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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

And if you care about your radiation dose (some of us do) you will opt for a molestation rather than a zap.

Uh, no. Many physicists don't like the now-discontinued X-ray backscatter machines, but the mm wave devices are not ionizing radiation. Some guy explained why non-ionizing radiation isn't a problem in 1905; won the Nobel Prize for it, too.

> but the mm wave devices are not ionizing radiation

The science is still out on whether it's harmful or not. I got TSA pre so I can just avoid it, but before that I always opted out.

The science is only still out if you believe that mobile phones are causing cancer as well- ie for those who can't, or refuse, to understand science. For everyone else it's throughly settled

Sorry, what?

"The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is part of the World Health Organization (WHO). Its major goal is to identify causes of cancer. The IARC has classified RF fields as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based on limited evidence of a possible increase in risk for brain tumors among cell phone users, and inadequate evidence for other types of cancer."

I would not call that "thoroughly settled".

Good chat, despite it's mildly aggressive nature. Here's what:

So, an organisation that basically labels everything in the world as either a potential carcinogen or carcinogen [0] when the second lowest score they award still reads as 'potential carcinogen' is more powerful than actual evidence, accrued across enormous longitudinal studies, first from scandinavia [1] but backed significantly by australia [2] and integrated into a plausable mechanism for increases in >70 year olds [3] combined with a finding that would actually revolutionise physics and biology for suggesting a new mechanism for the interaction of electromagnetism and biology?

Alarmists are everywhere [4]. But that doesn't mean they are right. It's easy to listen to fear, but just because someone is screaming and crying doesn't make them right. Serious claims deserve to be looked at seriously, and this one has been throughly examined, in research that is continuing. And it continues to be debunked by huge datasets - not just the referenced studies but also the million woman study [5][6] and others.

So yes, I repeat, for anyone versed in science, physics and with their head screwed on straight, the science is settled, and I challenge you to demonstrate either a mechanism or a throughly vetted dataset that proves otherwise. And i'll remind you that hitting the first answer on google does not constitute research.

[0] http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/299632-cha...

[1] https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.d6387

[2] http://www.cancerepidemiology.net/article/S1877-7821(16)3005...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15378499

[4] http://theconversation.com/new-study-no-increase-in-brain-ca...

[5] http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2014/05/14/back-in-t...

[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24078152

Thank you for the information, very interesting. Increased inflammatory response seems a reasonable potential mechanism:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994795/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25251956

Perhaps it doesn't cause cancer per se, but promotes tumor growth or otherwise creates a more favorable environment.

It's a pretty thin bow to draw, but could be - so could general increase in average population blood glucose as more of the population suffers from metabolic disorder/T2DM but again that's promoting tumour growth not necessarially causing cancer.. and there certainly isn't enough evidence to say that. Studies are continuing but again when early weak studies show a positive result, and later good studies show no result, the chance of drawing a positive p value become lower and lower

I tried researching this a while back and opted for the molestation (at least one qualified for that term). I recently went back to zapping out of cumulative annoyance. Any good resources that review the radiation type and dose?

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