A healthy woman’s blood cells formed abnormal clumps after just five minutes of having an idle cellphone placed on her leg. The same thing happened when researchers held the cellphone an inch away from the woman’s body, according to a peer-reviewed study published April 23 in Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development.
Using ultrasound, the researchers showed that the woman’s blood cells developed a rouleaux formation, an abnormal red blood cell pattern in which the cells stack together in long rows like piles of coins, according to MyHematology.com.
Dr. Robert Brown, the study’s author, said that although the impact of rouleaux formation on health is not well understood, it’s “not without potential health consequences.”
Brown is a diagnostic radiologist with more than 30 years of experience and the vice president of Scientific Research and Clinical Affairs for the Environmental Health Trust (EHT). He said:
“Because of the impact on gas exchange and increased blood viscosity due to clumping, it is possible rouleaux could account for the unusual uptick in once-uncommon disease processes and disorders increasing in our society over the past few decades, including hypertension, obesity, diabetes, strokes, particularly in the younger population, and others.”
According to Brown, the study is key to educating the medical community on how wireless radiation affects a person’s biological functioning.
“If we want to see a change in government regulations and a decrease in the indiscriminate usage of wireless technology, the allopathic medical community needs to become knowledgeable of the health effects of wireless communication radiation,” Brown said. “I believe this study has cracked the proverbial egg.”
Devra Davis, Ph.D., MPH, a toxicologist and epidemiologist who is founder and president emerita of the EHT, said, “This finding of clumping in the blood after only five minutes of direct cellphone exposure should give pause to all who keep phones close to their bodies.”
The EHT is a nonprofit research and education group focused on the effects of wireless radiation.
Researchers repeated the experiment several times
For the data in this study, Brown and his colleague, Barbara Biebrich, an ultrasound technician, did an initial experiment including an ultrasound scan of the leg vein of a 62-year-old asymptomatic woman with no history of allergy, blood disorder or systemic disease.
Next, they placed an idle Apple iPhone XR cellphone on the back of her knee for five minutes. The phone was connected to AT&T’s mobile network with its Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular antennas turned on. However, the phone didn’t make calls or send texts, or receive calls or texts, while placed on the back of her knee.
After five minutes, the researchers did another ultrasound. The second ultrasound showed that cellphone radiation caused the blood cells in the woman’s popliteal vein, located behind the knee, to clump in rouleaux formation.
Brown and Biebrich repeated their experiment with the same woman multiple times over three months. “Each time, we encountered the same results,” Brown wrote.
On one occasion, the woman’s blood cells were already in rouleaux formation before having the cellphone placed on her knee for five minutes.
“Although we were initially perplexed,” Brown wrote, “I asked the participant where she had kept her cellphone just before the scan, and she replied that it had been in her pocket.”
The researchers also altered the experiment by placing the cellphone an inch away from the woman’s skin, rather than placing it directly on her body. Again, they waited five minutes.
“She went into rouleaux, even with the cellphone exposure an inch away,” Brown wrote.
“By demonstrating rouleaux in a deep leg vein, the study confirms that the penetration and associated physiological effects of wireless radiation are not limited to the first few millimeters of skin, but do, in fact, occur deeper in the body,” Brown said.
This finding has “significant implications for safety,” he said.
The Federal Communications Commission’s safety exposure limits for wireless radiation are based on the assumption that the radiation can harm human health only at levels high enough to heat human tissue. Cellphones emit radiation at levels lower than that.
Many scientists, including Brown, say there’s evidence that non-thermal levels of wireless radiation may negatively affect human biology.
The study provides a “visible manifestation” that cellphone radiation at non-thermal levels has biological effects.
The study didn’t clarify what specific range of cellphone radiation frequencies, such as 4G or 5G, caused the blood to clump.
The cellphone was idle and not actively engaging a 4G or 5G network, beyond the usual “handshaking” communication that cellphones do with cell towers, Brown said.
‘I am quite certain our subject is not a unicorn’
In the experiment report, the researchers said they are planning a larger study to assess how prevalent cellphone radiation-induced rouleaux formation may be among the general population.
“Although the incidence of rouleaux formation following cellphone exposure is unknown, I am quite certain our subject is not a unicorn,” Brown said.
Ultrasound imaging is relatively inexpensive and popular, so it should be easy for other researchers to do follow-up studies, too, he added.
The researchers first published some of their results from using ultrasound to show that cellphone radiation induces abnormal blood clumping in a Feb. 10 peer-reviewed article in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine.
The April study in the Environment journal restates much of the February report in Frontiers. However, the report in Frontiers did not include the results from holding the cellphone an inch away from the woman’s body because the researchers had not yet done that experiment.
Both reports are important because they target different audiences, according to Brown.
The Frontiers journal is a resource for the physician community, particularly cardiologists and cardiovascular surgeons, Brown explained. The Environment journal is geared for the “much broader environmental science community,” he said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
