X-rays, in CT scans, and during air travel — we know it’s powerful enough to damage the DNA, and that repeated DNA damage over time can cause cancer. That’s why, for example, you’re not supposed to get too many X-rays in your lifetime. (In case you were wondering, there’s no precise number on how many X-rays are too many — but the Food and Drug Administration suggests keeping track and avoiding any that seem unnecessary.)

Again, non-ionizing radiation — the radiation from cellphones — doesn’t have enough energy to break our DNA, and therefore, we have traditionally thought, it couldn’t cause cancer. But there is some question about whether it’s as harmless as was once believed, or whether there might be another mechanism at play, other than direct DNA damage, that could lead to cancer or other biological problems.

“These electromagnetic waves may cause effects on cellular functions but not damage the cells per se,” University of Utah radiation expert Om Gandhi told Vox. And the closer you are to any source of radiation exposure, and the longer you’re exposed, the more radiation absorbs into your body, and the higher the risk of a health effect.

That brings us back to the main question here: Do cellphones cause tumors? We chose to focus this story on cancer risk, since it seems like the most common health concern people have about cellphones. But before we get to the answers, we need to take another (brief) detour to explain how this science has been done with human subjects. To do that, we need to zoom in on a nerdy subject: research methods.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

In many areas of health research, the randomized controlled trial is considered the gold standard of evidence. Researchers take test subjects and randomly assign them to one of two groups. One group gets a treatment; the other gets a placebo.

The idea is that because people were randomly assigned, the only real difference between the groups (on average) is the treatment. So if there’s a difference in outcomes, it’s fair to say that the treatment was probably the cause.

That’s why randomized controlled trials (RTCs) often yield fairly clear answers about the effectiveness of treatments compared to other study designs. (Fun fact: Scottish doctor James Lind, a clinical trial pioneer, figured out that citrus fruits seemed to have an effect on scurvy using one of the earliest RCTs.) RCTs can also be used to study whether something, like cellphone radiation, can cause disease.

Unfortunately, however, we’ll probably never have an RCT on cellphones and cancer in humans. It’d be too difficult and too expensive to randomly assign particular levels of cellphone use to thousands of people and have them stick with those plans for enough time (we’re talking at least five years) to figure out whether certain types of phones or phone use patterns cause cancer to develop. That’s not to mention the fact it’d be nearly impossible to find a group of people willing to not use cellphones and then make sure they actually stick to their promise.

But without RCTs, we can’t establish that cellphones cause cancer or prove that they don’t.

Instead, we have to rely on “observational” data, tracking people’s real-world cellphone use and their disease incidence. Studies using observational data tend to be weaker, messier, and less clear-cut than experimental studies like RCTs. They can only tell us about associations between phenomena, not whether one thing caused another to happen. So that opens up a lot of the ambiguity we’re going to delve into next.

One final wrench in cellphone studies: Some, but not all, have been funded by the cellphone industry, clouding their trustworthiness. You can read more about that in this investigation by the Nation, which has its merits but also strongly implies a causal link between cellphones and cancer based on cherry-picked studies.

When we analyzed the sources of funding behind the 49 cellphone and human health studies — on PubMed, the Cochrane Library, EMF Portal, and SaferEMR — published in the past 10 years, we saw no apparent link between the source of funding and the direction of the conclusions.

In fact, we found the best human studies that aren’t industry-funded on cellphones and cancer all seem to point in the same direction: Using these devices is not associated with an increased risk of brain tumors in humans — though there are many open questions about their health effects. Here’s why.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

To cut through some of the messiness in the data, we took a systematic approach to wading through the evidence. We focused on cancers, as well as benign tumors, of the head and neck, since that’s the body area thought to get the most exposure to radio-frequency radiation during cellphone use.

The three most common brain tumor types — and the ones most cellphone and human health studies focused on — are gliomas (malignant tumors of the brain and spinal cord), meningiomas (mostly noncancerous tumors of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, though a small percentage are cancerous), and acoustic neuromas (noncancerous tumors on the main nerve that leads from the inner ear to the brain). Note that of these, gliomas are the main concern — they generally have more severe outcomes than meningiomas and acoustic neuromas.

We started with systematic reviews: syntheses of the research evidence that bring together a bunch of studies to come to more fully supported conclusions. (For more on our search strategy, scroll to the end to read our methods section.)

We found 12 systematic reviews on cellphone radiation and head and neck tumors. To determine the quality of each, we used a tool to evaluate systematic reviews called AMSTAR. Eight of the 12 reviews were of “critically low” quality, according to AMSTAR’s criteria, meaning they shouldn’t be relied on to provide an accurate summary of the research.

