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Comment by ShorsHammer | Hacker News Reader

Eating a banana entails more radiation exposure if this is something you live in fear of.

World Health Organisation:

> A large number of studies have been performed over the last two decades to assess whether mobile phones pose a potential health risk. To date, no adverse health effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use

FDA:

> the current safety limits are set to include a 50-fold safety margin from observed effects of radiofrequency energy exposure

FCC:

> There is no scientific evidence that proves that wireless phone usage can lead to cancer or a variety of other problems

National Cancer Institute:

> Studies thus far have not shown a consistent link between cell phone use and cancers

https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electrom...

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/radiation-exposu...

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

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Bananas have different radiation than mobile phones.

Atomic vs. Electromagnetic

Bananas give off ionizing radiation which has been extensively proven to be dangerous for humans in large enough doses.

The radiation from phones is non-ionizing and from my previous comment you'll see even the most cautious health agencies in the world aren't willing to claim it's harmful.

Suggest you look at the xkcd chart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation#Radiation_e...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation#Health_...

Forget for a moment the proported damage allegedly caused by cell phone radiation. Can you think of other kinds of real radiation that can indeed cause harm to living tissue besides ionizing radiation?

A photon emitted from a mobile phone's antenna has ~4 orders of magnitude less energy than a photon of visible light (E = hc/λ). If you're worried about your mobile phone, you should be terrified of light bulbs.

Just for clarity, is that energy measured at the source, or at a certain distance?

That's the energy carried by each individual photon. In terms of the number of photons, a typical lightbulb emits one two to orders of magnitude more; the number of photons illuminating a surface will reduce with the square of distance (assuming an isotropic radiator).

The illuminance in direct sunlight is two or three orders of magnitude greater than in an artificially lit room; sunlight also contains photons at UV wavelengths, which can carry up to two orders of magnitude more energy than visible photons.

Sunscreen is opaque at UV wavelengths but effectively transparent at visible wavelengths, partly for aesthetic reasons but mainly because the lower-energy visible photons cause negligible damage to skin. UV photons are sufficiently energetic to break apart bonds in DNA, but visible photons only carry enough energy to heat the skin.

Mobile phones are utterly feeble radiators, both in terms of photon energy and the quantity of photons. In terms of your exposure to electromagnetic radiation, they're a rounding error.

If it's per-photon, isn't that a useless metric without discussing the amount of photons being pushed out?

I'm not worried about non-ionizing radiation. I'm not even worried enough about actual ionizing radiation sometimes. I'm just interested in the details behind the typical phone antenna.

You didn't read all the above replies

I am not a physicist, so I'm probably at least subtly wrong, but...

The photon has the same energy regardless of where it is measured, but the total intensity of the radiation (of all the photons reaching a unit of area normal to the source) decreases with the inverse square of the distance because the photons move generally (except insofar as they are acted upon by forces like the gravitational and electromagnetic) in straight lines at diverging angles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

I'm aware of the inverse square law, which is the entire point of my question. Even measuring a couple feet from the antenna would produce a massive difference in energy levels.

My point was that measuring the energy of a photon is independent from distance. A given photon's energy will remain the same until it interacts with something.

The maximum allowed intensity in the ISM band is a known value, 1W; but the energy of the photon is what you should generally be concerned with.

> Can you think of other kinds of real radiation that can indeed cause harm to living tissue besides ionizing radiation?

Ionizing radiation isn't a "kind" like microwave or visible. "Ionizing" is a label you apply to all radiation for which any single particle has enough energy to kick out electrons from the atom it impacts. The only other "kind" of radiation is non-ionizing radiation.

1 watt at close range at 2.4ghz is lethal given enough time. It doesn’t matter that it ionizes or not. It is cooking tissue. The reason it isn’t killing all of us is that the body has time to repair itself between bursts. To say it is harmless is really wishful thinking for engineers.

Ok I cannot reply further. My point that cell phone radiation can harm living tissue isn’t untested https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-01/u-s-finds...

Look 1 watt doesn’t sound like a lot but touch a one watt resistor sometime. Depending on the size it can burn you. The whole brain only uses about 70 watts.

The problem is that the distinction you're trying to make doesn't practically matter. As best we know now, the non-ionising radiation emitted by approved mobile phone transmitters is so minimally harmful that it is considered harmless. So it might denature a protein here and there, "cooking" an infinitesimally small amount of tissue, but any measurement of this damage, so far, completely lost in the noise. It is, for all practical purposes, as far as we best know now, harmless.

> 1 watt at close range at 2.4ghz is lethal given enough time.

Well, I'm curious as to how you determined this. It's plausible, so long as the target absorbs everything, radiates nothing, and is incapable of healing. Source?

Is my phone raising my body temperature more than a shower in the morning, wearing a blanket, cuddling, or going outside in the sun?

I dont see how you could realistically call it cooking to warm the skin ever so slightly.

Grossly, no, of course I wouldn't. However, the process of cooking things is essentially the process of using heat to denature and decompose components of tissue. So, it's not technically inaccurate to use the term if only a single protein is denatured by localised heating due to the non-ionising radiation. The point is that to use the term "cooked" in that way in this context is rather absurdly misleading.

The other part of this "cooked" term we're missing is that microwave energy (RF energy in the 300 MHz to 300 GHz band) only "cooks" things when there is enough energy at the excitation frequency of water molecules. That frequency is around 2.4 or 2.5 GHz. Most cell phones operate in the 700, 800, 900, 1700, 1800, 1900, and 2100 MHz bands.

