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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk. You can stand inside the path of a microwave communication dish and receive many orders of magnitude more radiation, and what it'll do is make you warm. That's it. Soviet soldiers used to do that in Siberia to keep themselves warm, and the only risk is the dish outputting too much power and cooking you instead.

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The first day in radar class the instructor put a piece of steel wool in front of a small dish and it instantly melted white and dropped molten metal onto the floor.

It always made me nervous when the class goofballs turned the horns on other people so you could feel the microwaves.

Goofball 1: 'accidentally' radiates goofball 2 Goofball 2: What? What are you doing? Oh, I'll show you - just watch me increase the power on this baby...

It turns out your testicles and eyes are a bad place to receive microwaves.

I submit to anyone thinking of attempting this: you are probably going to get the power calculations wrong and cooking human cells is not fun at all.

Yeah, there's definitely dangerous ways to use microwave emitters. But my point is that your instructor thought that it was relatively safe to give them out in radar class. If they were x-ray emitters, on the other hand...

I mostly agree with you. There are edge cases with microwave towers that can lead to vision loss as your eyes heat up, but don't dump heat very well. Further, modern cellphones don't operate in the same bands as old radio-waves.

However, this stuff is very likely to be safe at cellphone usage levels.

>Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk

Your confidence and shortsightedness are astounding.

Do you not see that ~40 years ago scientists were saying exactly the same thing, with exactly the same conviction about Asbestos, Lead, DDT, etc.

We don't know what we don't know, but at least we should admit it.

All of those compounds interact via chemical pathways, and our knowledge of biochemistry is undoubtedly incomplete. However, we know the effect that EM spectrum has on molecules. At the wavelengths in question, it is not possible to break bonds. Thus the only plausible effects would be a result of different vibrational modes or the indirect effect of localized heating. That makes any risk from those technologies very low.

Didn't those Soviet soldiers have a greater incidence of cancer later in life?

Some people wonder if one of our cells have a process to check the DNA runs an electric current through the molecule. There is a possibility that electromagnetic fields could distrupt this. This might obviously be bollocks but to say it's only heat output is also wrong...

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