I remember when people complained about sound coming from wind turbines. That was bad
This? Good
Just looked up, a windturbine has less infrasound then cars. (german Source) I would guess the datacenter could have more infrasound and thus be a bigger problem. They mention a study about windturbine infrasound and they point towards nocebo effect, but maybe windturbines are at a border where the health effects are very difficult to measure. So maybe studies about the infrasound of datacenters could find something. On the other hand, datacenters bring a lot more pollution factors, like light-, air- and waterpollution.
I dislike hypocrisy as much as the next person. So I feel where you’re coming from. At the same time, the wind turbines are generating power that everyone benefits from, whereas these things are consuming power for a product that very few people actually like or even want to exist. So I think its fair to say that maybe the noise is tolerable when you’re getting something you actually want out of it. Also, wind farms are usually built further away from large population centers, whereas data centers are because it’s cheaper to build them in areas with lots of people around. So the concern does seem a little more irrelevant to wind farming as a whole than data centers.
“3.7 MWh of power annually” - With authors like this, it’s no wonder some people find math and science confusing. I actually thought Toms Hardware was a quality site.
Ok technically it’s energy not power, big deal. Sometimes electricity is colloquially called power.
Both energy and power relate to electricity formally. Power is energy over time. There is no reason to confuse the two in writing, especially if they know enough to use MWh.
Let’s use science to determine what is happening.This can be measured. Use a blind study to evaluate the impact.
aren’t blind people more susceptible to auditory stimulus? wouldn’t that skew the numbers?
/s
Include that as a variable. It’s done all the time.
The article states it is sound frequencies “not normally measured”. It doesn’t say “can’t be”, so the first step is an objective measurement
Of course it goes further to point out that some things can only be heard/felt by a tiny percentage of people - the hard part is setting the allowed threshold and not perhaps that’s where your blind study idea would be helpful
Me when an AI data center is too close:
Homemade mortars have a very high CEP but thankfully, data centers have a large footprint.
even if the infrasound is debunked, the pollution, the power usage, cost would be much more annoying.
Here is the actual study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079610724001160?via=ihub
Notably study detail:s say it was funded by whack jobs. Notably mice are exposed to much stronger fields than you are in your home or work unless you literally have a high tension line running through your kitchen by the coffee maker on its way to power the adjacent factory.
It does not in any way suggest that the EM radiation people are exposed to has any effect on them.
Garbage article. Follow the link to a meta analysis that shows EM has no effect in rats. mouse effect: one poorly done paper.
No, power lines do not cause disease.
Good thing I’m not a Mouse. And I say that kind of as a joke because if you look at the findings it didn’t increase the odds in rats. So does it effect humans or is it because mice are small and rats are big enough to not be effected. Or do rats have something else going on? Or is it because mice have short lifespans. Just because something effects mice does not mean it effects other animals.
There’s a local council in my community that is gunning for an AI data center in my county. People are livid, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough to stop the construction. It’s shady as fuck with hidden shareholders that nobody will reveal.
I’m open to any and all suggestions on how to prevent this data center from being built. Peaceful ideas or otherwise.
When they come up with it on their own, and push it relentlessly despite obvious and enormous resistance from the citizens, you know they been paid off handsomely.
they likely paid off the politicians before hand, remember janet mills in maine, she basically allowed one to be built and vetoed any measure to block it.
If you can’t come up with ideas in the “otherwise” category, you probably aren’t very serious.
If they don’t respect the law or the will of the people when they put the god forsaken thing up, why are we beholden to the law and the will of the shareholders when we insist that doing it in spite of us is a Bad Idea?
exactly. either the law applies only to The Poors, or it applies to everyone.
if the law applies to everyone, then it needs to be applied.
if you can’t apply the law, maybe apply something else.
Silly take. Almost nothing will stop it long term if they want it, illegal or not. And thinking of ideas that potentially could, that a single person could genuinely pull off, is not simple, no matter how serious you are.
Funny how they look so flammable
As if Americans would ever lift a finger
Come over here and lift my finger for me, jackass.
It’s like they’ve been genetically modified to be stupid and lazy for 40+ years with a firehouse of corn syrup and
poor educationpropagandaExcept the ones who are supposed to be fighting back have spent the last few decades doing little else but loudly proclaiming how much more intelligent and capable they are than the Americans you’re describing.
