Spyke

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61 replies

infosec.pub

The chances of this actually being connected is probably near zero (since rising dizziness is global, but datacenters are mostly in few countries), but still felt funny enough to post.

Randomly stumbled upon this while researching why are so many people around lately feeling dizzy.

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lemmy.zip

I didn't even know dizziness was on the rise! What did you find?

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lemmy.world

If I were to guess, probably heat stroke due to rising temperatures. Which, if true, would also be worsened by having more data centers

67
seaplantreply
slrpnk.net

It looks like the rate of searches starts going up around January 2026 though, middle of winter in the northern hemisphere. Unless Australia was having a heat wave? They're probably prone to dizziness anyway being upside down all the time

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Yeah, and their toilets flush the wrong way too. That's gotta make a person dizzy, I mean our bodies are 80% water. Although Australians are probably more like 60% water if we're being honest

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I would have guessed latent response to bioaccumulation of lead from leaded gasoline, or increased CO2 in the (local) atmosphere

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REDACTEDreply
infosec.pub

Nothing solid. Imma about to put on my tinfoil hat and start looking at the Russian satellites. Realistically I'm way over my head here and I hope someone else notices the weird trend. The only reason I started looking around is because I feel slightly dizzy for the past 3 months and decided to ask around. Surprisingly alot of people are experiencing the same thing. I'm from Baltics. All health checkups return perfectly fine.

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Jadeyreply
feddit.nl

it's interesting, in dutch Google trends, "dizziness" has a similar graph but "duizeligheid", the Dutch translation for it, is a flat line

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Interestingly enough, in my language (Latvian), medical term is "Vertigo". Out of 5 years, the term had most searches (100) on April 2026.

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That's odd, I just had a random moment of dizziness today. I assumed it was the heat, but I've had heat sickness before and it didn't feel like that. It felt like the ground shook for a moment, but no one else seemed to notice.

I'm across the ocean by the way.

And I don't think EMF interference is a crackpot conspiracy theory. Havana syndrome is real, and supposedly the CIA has an undetectable heart attack gun. Sonic weapons exist, so why not RF weapons? Not saying they're okay, just possible. And anything that's possible is likely at this point...

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Zwiebelreply
feddit.org

Post covid effects? I've been dizzy often since then

12

severe upper respirtory can affect your vestibular system, causing vertigo. i did get balance problem one time from a pretty bad flu infection, but never covid.

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You ever spin in a circle? You do it a few times you don't really notoce, you do it a lot, younget dizzy.

The earth has been spinning in a lot of cirxles, and we are starting to cross into the "do it a lot" range of spins.

-- Calvin's Dad

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sp3ctr4lreply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Actually there is a proven causal connection:

Infrasound.

Data centers make a lot of that, and that does cause/exacerbate dizziness and disorientation.

Now, what proportion of increasing dizziness is caused by more data centers?

Impossible to tell from this meagre data set, likely an insubstantial amount... my money would be on long covid + its really fucking hot more often.

EDIT: derp, ivan beat me to it.

0

Please cite some sources that show that infrasound causes/exacerbates dizziness or disorientation (or see my other comments in this thread). There is no conclusive evidence to support negative health effects from infrasound.

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marcosreply
lemmy.world

The delay implies on the other direction. Let's see if dizziness reduces a bit in 6 months.

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Abyssianreply
lemmy.world

But it really doesn't.

You could replace number of data centers with total number of Taylor Swift songs released and get that same idea. Taylor Swift music existing causes dizziness, and it must be stopped.

Or you could replace number of data centers with "Sean Connery alive?" and decide dizziness has been going up since he died. He was somehow guarding the world against becoming dizzy, and we lost that protection when he passed. :/

Putting two random things on a chart like this doesn't actually show or imply anything, other than that the person who made it likely wants you to believe there's some kind of connection.

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... You seem to be assuming Google search frequencies are the only reasonable metric to measure the increase of a thing in the world.

0
sopuli.xyz

It's actually

Causation causes correlation

52
piefed.social

Infrasound. Proven Possible (>100dB is absolutely harmful though, lower levels are object of studies now and testing on humans yielded inconclusive results) negative impact on people's health and general wellbeing, waves travel quite far and have high penetration, and data centers are absolutely the source of it with all the fans and pumps.

Not saying that there 1:1 causation here, but having a data center around will absolutely make you miserable, and dizzy too.

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jaybonereply
lemmy.zip

How far does that actually travel, and how does that compare to other bad stuff that has been around longer, like refineries or power substations or whatever?

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iktreply
aussie.zone

data centres have been around for decades as well, I believe it's the new hyper scaler data centres that possibly have this infrasound thingo

But that's nothing related to a google trend graph of dizziness and data centres, that's as the OP says, random

These are great:

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

18
fooreply

Spurious shmurious! The causation here is clear: eating butter generates wind farms. Eat more butter to save the planet everyone! It's undeniable science!

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Dammit people would you stop commenting on Technology Connections videos? I can't afford it!

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When datacenters are being powered by unregulated natural gas generators then it has a massive impact

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Where I live there's a refinery, about ten years ago they changed the burners on the tall torches for a new kind that burn apparently cleaner but they make a lot more noise. It is 6km away with no direct line of sight, the low pitch rumble makes some of the windows in my house rattle.

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I’m a big Benn Jordan fan but he missed the mark on this one. See this detailed rebuttal. Sniping between the author and Jordan on Blue Sky aside, he makes a lot of good points about how the research does not show negative health impacts related to infrasound.

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ivanreply
piefed.social

So, you may have noticed that 5 GHz Wi-Fi has smaller coverage area than 2.4 GHz.

