Unremarkable science can sometimes tell a remarkable story. Two papers that were published in the last few weeks —and passed mostly unnoticed— have important, though very different, backstories.
One offers a surprising glimpse of change in the usually static field of RF research, while the other shows how much has stayed the same over the last many years.
Yet, in the end, they offer the same well-worn message, always worth repeating: Those who sign the checks, run the show.
The two papers come 30 years after Henry Lai and N.P. Singh began an experiment at the University of Washington in Seattle that would set off alarm bells across the still-young cell phone industry —and the U.S. military. Lai and Singh would show that a single, two-hour exposure to low-level microwave radiation (today, we’d say RF) could lead to breaks in the helical strands of DNA in the brains of live rats.