My first thought was that Benn Jordan did a great bit of video journalism on this, but it’s already linked from the article, although without any other mention of it.
Dude is just a wealth of interesting videos.
Edit and speaking of which… He dropped this doozy today: https://youtu.be/lA8WuXDXfcI
Just watched these two videos 6 hours ago hahaha, without knowing him or the article or the post.
He really is, I found him from his Flock videos and have since binge watched everything he’s made.
The music that he makes for the videos is a wonderful cherry on top of the great information and presentation.
He also has a huge backlog of music as The Flashbulb
Thanks, TIL
I’ve listened to him quite a lot in ~2010, then learned about his YouTube channel when it started popping off, but only recently made the connection that it’s the same person.
I went to look at his Wiki page now, and apparently he also released music as Acidwolf, Human Action Network, and FlexE. TIL as well!
Link for future readers:
It’s Cuba using Russia’s secret sonic weapons obviously
Is there any research on this?
Back in the 90s, there was a theory that living near power-lines was unhealthy, but later shown to be bunk. Also similar to “electro magnetic sensitivity” like Chuck in “Better Call Saul”. Does inaudible sound effect people’s health?
Yes, infrasound is a fairly well understood phenomenon. Loud noise at frequencies below 10 Hz isn’t commonly picked up by recording equipment but can induce things like anxiety, nausea, and sleep problems. While recently wind power plants have sometimes been accused of generating it, it’s also been caused by industrial fans and even resonance in a building’s ductwork.
It wouldn’t surprise me if a data center’s AC caused enough noise at frequencies not normally monitored to become an issue.
Pipelines also cause a resonance hum that some people CAN hear for miles, and it drives them batshit.
Spend time at an interstate rest stop. The vibration can be intense.
There’s a steam plant for my local hospital about 300m from my house. When I’m in my basement trying to record drums, I can audibly hear when the plant is running. Super low, sub-50hz hum. It gets into all my mics.
Fortunately my bedroom is on the second floor of the house so the resonance doesn’t keep me up at night.
Anxiety, nausea and sleep problems can be caused by many things. One of those things is believing that a nearby datacenter is making you ill.
Sure, investigate it and see if it is actually happening. But, do a proper double-blind study.
I take this personally because my mother is a conspiracy nut who thinks that everything is making her ill: wifi, chemtrails, street lights, electricity, gluten… if she heard about infrasound she’d add it to the list of things that are hurting her health.
Infrasound isn’t some fringe conspiracy theory, it’s well-understood, and infrasound weapons are banned by the laws of warfare because they literally torture people to death and can cause internal bleeding.
The infrasound in this article is obviously less intense than a deliberately designed weapon, but it can still cause extreme discomfort, pain, illness, and stress.
You don’t need a double-blind study to determine if acoustic emissions are the culprit. You just need to measure specifically for infrasound (and ultrasound, for that matter). It’s an unusual form of pollution but very much measurable if you know to look for it.
Unlike the things you mentioned, infrasound is understood to be a thing these days and is sometimes considered in construction. It’s not exactly witchcraft; most equipment (including decibel meters) just isn’t built to account for very low frequencies.
If the data center does put out noise at very low frequencies that’s probably some kind of unintended resonance that they’ll have to stop. It might be as simple as slightly changing the RPMs of some cooling fans or installing sound proofing in specific places.
It’s very likely that she does have some sort of health problem and doctors weren’t useful in finding it. It’s very hard not to be superstitious in that situation
most of these are a psyop to make the real things sound phony
In one case, apparently, the infranoise was at the right frequency to resonate with the eye and cause people to hallucinate. This was due to a fan in a basement, not an entire data center.
[citation needed]
I fully believe that at times infrasound can result in anxiety, nausea, etc. But, in 2026 so can reading the news. So can thinking that your health is being affected by a datacenter, resulting in you worrying and losing sleep.
This whole thing about the “resonant frequency of the eye” and that causing someone to hallucinate… that smells like utter BS. A much more likely explanation in a basement is carbon monoxide.
