Biophysical Properties of Liquid Water Exposed to EM Radio Frequency Radiation Author: Shalatonin V Affiliation: Belarusian State University of Informatics & Radioelectronics Belarus Conference/Journal: In book: Electromagnetic Radiation, Chapter Date published: 2012 Jun 6 Other: Pages: 269-288 , Word Count: 585 Water is the most abundant substance on the surface of the earth and is the main constituent of all living organisms. The human body is about 65 percent water by weight, with some tissues such as the brain and the lung containing nearly 80 percent. Without water life would probably never have developed on our planet (Mottl et al., 2007). Increasing evidence indicates that the water has unique electromagnetic and biophysical peculiarities (Ball, 2001; Voeikov & Giudice, 2009). Since all life is based on water, all molecules in the living organisms interact with water. The water of body may not only be a carrier for nutrition and energy, but also a source and carrier for regulating electromagnetic information (Pan, 2003). Human and animal beings are bioelectrical systems and they are regulated by internal electromagnetic (EM) signals, which form an endogenous EM field. Environmental exposures to the artificial EMFs can interact with fundamental biological processes in living organisms. It is supposed that the environmental exposures to natural and artificial EM fields may interact with biological EM signals through intracellular and extracellular water. In some cases, this may lead to disease. During the past twenty years, the growing use of mobile phones (MP) has aroused great concern regarding the health effects of exposure to the EMR (Kundi et al., 2004, Khurana et al., 2009). Dual-band phones can cover GSM networks in pairs such as 900 and 1800 MHz frequencies (Europe, Asia, Australia, and Brazil) or 850 and 1900 MHz (North America and Brazil). Today’s public exposure limits for telecommunications are based on the presumption that heating of tissue is the only concern when living organisms are exposed to EM radiation. In the last few decades, it has been established that bioeffects occur at non-thermal or low-intensity exposure levels thousands of times below the levels that state agencies say should keep the public safe. As reviewed in (Genuis, 2008), there are several hundred studies that support the existence of low-intensity, non-thermal effects of the MP radiation on biological systems. The consequences are mostly adverse: DNA single-and double-strand damage, changes in gene transcription, changes in protein folding, heat shock protein generation, production of free radicals, and effects on the immune system. In addition to mobile phones, new communicating systems are in use and developments of higher frequency applications are to come. At present the question how such a low-energy of EMR could influence the functional activity of cell and organism still remains unanswered. Numerous hypotheses on molecular mechanisms of the specific biological effect of EMF have been proposed, but none have www.intechopen.com 270 Electromagnetic Radiation provided a reliable and exhaustive explanation of the experimental findings. The absence of such a mechanism cannot be taken as proof that health effects of environmental electric and magnetic fields are impossible. As water is the main medium where the major part of biochemical reactions is taking place, it is supposed that the environmental exposures to natural and artificial EM fields may change metabolic activity of cells and organisms using body’s water as a primary receptor of the EM field (Shalatonin, 2008, 2009). Increased knowledge of the mechanisms underlying electromagnetic information storage, amplification and transduction by water may give us a fundamentally new comprehension of the processes operating in the water within biological systems (Del Giudice et al., 2010). This work presents simple and sensitive biophysical experiments and its results to develop our notion that a possible reason of the long-term physical changes in water is conditioned by internal structures of the oxygen and hydrogen nuclei and the quantum properties of the EM radiation (V. Shalatonin, 2009, 2010, 2011; Shalatonin & Mishchenko, 2010).