(Some common flaws in these studies: The summaries of the evidence weren’t comprehensive, the researchers often didn’t look at the quality of the studies they found, and they failed to do other simple things that would limit bias from creeping in. They also relied on case-control studies, a poor method to determine causality — more on that soon.) So we didn’t include these eight reviews in our analysis.

The remaining four did a little better according to AMSTAR — but only ranked “low” or “moderate” quality. They still relied mainly on case-control studies — a very weak type of observational study design when it comes to proving causality.

In case-control studies, researchers start with an endpoint (in this case, people who already have head and neck cancer and people who don’t) and work backward to see what may have contributed to that health outcome (in this case, figuring out how people’s cellphone use patterns may have differed).

For each person with a disease (a case), they find a match (a control) — or someone who doesn’t have the disease. They then look back in time and try to determine if there are any patterns of exposure in those with the disease that aren’t present in those without the disease.

This method is prone to bias. When we look back in time, it’s more difficult to get an objective measure of what happened. For example, when it comes to cellphone use, researchers have to ask people to think back 10, 15, or 20 years and estimate how much they used their mobile devices, or use cellphone records as a proxy.

Additionally, the way researchers match cases to controls tends to be subjective. They try to match based on things we know might affect the outcome, such as socioeconomic status, gender, and age — but it’s impossible to match for everything.

Altogether, the four reviews had somewhat mixed results — which isn’t that surprising since they were not conducted to the best possible standards. Here’s a quick rundown of their findings:

This 2017 review, published in Neurological Sciences, looked at case-control studies on cellphone use, focusing on glioma, meningioma, and acoustic neuromas. This review was interesting because the researchers divided the studies by quality, and higher-quality studies — which tended to be funded by the government and not the cellphone industry — showed a trend toward an increased risk of brain tumors, while lower-quality studies did not. Overall, though, their meta-analysis found an increased risk of brain cancers (mostly gliomas) among people who were using cellphones for 10 or more years, and no increase in the risk of acoustic neuroma.

This 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis, published in PLOS One, looked at mobile phone use in case-control studies and the risk of glioma. “Our results suggest that long-term mobile phone use may be associated with an increased risk of glioma,” they wrote. The researchers found an association between mobile phone use and low-grade glioma in the people who used cellphones regularly or for 10 years or more. “However, current evidence is of poor quality and limited quantity,” they added, and called for prospective studies to confirm the results.

This 2012 systematic review, from Bioelectromagnetics, found no increased risk of glioma, meningioma, or acoustic neuroma at any level of cellphone use.

This 2009 meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, looked at 23 case-control studies of the risk of both malignant and benign tumors from mobile phone use. When the authors included all 23, they found no increased risk of tumors. When they crunched certain subsets of the data — like looking only at studies that were blinded, or people who used cellphones for 10 or more years — they did find increases in tumor risks. Confusingly, when they divided up the analysis by tumor type, they found no increase in risk for glioma and acoustic neuroma, and a decrease in risk of meningioma.

Overall, the reviews of case-control studies seem to suggest there is perhaps no risk of cancer with cellphone use — unless you look at some subgroups (like people in blinded studies or people with long-term exposures). But these reviews are based on case-control studies — which are like the National Enquirer of the science world: cheap and often misleading.

So let’s take a look at a stronger type of study design: the cohort study. Unlike case-control studies, cohort studies follow people with a known exposure (e.g., cellphones) through time, waiting to see if, when, and how many people develop a disease (such as cancer).

This means they’re not left searching for artificial controls to match their cases. And since researchers have data that follows people through time, and can sometimes check in on how they’re using their cellphones in real time, they don’t have to rely on people’s memories of the past.

In our search of the literature, we found five recent cohort studies. They looked at populations of 60,000 to 23 million people, examining different levels of cellphone use and whether users went on to develop head and neck cancers or benign tumors like acoustic neuromas:

This 2009 study, funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, tracked nearly 60,000 people across Scandinavia between 1974 and 2003 to look at changes in glioma and meningioma rates.

This 2011 study, also funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, tracked nearly 3 million people who had used cellphones for more than 11 years.

Taiwanese people were early adopters of cellphones and among the heaviest users in the world. So the National Science Council in Taiwan decided to look at a cohort of 23 million cellphone users over 10 years to see if there was any increase in brain tumors. They published their findings in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention in 2013.

In the UK, Cancer Research UK funded a study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2013, that allowed researchers to track nearly 800,000 women for seven years to see whether their use of cellphones correlated with an increased risk of head and neck cancers.