I believe the poster is referring to The Ghost in the Machine, Published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol.62, No 851 April 1998 (pdf)
Ok, that’s a paper that attempts to explain the feeling that a building might be haunted. There’s nothing in there about causing people to hallucinate. They talk about the supposed “resonant frequency of the eye”, but then they say:
The resonant frequency is the natural frequency of an object, the one at which it needs the minimum input of energy to vibrate. As you can see from above, any frequency above 8 Hz will have an effect and some sources quote 40Hz
If the values are that vague, then there is no resonant frequency. There may be frequencies that transmit vibrations to the eye, but with a big enough speaker you can cause anything to vibrate.
The closest the get to hallucinations is to say that "the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious “smearing"of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.’s spectacles.” So, no hallucinations, just some blurry vision that might vaguely count as an excuse for seeing a ghost if your eye is vibrating significantly. Notice that that’s all just speculation, saying “this seems like it could be possible” rather than actually testing for that hypothesis.
We had slightly different readings.
As he was writing he became aware that he was being watched, and a figure slowly emerged to his left. It was indistinct and on the periphery of his vision but it moved as V.T. would expect a person to. The apparition was grey and made no sound… V.T. was unable to see any detail and finally built up the courage to turn and face the thing. As he turned the apparition faded and disappeared.
He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person. Even without it being interpreted as a person, that’s a textbook mild hallucination.
Once V.T. knew this he calculated the frequency of the standing sound wave … 18.97Hz … plus or minus 10%
Table IV on page 212 of this book shows frequencies causing disturbance to the eyes and vision to be within the band 12 to 27 Hz.
Most interestingly, a NASA technical report mentions a resonant frequency for the eye as 18 Hz (NASA Technical Report 19770013810).
He cited two sources inline with ranges narrower than 8-40Hz which indicate that vision can be affected at the same frequencies he measured in the lab. He even noted that everyone would have slightly different resonant frequencies.
No, it’s not a full research paper, but it is the citation you requested.
He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person
Which can’t be explained by an unfocused eye. They do a lot of speculating to come up with a reason why he could possibly see something out of the corner of his eye. But, that’s only the physical part of it. It doesn’t explain why he might think that whatever he was seeing was “a figure” and moved like a person.
That’s like saying that ghosts can be explained by wearing glasses with dirty lenses, then going into detail about how dirty lenses can cause someone to see something that isn’t there, while ignoring the
elephantghost in the room. Except it’s even worse because a smudge on your glasses causing you to “see something that isn’t there” is really easy to test and barely needs an experiment to confirm it’s true. But, low frequency waves causing someone to see something that isn’t there isn’t something that has been tested. It’s pure speculation.So, pure speculation that low frequency waves can cause someone’s eyes to blur in such a way that the corner of their glasses is mistaken as something that isn’t there. No proof that has happened or can happen, just speculation.
Then ignoring the elephant in the room that just because someone might not see clearly if their eye is vibrating, that is somehow magically interpreted as a figure moving like a person, which they interpret as a ghost.
There’s a humongous jump there from “a certain frequency might cause the eyes to wiggle” to “and therefore that’s why he saw a ghost”.
Ultrasonic sounds (above 20 kHz) can cause physical symptoms in humans, particularly at high intensities ((>75\text{ dB})), including headaches, dizziness, nausea, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), and fatigue
Animal studies have demonstrated internal tissue alterations at specific frequencies and intensities
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/topics/l4/ultrasonic-exposure-effects-on-human-health
this is also used as weaponry
There is a lot of research on this. Exposure to this level of infrasound has negative effects on anxiety, the ability to sleep, and even cardiac function. Those who experience the level exposure associated with living close by to these datacenters can start to experience negative effects on their hearts ability to contract properly after as little as one hour. Take into account these people are exposed to this every hour, hour after hour, for years if not the rest of their natural lives.
There is a lot of research on this.
You provided none
I don’t recall being asked to. The question was “Is there any research on this?” And I answered the question lol.
Now that you’ve been made aware of the research done on this you can go look it up. Just Google “Infrasound NIH” and I’m sure you’ll figure it out from there.
Exposure to this level of infrasound
What level is that?
The article mentions 96 dB for 24 hours a day
The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.
