Whether the effect was large or small, there is a fundamental scientific question: how does non-ionizing radiation cause cancer? The fact that it can requires better models of how EM waves and biological matter interact.
Yes. It has been known for decades that biological matter resonates at microwave frequencies but we've been told over and over that non-ionizing radiations cannot cause cancer [0]. DNA is an electricly charged dipole that will heat up when exposed to microwaves and that would damage it [1].
There's a lot of water in the way between DNA and any microwave source. Microwaves do not penetrate water very well - part of the reason rain tends to cause problems with microwave links. Also the reason microwave ovens work: by heating the food.
So what is the proposed mechanism by which microwave energy is supposed to heat DNA enough to damage it?
Most of the microwave power does not deeply penetrate something like a whole ham. The microwaves are mostly absorbed by the outer layers and then the heat conducts through the inner portions.
The journal article below contains lots of detail. It claims that microwaves penetrate about 3.8 mm in cooked ham and 9.9 mm in cooked beef.
> The microwaves are mostly absorbed by the
> outer layers and then the heat conducts
> through the inner portions.
Then why does the plate have to be slowly rotated within the oven? I used to believe that it was for the waves peaks (distant from one another by a pair of centimeters) to be able to reach every point of the inside.
But if the inside is heated by conduction, which propagates evenly in all directions, then why care rotating the plate?
Microwave ovens do indeed have hot spots[0]. Conduction doesn't propagate evenly in very many foodstuffs, and you still want to avoid overheating any one spot.
About the only thing that can be reasonably uniformly heated in a microwave at continuous full power is a water-based liquid and that only because of convection.
Put a slab of meat in for a minute at 100% power and it'll be still cold in the center.
I was surprised by the table. Temperature matters way more than I'd expect for water, and it seems ice may in fact be effectively transparent to microwaves? Now I want to fiddle when I get home... it looks an awful lot like you can put a cup of water and a chunk of ice in a microwave and boil the water while the ice is still frozen... (though I'm going to assume that number for ice is pure ice; air bubbles in ice may wreck this up) Experimentation time!
Someone came up with a recipe exploiting the fact that microwaves are absorbed much more readily by fluids than solids. It was a frozen meringue with a hot center. I think it was in Sci Am. The name suggested the reverse of a Baked Alaska.
Sure, when you use hundreds of watts over several minutes.
The decay over distance should be roughly exponential: every x millimeters, you're left with only half of the radiation. Given the radiation caused by a cellphone in your pocket, how many microns of water do you need to attenuate the intensity to a non-mutagenic level?
WiFi typically uses frequencies that resonate with water, which limits its range due to H2O vapor in the atmosphere. These frequencies are used because they're not licensed for other purposes and because this range limitation allows more WiFi to more easily coexist in urban areas.
Would this be bad or good from a (hypothetical) carcinogenic standpoint? Since we are mostly water would this mean our interior below say the first few layers of skin are fairly effectively shielded from WiFi radiation?
> The fact that it can requires better models of how EM waves and biological matter interact.
Can I assume you are making this claim from the study? That they showed "some effect" ? If so, it is important to differentiate by intensity. EM waves are just light, you know red, green, blue etc. And if they are strong enough can give you a burn (sunburn being something everyone has experienced). But we don't get stories of people getting moon burn from the light reflected off the moon. In part because the amount of energy per square meter in moonlight is about 2.3 million times less powerful than sunlight. We are evolved to live in an environment that is flooded with EM energy in a variety of bands.
The study showed that if your cellphone put out 100x the amount of energy it does, there might be a small measurable effect on cancer rates. We know melanoma rates go up if you get a lot of sunburn (which is EM exposure). The energy per square meter in sunlight is 8 orders of magnitude higher than the energy per square meter from a cell phone.
Bottom line, there is still no mechanism, study, or theory, that supports a hypothesis that 1 watt cellphones cause cancer.
It's also possible that it increases cancer rates without causing cancer. Instead, it might be preventing the body from stopping new cancers that otherwise would have been stopped.
The observed cancer rate will be roughly the difference between the rates of cancers that start and cancers that are stopped by either the cell's internal repair mechanism or by the body's mechanisms for finding and killing bad cells. Something that affects the observed rate could be acting on either side of the difference.
It's the same way that DDT caused cancer when it was first used. It's the same way that BPA caused fertility problems for decades, and it's the same way that BPA substitutes look to be causing fertility problems now.
What way is that?
We simply don't understand what's going on, and it's important that we acknowledge that.
Our current scientific model says "we have spent decades and millions of dollars trying to see if cell phones cause cancer, and we have never found a link, therefore cellphones don't cause cancer."
Which is exactly the same as saying "we have spent decades and millions of dollars searching for little green men, and we have never found any, therefore we are 100% they don't exist."
Both of those statements are utter nonsense. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We honestly have no idea if little green men exist somewhere in the universe, and we also have no idea if cell phones cause cancer. We think we know, but we're just doing our best to look at evidence.
You can rest assured that in ~50 years we'll look back and say "Of Course! Those scientists in 2019 were so simplistic and quaint!"
"But don't worry, now it's 2070, we know so much better, so that new-fangled thing you have is perfectly safe!"
We have data involving a significant fraction of humanity and we didn't find a link. Cell phone aren't rare and cancer isn't rare. It means we have a very good statistical model. Cell phones have been widespread for 20 years now, which is less than we might want but still not bad. Furthermore, fundamental physics go against the idea that cell phones cause cancer. We have more or less proved that cell phones don't cause enough cancer to matter.