It works that way all the way down to infrasound, which is <20 Hz, and natural examples would be whale communications (thousands of kilometers) or volcano eruptions (infrasound wave from Krakatoa eruption lapped around entire globe multiple times).

As for human factors - basically any big industrial tech object is gonna be the source of ultrasound. So it's kind of safe to assume that infrasound from data centers may be "heard" from at least several kilometers away. Dunno how it compares to refineries and power substations - but they're also source of that.

5

At night I could hear a train idle from a kilometer away through town easily. That was still in the audible range, not infrasound, and also it was literally just the engine idling, not the train being driven - not super loud even if standing next to it. A bit louder than a car.

2

Has it been proven? I see articles that suggest pathways or mechanisms.

But when I looked for a double blind study with controls, they do not find any effects at all. Arguably the majority of studies are around 8 hour periods or sleep period, not 24 hour exposure. But you would think they would find something. They did hearing tests, blood test, brain activity tests, and emotional response "feeling" scores. It just isnt there conclusively.

People started doing a lot of this research because of the wind turbines, which also are very loud, run as long as their is wind, and produce infrasound.

Don't get me wrong: I am not defending putting loud constant noise machines near people, this should be part of a zoning regulation. That seems bad enough, infrasound or not.

9

Please cite sources for this claim? Infrasound has not been shown to have “proven negative impact.” That is fear-mongering on par with “wifi makes people sick.”

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Abyssianreply
lemmy.world

It seems you've discovered a real correlation here!

... it's called "cold season" for a reason, and lots of people will be searching for common ailments at the same time.

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Tony Nreply
lemmy.ml

That doesn't explain the huge spike over the past 6 months, and cold season has been over for about 5 of those months.

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Abyssianreply
lemmy.world

Not cold season alone, for fuck sake. Seasonal allergies, the whole lot. And the big spike you're seeing is because you failed to zoom and actually look at the last 6 months.

End of May, beginning of June there were a lot of searches, then it died down. I'm all for conspiracy theories, but at least take the time to apply a tiny bit of logic.

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I'd expect to see a spike every year if this was a seasonal or annual occurrence

2

Over 30 years in data centers, no dizziness. I do have a deep contempt on the amount of waste and it has grown over those 30 years...

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I mean f**k AI and massive datacenters near residential areas but I think some of this could be nocebo

4
lemmy.world

Well infra sound isnt audible but does damage the body.

Sort of how radiation is invisible but still damaged the body. And takes a while to show.

It works very similarly in infrasound except it's a different kind of damage.

It's known to cause cardiovascular damage and organ damage as well as dizziness and damage to hearing organs and vestibular system.

0
daanniireply
lemmy.world

Infrasound in Biology and Medicine: Insights into Mechanisms, Health Outcomes and Research Perspectives-A Narrative Review

Palak Kapoor, Renu Bala Yadav, Neha Agrawal, Savita Gaur, Rajesh Arora

Noise and Health 27 (129), 676-691, 2025

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=infrasound+cardiovascular+#d=gs_qabs&t=1783484355429&u=%23p%3DIQT0nWogXtoJ

Quick Google scholar search.

I was under the impression most scientific minded people were aware of this.

There are YouTube videos spreading awareness of infrasound. It's a common talking point about the hazards of data centers.

And fracking.

Which also creates it.

It's not even new research. This one from 2017

Infrasound‐induced hemodynamics, ultrastructure, and molecular changes in the rat myocardium Zhaohui Pei, Hanfei Sang, Ruiman Li, Pingxi Xiao, Jiangui He, Zhiqiang Zhuang, Miaozhang Zhu, Jingzao Chen, Hong Ma Environmental Toxicology: An International Journal 22 (2), 169-175, 2007

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=infrasound+cardiovascular+#d=gs_qabs&t=1783484355429&u=%23p%3DIQT0nWogXtoJ

0

The Kapoor article cited many other studies that actually looked at audible sound and noise pollution. It also cited several articles that conclude that evidence of symptoms directly related to infrasound exposure are mostly case studies and anecdotal evidence and that more research is needed. The authors even state in the article itself, “It is still not unambiguously established that low-level exposure to infrasound always leads to adverse consequences at the organ, tissue, cellular and molecular level.”

As for the Zhaohui article, please consider this article that discusses how average infrasound that we are exposed to day to day (even from sources such as regular passenger cars) exceeds the thresholds that are said to induce negative myocardial effects.

Can Infrasound from Wind Turbines Affect Myocardial Contractility? A critical Review

Just because it’s being talked about on youtube does not mean the research backs it up.

Many studies on infrasound are related to wind turbines, which produce a similar level of infrasound to data centers. Consider the following study that found no link between infrasound and negative health effects:

The Health Effects of 72 Hours of Simulated Wind Turbine Infrasound: A Double-Blind Randomized Crossover Study in Noise-Sensitive, Healthy Adults

And multiple large scale reviews done by governmental organizations across the world:

Systematic review of the human health effects of wind farms

Understanding the Evidence: Wind Turbine Noise

The Potential Health Impact of Wind Turbines

Infrasound Does Not Explain Symptoms Related to Wind Turbines

Infrasound is generated by both natural sources (ex: severe weather, ocean waves, whales) and man-made sources (ex: data centers, wind turbines, diesel engines). Despite the recent discussion around data centers, infrasound exposure is not new, and has not been shown to cause negative health effects.

Fuck data centers and every negative environmental and societal effect they have (including established issues with audible noise pollution). However, health impacts from infrasound are not one of them.

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mufkinreply
lemmy.zip

Just stop. You could have put that in your post. I’m not clicking that link. Post your evidence and not a screenshot. Do better.

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