It says “these industrial sites” so it’s making a generalization, it says “as high as” so that’s presumably the maximum they measured at one of those many sites. They also talk about high and low frequency sound, so it may not be the infrasound that is “loud” but the high frequency sound, which doesn’t as easily travel through the ground, etc.
Because sound tends to follow an inverse square law, if they measured that 96 dB at 100m from the sound’s source, it could be just 2% of that level at 800m away.
So, that “96 dB” figure needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The figure as actually measured in some person’s home might be a tiny fraction of that amount.
Again, it doesn’t mean there’s no problem, just that it needs some further investigation.
Lots of research has been done on this. But I would highly recommend watching the YouTube video that was posted by the top commenter instead of trying to dig through what’s out there.
Dude living near large scale powerlines does cause health problems.
I’ve never heard of that. What sort of problems? And is there research to back it up?
Lot cancers and not talking about your average powerlines.
Talking about lines like this. Been near these? You can literally hear the power going through the lines.
You can literally hear the power going through the lines.
Which is the problem. People get scared of them, even though there’s no danger, but they convince themselves there is, and they get a Nocebo Effect.
This has been widely tested. Some people claim that WiFi makes them ill, so they did tests. The tests showed no difference in people’s reported symptoms when they were next to a real WiFi router that was emitting WiFi signals vs. a sham WiFi router that was designed to look real but didn’t have any active radio components.
They’ve also done studies that show that exposure can result in symptoms. Exposure to media claiming WiFi is dangerous, that is.
Where’s the research though?
Idk, seems shaky at best. Not sure what hearing the lines matters.
According to what science?
@Fredselfish@lemmy.world @NarrativeBear@lemmy.world care to explain yourselves?
I think you misunderstood Chuck’s medical condition.
Would you care to elaborate?
He doesn’t have any condition where he senses electromagnetic fields. It’s a condition he made up entirely in response to how Jimmy violates Chuck’s world view where Jimmy is inferior to Chuck. It started soon after Jimmy got a law degree, it got better when Jimmy worked under Chuck, because Chuck liked being his boss and controlling Jimmy’s big case. It got worse when they had a falling out. It got way worse after Chicanery where Jimmy proved he can be a better lawyer.
If Chuck actually had an issue, how did he function as a successful lawyer for most of his life? When he had severe symptoms, it was all around his head, his ears rang, his eyes hurt, his head hurt, so how was a reflective liner in his jacket sufficient to protect him for a season or so? Why does he routinely only experience symptoms after being told about hidden electronics?
It’s pretty clear it’s a BS condition. Jimmy even tests him. It doesn’t mean that Chuck is lying, it’s also pretty clear from the show that it’s some kind of Nocebo Effect. He doesn’t want to believe he’s a bad person, so his body effectively comes up with this “solution” to the problem.
Yeah he was clearly psychologically unwell with psychosomatic symptoms
Right. I think the person you replied to was saying, is infrasound sickness or whatever also psychosomatic, like Chuck’s thing. Seems like this one may actually be real, but I don’t think they misunderstood Chuck’s condition.
Wind Turbines can also cause this kind of disturbance. I remember seeing something about a lawsuit over that.
Just because there was a lawsuit doesn’t make it true.
That’s right. Even if the person won the lawsuit it doesn’t mean the science is true. It’s one really frustrating thing about the legal system, sometimes people win lawsuits based on absolutely terrible BS science. A persuasive lawyer has to convince a jury that something is true, not convince a scientist who knows about that field.
just because one thing turned out not to be true, it doens’t automatically mean you don’t have to believe any other claims.
A lawsuit being filed doesn’t equal scientific or medical fact. You can file a lawsuit for literally anything.
Without concrete, peer reviewed studies, windmills causing health issues is just as believable as wifi causing health issues.
yeah I was kinda implying that the people filing the lawsuits were on all that business, just didn’t feel like spelling out the vague details I remember from a newspiece a year or so ago,
Data centres are the new windmills?
Here’s a short video that goes into the specific and how this affects surrounding neighborhoods.
Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons
The researchers he ‘cites’ in that video have said he misinterpreted their findings.
Writer pic is AI generated. It’s arguments are invalid.