For little green men, we can only search the tiniest fraction of space, and we have only a single data point: us. The only vaguely statical model we have come from the Drake equation, and it has more holes than Swiss cheese. It would be laughed off by the scientific community if it wasn't so exciting.
> Cell phone aren't rare and cancer isn't rare. It means we have a very good statistical model. Cell phones have been widespread for 20 years now
Uh-huh, and cancer rates are absolutely skyrocketing, soon to be 50% of the population.
Why is that?
> fundamental physics go against the idea that cell phones cause cancer. We have more or less proved that cell phones don't cause enough cancer to matter.
You're missing my point. You should have said "fundamental physics, as we understand it today, can't explain how or why cell phones cause cancer, but there could be stuff we don't understand"
Have a good look at history and look at all the times we didn't understand stuff that we were doing, but we were pretty damn sure we did.
Cancer rates are skyrocketing, and it is a good thing, because it means we are not dying from something else first.
As we eliminate causes of death, others raise naturally. Right now, in the first word, we are at about 1/3 heart disease, 1/3 cancer, 1/3 others. If we get to 50% cancer, I guess all we can do is blame cardiologists for doing a good job ;)
Microwave and other non-ionizing energy can be used to influence rate of reaction. Chemical reactions depend upon orientation and bond state/dynamics, that are influenced (not necessarily broken, but, say, "flexed", stretched, etc.) by resonant radiation.
I remember learning about this decades ago, in college chemistry. (G\heck, getting out of the "radio" frequencies, many people have had photo-sensitive reactions demonstrated to them, for this very reason.)
Well, say you have a chemical reaction that presents a certain risk level. And say non-ionizing radiation in your environment influences that reaction.
Take it a step further down: Temperature influences rate of reaction. We certainly know that non-ionizing radiation effects temperature of absorptive materials.
Look at another aspect of this: We have chemical compounds that are strongly believed -- known either through strong empirical observation or deduction of the specific chemical mechanisms -- to cause cancer.
They appear or are known to be doing so without the assistance of ionizing radiation. Ergo, this effect consists of chemical reactions.
We know that non-ionizing radiation can influence chemical reactions.
We are nowhere near a comprehensive catalogue, much less understanding, of all the chemical reactions in the body. Chemicals that we and our natural environment evolved, much less chemicals we've manufactured and introduced into our environment.
Can we say that non-ionizing radiation cannot cause or promote cancer? I don't think so.
> Whether the effect was large or small, there is a fundamental scientific question: how does non-ionizing radiation cause cancer? The fact that it can requires better models of how EM waves and biological matter interact.
This is wrong. Non-ionizing radiation obviously causes cancer. "Ionizing radiation" for photons is (somewhat arbitrarily) defined as photons with >10 eV. That's far ultraviolet, far beyond anything in sunlight that has passed the atmosphere. But sunlight still gives you cancer.
There are any number of ways that cells and genes can be disrupted by non-ionizing radiation. Just disrupting in-progress reactions can eventually damage cells, and that doesn't require anything nearly as dramatic as ionizing an atom. At the bare minimum, all waves >1 GHz interact with and are absorbed by biological matter.
However the low-microwave frequencies from cell phones and wifi are hugely innocuous in addition to being crazy low power. They practically only interact through heating. I'm about as worried by the visible radiation from a cell phone's screen as I am from the transmitter. Hell, I'm pretty positive the local heating from the CPU getting hot will be more likely to contribute to cancer.
It may be a secondary effect. Most people know the feeling of having a “hot ear” from talking long on a cell phone when it’s against the ear. Frequent heating of cells can be inflammatory which in turn is recognized as a possible cause of cancer - https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/06/09/more-on-...
Note that “hot ear” can’t possibly be an effect of RF, more that you’ve just held something up to your ear.
Simple evaluation based on the size of the battery in a phone tells you that there can be no significant heating effect on anything, given that there’s no functional difference between a call and a phone just using data, this effect would be constant to everything around it. There’s simply not enough energy capacity in the battery for this to be true.
I don't think the parent was suggesting that what makes your ear hot is RF.(of course it's conduction from a hot phon and lack of ventilation). They were suggesting, I think, that cancer can arise from having frequent hot ear, regardless of the heating mechanism.
I think the above poster is not clearly differentiating between heating from RF radiation and heating from electrons colliding with silicon or battery components. Given that simple failure in communication, I'd like to see the calculations they performed to arrive at their conclusion.
Yea, I dunno what that guy is talking about. Batteries carry incredible amounts of energy, certainly enough to output significant amounts of heat. After all, there was that whole scandal where Samsung cell phone batteries were exploding into burning fireballs...
The potential energy of a battery carrying out the intended chemical reaction to generate electricity and the potential energy of lighting it on fire and burning that same battery in air are very different things.
Modern batteries are impressive compared to their predecessors but adding up the watt-hours in a battery and then calculating how much that would heat a bucket of water is a serious disappointment.
You're telling me that you've never held a phone on your hand and had it get hot? C'mon man. Every modern phone that I know of gets quite hot when doing something like streaming video or taking a voice call for an extended period of time. You can do a simple Google search and see that people quite often discuss how their phone gets uncomfortably hot during all kinds of normal activities.
Nobody said anything about heating a bucket of water. The discussion was about heating up someone's ear, which certainly happens.
I think you’d struggle to find people who wear ear protection but aren’t exposed to, for example, other hazardous conditions on a mining or building site that are hard to control for.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000634950...
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2304485