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by hwillis 2789 days ago
> 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.