That’s a logic error. The merit of what is said determines truth, not that you don’t like the author.
This whole blog seems extremely pro-AI and their entire site is full of articles supposedly debunking why data centers aren’t actually bad after all…
This specific article has some pretty crazy conclusions about Benn Jordan’s own double-blind study. They’re saying it wasn’t double blind because he might have noticed water shaking, but in the actual video he explicitly says he threw out any of the data points where he knew if the sound was on. The results seemed pretty conclusive to me.
The other thing is it talks a ton about wind turbine infrasound, and how dangerous levels are thousands of times louder. But the actual measured level of sound ARE thousands of times higher. Measurements have been taken at 96dB, which is significantly higher than the 50-75dB this article is referencing as safe. If the 96dB infrasound is loud enough to shake a glass of water as above, it’s not “imperceptible” like the safe levels.
As with all loud sounds in general, exposure time is a factor. A brief burst above 100dB won’t damage your hearing, but extended exposure will. I don’t see why the same wouldn’t apply to infrasound. All these studies are 72h or less of exposure, but there’s people living next to these datacenters 24/7.
Personally I’m waiting for more research to be done. There’s not enough data to be calling things fake or debunked here.
worse. but this is just people trying anything they can to keep these pieces of shit from wrecking their communities.
I hope MAHA is also livid over this.
Sorry they can’t hear you above the munching on rat penis.
Make America Hard Again?
Make America Hopeless Again
I would have assumed: Make America Hate Again, as it rhymes.
My Aunt Hates Ants
My Anus Has Aorms
lol
They should announce a day they plan on cranking up the power, and instead turn everything off. See how many people can “feel” the increased activity.
It’s a very real phenomenon with documented health effects. You have to use a decibel meter that’s capable of detecting sounds just outside of audible range. Benn Jordan on YouTube recorded infrasound at the edge of the property line at Collosus XAI peaking at -96 dB.
https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuoactually it’s inauduble and therefore can’t hurt you, like how gamma rays are invisible and therefore harmless
Is this sarcasm? Sorry sarcasm detector broke.
Edit: Yes, it has to be. No one would think gamma rays are safe right? Right?
Like how before microscopes bacteria couldn’t hurt people!
Like how John cena cant hurt me cause I can’t see him.
humans cant percieve, elephants can sense it, percieve, cats,dogs, and mice might able to, and also bats.
Alright so I watched him break down the data at the end, and the best that this proves is that it should be studied further to verify his experiments. Thousands of people should be studied in universities all over the world. My own distaste for datacenters not withstanding, if those future studies indicated and even maybe found the mechanism for these issues, that would not translate to datacenters ought not be built. It will and should be translated to a public health and engineering problem. We put shielding on nuclear powerplants to protect people from radiation, and we can likely do something similar to prevent infrasound, if the claims of some papers and this youtuber are proven to be correct beyond a reasonable doubt. This whole thing just stinks of “wifi sickness” and I am highly skeptical 🫤
We will all be picking up the tab to shield these places in the future in the name of public health and safety. The hyperscalers won’t pay when they can plead ignorance and have the tax payer pay to fix it for them. Problem with data centres is once they are online, changes are very slow. Any datacentre with five 9’s or above will only allow small incremental change each year. While this is faster for single tenant datacentres, it won’t be a quick fix.
It’s still just a matter of political will.
You would be AMAZED at how quickly things would be fixed. At rates previously claimed “beyond impossible”, IF governments “pulled the plug” until things were fixed… rather than issuing fines or providing grace periods (and subsequent extensions).
I’ve worked at places that would just eat compliance fines (not for health). Just straight up eat them. They put a token team on it… but continually divert that time to other tasks.
The companies that claim these things cannot be done are the same ones who said they couldn’t survive without slavery, with any environmental regulations, with a 5 day work week, without being able to use child labour, with a minimum wage, without strikebreakers etc etc etc. It’s literally industries job to push back on anything that cuts into thier bottom line at all. It’s governments job to say “bullshit”
I hear you that these companies would make excuses just to make the executives more money. Wish someone in my government had the balls to yell bullshit but they all just see the project dollars and know they can use that number to get re-elected. Politicians are cunts