Dont most cell phones connect to wifi?

See the Bloomberg link I added above recently like most of you I ridiculed the notion that cell phone radiation is harmful. Have you ever had to pull your phone away from your ear when communicating a far away tower because of a very weird sensation. I have. It doesn’t prove anything of course but that I can sense it and that it is not comfortable makes me think Having it near my brain constantly isn’t going to lead to a good outcome.

That's pretty cool - have you been able to duplicate that weird feeling effect? Have others? Has it been double blind tested such that you can actually tell, with no other data, that your phone is transmitting with a higher power? Can you duplicate that same test with others?

It seems that this could be pretty easily mitigated by using a low power bluetooth headset to connect to the nearby cell phone to avoid putting the higher powered signal near your head.

300+ people have this sensation

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3346470

I never saw the discussion before but I thought to google it for myself

Was in first page of results

I am mentally ill but on this I’m not imagining “things”

And no this isn’t cool at all.

The tower in question is about 8 miles away. We have few towers where I live. It’s sprint which few of my contacts use.

That’s just not how it works at all though. It’s not causing any damage, it’s heating your tissue such a small amount that it doesn’t get anywhere near hot enough to ‘cook’ any of it.

You would need a lot more power, or an antenna pattern much more focused, and for it to be continuously emitting for a long time while very close to your skin to actually get hot enough to cause burns or denature proteins (which is about the only thing non-ionising radiation can do).

But phones don’t transmit all the time, but in bursts, and the antenna pattern spreads the radiation out.

Our company builds satellite antennas that focus 25-100W of RF power (in various bands from L band at 1-2GHz up to Ka at 29-31GHz) into about a 1 degree or so beam (big parabolic dish reflector), and at that point you need to take some precautions. I don’t have a single worry about phones.

The second wiki link has that all right there.

> Radio-frequency radiation

> Biological effects

> Heating of body tissue, raised body temperature

Some other frequencies of non-ionizing radiation like UV, microwave and visible light have health implications, mainly for the eyes and skin.

There's a difference between a 60kW arc lamp and a 2W night light. The massive microwave transmitter on the tower (the arc lamp) is thousands of times more powerful than the phone in your pocket (the night light). Yes, it's the same light but being up close and staring at the arc lamp could very well blind you - but the night light, no matter how long one stares? No.

Arc lamp / microwave tower is still heat damage, not ionization damage.

Yes, that was the point of the analogy.

Can you cite some specific concern here about the 3G-4G range?

On a personal level are you actually staying away from mobile phones given the risk that some commentators seem to imply?

No, at this time, given the wide usage and absence of evidence of negative health effects despite wide deployment and study of the technology by a large number of otherwise unrelated entities, I have no concerns about about a negative impact to my health as a result of using permitted and certified mobile phone transceivers on and/or around my person.

However, per my arc lamp analogy above, I would certainly not like to find myself in an industrial microwave oven while it is on. Even if it's non-ionising, being cooked while alive is likely to be quite harmful to my health. But then again, if that microwave had the same power my mobile has - it'd be rather a rubbish microwave and I'd be perfectly fine.

Ever seen that glowing ball in the sky?

Or lasers, standing in front of a radar installation, getting fried by a giant toaster. Take a tiny piece out of you and cook it in a microwave then put it back. Harmless? What if it came from your central nervous system?

A phone and a microwave aren't comparable. A microwave contains an extremely focused emitter.

It's the difference between staring at an LED light and a Class 3B or Class 4 laser.

That laser will burn right through your cornea but you could affix the LED directly to the surface of your eye without any measurable ill effect.

Take your phone and tape it to your head with it ringing day in and day out every second of every day. How long will you live?

Even though your proposition is outside of the scope of typical cell phone use, I would likely live just as long as I would have lived without it, given that its radiation is A) non-ionizing and B) not focused.

As an example, you could spend 14 hours a day in the sun to no ill effect, but only about two minutes with a magnifying glass focusing sun rays onto your forehead.

Please read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation#Health_...

If you've ever taken antibiotics, I think I have bad news for you...

You could die from lethal amounts of neutrino radiation technically. That doesn't mean it is a relevant threat because stellar event levels of energy can't be involved here.

The microwaves of an oven (don't put your hand inside), the infrared of a fire (don't get too close) and I just started thinking about it.

Bananas emit both beta particles (e.g. electrons) and gamma rays

So since this is all not harmful then essentially on this chart more is better. Can you expect stronger reception from more radiating phone?

These figures are for radiation absorbed by an anatomical model, not the total radiation emissions. A phone with a higher SAR may simply have a less effective radiation pattern, directing less energy into free space and more energy into the user.

Is that "into the user" as measured when holding it up next to your head and talking into it?

Yes. SAR testing uses a model of the head, with the phone held next to the ear. On a smartphone, you're essentially measuring the amount of energy coming out of the screen side of the device. When the device is being used handheld, this is effectively wasted energy, because most of it will be directed towards the sky rather than towards the horizon.

"Stronger reception" is a combination of tx and rx connectivity. More radiation is only a possible indicator for the sending side of the tx connectivity.

As a frequent flyer with a family history of melanoma, those links make me want to go see my dermatologist.

I don't eat a banana whenever I have 5 minutes of idle time during the day though ;)

Missing the point is not a substitute for cleverness. (unless the ;) indicates the statement was meant in jest only, in which case: well, alright then - Poe's law has ruined me)

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