In Japan, the government’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications tracked cellphone users from 1993 to 2010 for a 2016 Bioelectromagnetics study.

None of them were funded by the cellphone industry, which suggests they’re less likely to be biased and that we can be more confident in their results. Not surprisingly, their conclusions looked different from what the reviews of lower-quality research uncovered, though not in the direction you might expect.

What did they find? No increased risk in glioma or meningioma tumors, while one (the British study) found a small increased risk of acoustic neuroma, the noncancerous tumor on the main nerve that leads from the inner ear to the brain. But the researchers noted these tumors were so rare that they were uncertain about the link.

So here are five large cohort studies — some of the best-quality studies in humans we can get on the question of cellphones and cancer — from different continents without industry funding. They consistently showed no increase in cancer risk.

What’s more, when we looked at the incidence data for acoustic neuromas, gliomas, and meningiomas in humans, they haven’t been going up in the period you’d expect them to (about a decade after cellphones came into widespread use).

“We see either no change or very small increases in incidence in some tumor types,” Quinn Ostrom, the Baylor College of Medicine researcher who has been analyzing these cancer trends, explained. “I would be inclined to say this isn’t as much of an increase as you might expect if cellphones were causative [of brain tumors] due to the very sharp way use of these devices has gone up over the last 20 years.”

But, dear reader, don’t think we’ve reached a “case closed” moment: Unfortunately, even the best evidence on cellphones and brain tumors is far from ideal. Remember, these cohort studies are still observational research — not experimental studies like RCTs. That means they can’t tell us about causation, and there are still many ways they could be biased.

For example, they mostly relied on self-reported survey data about cellphone use or people’s cellphone records instead of measuring people’s actual exposures to radio-frequency radiation. (You can read criticisms of the Danish studies here.)

It’s also possible that longer-term studies and cancer incidence tracking will find larger cancer effects in another five or 10 years — or that how we use cellphones is evolving such that the devices may cause cancer in ways these studies didn’t account for. (These days, many people text instead of talking, and hold their cellphones in their pockets but not on their heads and necks.) That’s why some people look to animal studies to supplement our understanding of the potential biological effects of cellphones.

One of the most robust animal studies comes from the US government. In 1999, the Food and Drug Administration asked the National Toxicology Program (NTP) to study the toxicity and cancer-causing capability of cellphone radio-frequency radiation. At the time, health officials felt epidemiological studies in humans wouldn’t answer these questions, so the NTP embarked on studies in rats and mice.

This was some of the most complex research the NTP had ever undertaken. The scientists tasked with these studies had to have special chambers built in Switzerland so they could control exactly how much radiation the animals were getting. All told, NTP spent $25 million on them.

In 2018, nearly 20 years after the FDA requested these studies, they published their draft reports. (Their final versions have not yet been released.)

In the studies, the researchers looked at a whole slew of health outcomes (like offspring survival, bodyweight changes, and body temperature changes), but importantly, they also looked at brain tumors, including gliomas. They exposed the animals to radio frequency radiation for up to nine hours a day over two years, and then examined more than 40 tissues in each animal. And they had a control group that wasn’t exposed to radiation for comparison.

The exposed male and female rats developed gliomas more frequently, but, oddly, the exposed mice didn’t. The rats (but again, not the mice) that were exposed to radiation also experienced an increase in heart schwannomas — an effect the researchers thought could be attributed to the radiation.

Heart schwannomas, malignant tumors in animals, affect the same cells (known as the Schwann cells) as the noncancerous tumors in the heads of humans called acoustic neuromas. Some researchers think these animal studies are good evidence that cellphones can cause these noncancerous brain tumors.

“It’s quite informative that the NTP data found evidence of an increased tumor risk in the male rats for glial cells and in the [heart] Schwann cells,” said Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the Berkeley School of Public Health (who writes about electromagnetic radiation here). “That’s compelling evidence that what we’re seeing in humans — even though the signal is not clear — is highly suggestive, and that there is indeed something real going on with regard to tumor risk in humans.”

Acoustic neuromas, while they aren’t cancer, can be horribly disruptive to people’s lives. They can cause hearing loss, ringing in the ears, loss of balance, and numbness. Sometimes, these tumors can interfere with brain function, and the surgeries to remove them can be risky and expensive.

But, like the human studies, one can pick apart the NTP studies too. The researchers found other strange effects that muddied the interpretation of the studies: The rats exposed to cellphones seemed to outlive the rats in the control group, for example. There was no clear linear relationship between higher levels of cellphone exposure and more cancer at some tissue sites, and the cancer rate in the control group was lower than it should have been at other tissue sites.

