“All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected, according to the study by a group of institutions, including the TU Delft University and Wageningen University,” Schoemaker reports. “The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldn’t be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.”
Schoemaker reports, “Additional testing found the disease to occur throughout the Western world. In the Netherlands, about 70 percent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms, compared with only 10 percent five years ago. Trees in densely forested areas are hardly affected.”
Read more in the full article, via Macworld UK, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Uh, great (as we sit here with WiFi streaming all around and, likely, through us – for the last 11+ years, no less).
And here I thought global warming was the most invidious issue facing mother earth. As a subtitle, this study was originally reported by the Chicken Little Studies Group otherwise known as the “We Are All Doomed Scientific Center”.
Isn’t this a little early for an April Fools joke?
“Trees in densely forested areas are hardly affected.”
There’s no WiFi in forested areas?!?!?
Time to fix that.
Net Neutrality.
Lets see, there’s radiation coming from radio waves, cell phones, power lines, Police, Fire, and other two-way radios, microwave towers, cable television satellites, and even the sun.
Yep, must be WiFi.
At least ATT can’t be blamed here.
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You need a signal before you can cause damage.
the “Black Shakes” from Johnny Mnemonic anyone?
When i read the comments we just deserve to be extincted… WHAT if it’s true??? Only in Hollywood movies the U.S wins.
I hope you good people are not confusing ‘radiation’ with ‘radioactivity’ and the 2.4 frequency range with what really matters, which is the wavelengths.
“Has anyone looked at trees next to microwave transmission / radio towers over the last 60 years or so?”
We transmit in the 6 GHz range, and I have to trim saplings back from the guy wires every few years. Plenty of logging all around my towers and no noticeable difference in trees.
But then again, what do I know.
I am an uneducated Southern Conservative too stupid to look at a map to see where all them edumacated folks live….
(and btw, we hade a blight years ago in the South that affected Dogwood trees in yards differently than those in dense woods)
You guys have NO clue what the TU Delft is, right?
Gee and you are macusers? Poor you.
With cel phones, electrical curent, microwaves etc, how did they isolate WiFi fro all other forms of interference? Or did they?
Within five years from now, studies will also show that Wi-FI is actually harmful to humans. Bye the way, the jury is still out on the safety of cell phones.
We have a potted palm tree right next to the Airport base station. Doesn’t seem to be affected.
“Within five years from now, studies will also show that Wi-FI is actually harmful to humans.”
That shouldn’t take 5 years to show.
You take a chimp and bombard him with wi-fi.
“Bye the way, the jury is still out on the safety of cell phones.”
What jury? Is their already a lawsuit?
That should settle it….
Intuitively, this study makes no sense to me. It’s far too short to see discernible evidence. Does it have a control group? Have they ruled out other causes, like global warming? In the urban areas, those areas are already quite hostile to trees. I see no visual difference in heavily urbanized areas.
The funny thing, shouldn’t global warming be beneficial to trees? More carbon dioxide for them should be better, not to mention warmer temps.
I’m certain the study was able to properly isolate all other environmental factors… If not, well, looks like a bunch of bunk.
So the researchers not only studied trees in the Netherlands, they also studied every species of tree in the entire Western world to confirm their far-reaching claims? Yeah, right.
Not that Western science has the slightest f-ing idea what wifi signals do to plants, animals or human beings.
That they know of!
AIDS, while the disease may have afflicted someone in 1783, 1883, 1983, etc.
Whenever it got designated as ‘AIDS’ ( http://www.aegis.com/topics/timeline/ ), it still wasn’t in the lexicon verbiage when I was growing up.
So, while it may be wifi / radiation or whatever doing this. It could also be some virus / bacterial infection not known, defined and diagnosed for those poor trees.
Love those correlational studies and all of the mindless publicity they receive from a media that endless represents moments of opposition and polemic.
Did you know that there is a 100% correlation between being born and dying? Maybe we need to give up natural birth and move toward androidification of the human race.
I have never seen so many idiots post on any MDN subject before. Seems everyone is an expert, except me. While I am skeptical I do suspect that all the different waves bombarding everyone and everything may have some effect. I grew up in western Utah during the atom bomb testing and witnessed many mutations of desert animals, as well as clusters of cancers. The government said it was safe. So I just wonder if that was junk science too.
Many years ago, I was discussing Wi-Fi networks with a technical consultant for one of the major UK distributors for one of the major corporate-grade hotspot manufacturers.
He told me a story that they’d been called to a university that was noticing that it lost its 802.11b network every lunchtime during the week. What’s more local businesses were complaining that there systems were also being affected.
They set up a couple of monitoring stations and noticed that reported symptoms were true, not just for the campus but for businesses up to a mile away from the boundary.
After a lot of triangulation which they could only do for about 60 minutes each day, they isolated the problem.
One of the student common rooms had a microwave oven that had a broken handle on the door and they had rigged a “repair” using a pencil. Effectively, the graphite in the pencil was acting as an antennae for the microwave radiation (which is 2.4GHz, just like 802.11b/g and DECT phones and loads of other things) and they were effectively sending all the rated power of the oven across the entire district.
In my science career, I do a lot of reviewing for major scientific journals and if a paper came along my desk lie this, I would reject it instantly. Its a joke.
Could it be real in that WiFi affects trees? Maybe, but this does not offer anything in that regard but wild-ass speculation. It could be city smog that is affecting the trees or one of a dozen of other explanations.
Assuming this story is real and saying it is WiFi, in the absence of any proof, is just plain stupid.
And people please…this has nothing to do with political leanings? Last time I looked, both conservative or liberal parents are concerned with their kids health and the world they will be growing up in…..
are they doing tests for GMS, CDMA and WiMax too?
uh… if anything… maybe Apple should be growing some trees…
Correlation does not necessarily equate to causation. What other environmental factors have increased or decreased in the last 5-10 years? Way too early to make any kind of conclusion.
Cue Algore and “The End Of The World” symphony…
November 19th fools!
This does sound like a bad acid trip. Seems to be going around lately.
Does this mean we have to destroy the magnetic core of the Earth or we’re all gonna turn into troglodytes?