for a while i've had a slight fear that the bluetooth from my airpods could be frying my brain

this weekend i pulled the raw data from a $30m government study of 1,679 mice blasted with cell phone radiation and reanalyzed it

what i found was...not what I expected?
🧵 for 2 years 820 mice & 859 rats lived in specially designed metal enclosures that scatter radiofrequency signals uniformly, so every animal gets a consistent whole-body dose

they were exposed to .9 – 1.9 GHz radiation, 9 hours a day

for context:
- this is the same radiofrequency used in your phone's 2G/3G signal – and is similar to the 2.4 GHz frequency used in bluetooth
- the intensity of radiation is roughly 100x more powerful than that emitted by something like airpods and 10x a cell phone

WHY DOES THE EPIGENETIC CLOCK TICK?

While money has been poured into developing therapies to reverse the epigenetic clock (@altos_labs 🤑), why the epigenome changes with age at all is unclear.

In @NatureAging today, we suggest a potential driver: somatic mutations. 🐇 The white rabbit that led us down this path of investigation is that there is an intrinsic chemical link between somatic mutation and DNA methylation at cytosine nucleotides.

This is because methylated cytosines are the most frequently mutated sites in the genome (mutated 16x more frequently than would be expected by chance), due to a combination of 5-methylcytosine deamination and unfaithful replication.

Simultaneously, cytosines are the primary location where DNA methylation occurs and the sites used to make epigenetic age predictions.