The researchers also found that the rats and mice absorbed radiation at different frequencies more easily depending on their body size — another good reminder that animal studies are a very poor way to understand human health.

Remember: The cancer incidence data in humans, at least to date, suggests no avalanche of head and neck tumors. Since so many people are exposed to cellphones, if there were a big risk, we’d probably see it turn up. “If cellphones caused brain tumors at the rate that cigarettes caused lung cancer,” said Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, “we would have figured it out by now.”

Our tour of the cellphone and brain tumor data is (almost) over. We think it’s fair to argue two things based on the best available research: that they don’t cause tumors, or that the data is too poor to know that for sure.

Researchers — and my mom — have long been concerned about the fact that cellphones may decrease fertility. And there is good evidence of some worrying effects on reproductive health.

A systematic review published in 2014 examined the impact of cellphone radiation on sperm health, both in humans (in vivo) and on sperm in petri dishes (in vitro). The review brought together 10 studies, four on sperm in human testicles and six on sperm samples in petri dishes.

The authors found a consistent effect, in both types of studies, that cellphone radiation leads to decreased sperm motility (ability to swim) and viability, but not a decrease in overall concentration. While it’s unclear if these specific changes are enough to affect men’s fertility, the authors wrote, “mobile phone exposure may form part of a cumulative effect of modern day environmental exposures, that collectively reduce sperm quality and explain current trends in infertility.”

In theory, men may be more vulnerable to cellphone radiation’s effects on fertility than women. Sperm cells are made and stored in testicles, whereas egg cells are stored in ovaries. And the location of these two organs means that sperm and eggs have different levels of protection from radiation. Testicles sit outside of the abdomen, which makes them more sensitive to radiation. And, well, a phone often sits in your front pocket.

The ovaries are deep within a woman’s pelvis and are more protected. So one would expect less of a potential impact on egg health from a cellphone in your pocket.

Still, the effect of mobile phones on egg health, and women’s fertility, is a much less studied area. In fact, we struggled to find any studies done on humans, or any good-quality reviews on the subject. We did find this narrative review, and the overall conclusion was that we need to conduct better-quality studies.

Wherever you come out on the cellphone and cancer question, one thing is clear: How we live with cellphones, along with our exposure to the radiation they emit, has changed dramatically over the past several decades. That has policy implications; it’s something regulators, researchers, and cellphone companies need to pay attention to. In that context, a few things should happen:

1) Our exposure to radio frequency radiation is changing. Regulators need to catch up.

“5G” cellphone networks are going to be rolled out soon. The G stands for generation, and with each generation, the frequency and bandwidth tend to be greater for transferring information more quickly.

But the 5G signals are weaker at traveling long distances, and weaker signals mean we need more antennas to amplify, or strengthen, the 5G network. According to the New York Times, “Instead of relying on large towers placed far apart, the new signals will come from smaller equipment placed an average of 500 feet apart in neighborhoods and business districts.” They’ll also emit a different kind of higher-frequency radio waves, known as millimeter waves.

Researchers need funding to move fast to study the potential health effects of 5G networks and how they might change our exposures to radiation. “So far, we’ve got research that’s done on 3G and 4G but not 5G,” said Brawley of the American Cancer Society. “We do think the answers [about cell radiation’s cancer effects] for 5G may be different from the answers for 4G or 3G. … As these types of radio waves and energy change over time, the answers [about their health effects] may change.”

It also means regulators need to make sure their policies reflect new levels of exposure. The Federal Communications Commission currently oversees cellphone safety and sets the limits for how much radiation people should be exposed to. (This is measured by the specific absorption rate — the rate at which the body absorbs radio frequency energy — and the current limit for cellphones is 1.6 watts of energy per kilogram of tissue. The whole-body threshold is a SAR value of 0.08 watts per kilogram, and the tower radiation limit is 10 watts per square meter.)

But these regulations haven’t been updated since the 1990s, said the University of Utah’s Om Gandhi. Since that time, people’s exposure to radiation through their phones and the environment have changed dramatically.

For example, cellphone manufacturers currently test these devices for compliance with FCC standards by placing them against the head, and near the torso with some separation. Just check out Apple’s iPhone manual: The company tests the specific absorption rate at a 5mm separation from the body. But if you wear your device in your pocket, you’re probably not going to have that 5mm separation, meaning you may be exposed to more radiation — perhaps enough to exceed current standards.

In addition, cellphones potentially harm our health in ways that have nothing to do with cancer. The effect on sperm is concerning to Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the Berkeley School of Public Health, and he noted that our current cellphone regulations also don’t account for these potential effects. Plus, we still don’t know what steady exposure to this kind of radiation from devices means for kids.

The European Union is currently running the Mobi-Kids, a case-control study in 14 countries, to better understand the effects of electromagnetic fields radiation on children and adolescents. One of the early publications from the project, looking at data on the use of wireless devices among 10- to 25-year-olds in France, found that kids are started to rely on these devices earlier and earlier in life. But the researchers are still analyzing the main results on any health impacts, and haven’t yet published their findings.

“The guidelines adopted in the 1990s by the FCC were designed to protect the public only from heating risks from exposure to high-intensity wireless radiation,” Moskowitz added. “Our exposure to wireless radiation from multiple sources is much greater than two decades ago.”

2) We need clearer consumer guidelines

Consumers also need to understand what they’re being exposed to. With every cellphone comes a booklet of instructions including guidelines for safe use. But these guidelines aren’t written in a way that’s easy for consumers to understand.

That’s why the International EMF Scientist Appeal and a number of health and safety organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Environmental Health Trust, have called on the government to reassess the safe levels of exposure to cellphones and other wireless technology and then develop new consumer safety guidelines based on those assessments, Moskowitz said.

Finally, Brawley reminded me that cellphones kill humans in another way that we’re already certain about: because of inattention through distracted driving. In the US alone, there were 3,157 fatal crashes in 2016 that involved distracted driving, 14 percent of which included cellphone use, according to the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That’s not the focus of this piece, but perhaps state and federal regulators could follow places like Washington state, California, New York, and Nevada and heavily crack down on distracted driving with bans or stricter laws.

3) There are simple things you can do to reduce your exposure

If you’re concerned, take steps to minimize your cellphone exposure. Keep your cellphone off your body, wear wired earpieces when you use it to reduce your exposure to radiation, and don’t sleep with your cellphone next to your pillow. These changes are free — and they’ll minimize your radiation exposure.

4) We need better research on cellphones and health

There are so many potential health effects from this changing technology — and so many people exposed to the effects. We need a research agenda that reflects that.

“Given the ubiquitousness of worldwide exposure, and that exposure begins in many countries prenatally, we need to understand if it does have health effects,” said Colorado’s Jonathan Samet. “For many biological exposures, we have concerted research agendas, but that’s not the case with this type of radiation.”

As a starting point, he’d like to see research that looks specifically at the different mechanisms by which non-ionizing radiation may harm human health. “The animal [studies] show responses that cannot be understood in terms of [our] current understanding of how electromagnetic radiation interacts with tissues,” he said.

Instead of more animal and even epidemiological studies, he thinks researchers should focus on finding the mechanisms by which cellphone radiation may affect human health. Since we’ll never have an RCT on cellphones and cancer, he added, studies should measure actual cellphone use and exposure to radio-frequency radiation, instead of estimations of how much people are exposed (which most studies currently do).

We focused our search strategy on cancers of the head and neck because these parts of the body are thought to get the most exposure to radio frequency radiation during cellphone use.

We limited our search to studies that were conducted in humans, and whose outcome was one of actual head or neck cancers (rather than things thought to be linked to cancer).

Specifically, we looked for studies that measured rates of acoustic neuromas, gliomas, meningiomas, and thyroid cancers. We also narrowed our search to studies that looked at the effect of radio-frequency radiation originating from an actual cellphone, rather than experimental equipment. We did this because we wanted evidence that could apply to real life, not specific laboratory settings or hypothetical outcomes.

Searching PubMed for studies published in the past 10 years, we found 102 studies that ultimately resulted in 12 relevant systematic reviews. To limit bias in our assessment of the literature, we used a validated critical appraisal tool called AMSTAR to determine the quality of each review. Eight of the reviews were critically low quality, two were low quality, and two were moderate quality.

We decided to focus our reporting on the best available evidence, and we did this by excluding the critically low-quality studies (n=8).

But given that these systematic reviews mostly looked at case-control studies, we felt that it was important to also look at cohort studies because they are a more reliable study design for finding rare harms. We found five cohort studies, all of which we included.

We also spoke to experts and searched government reports to try to find any other high-quality evidence that may not have been published in an academic database. We included the National Toxicology Program’s animal studies, since they are considered some of the most important animal research that was funded by the government to help answer the question of whether cellphones cause cancer. We also included research on the fertility effects of cellphone radiation, since that was a concern many researchers in the field had.

Editor: Eliza Barclay Graphics: Javier Zarracina Copy editors: Tim Williams and Bridgett Henwood Special thanks: Mohsin Ali and Puru Panchal for their research assistance

Original Source -> Is your cellphone giving you cancer? A comprehensive guide to the messy, frustrating research.

via The Conservative Brief