[vardump]

If the energy isn't enough to ionize, then what is there to study?

(Extreme) heating effects can cause cancer, but the source of heat is irrelevant. The power levels 5G uses make even this point completely moot.

If you really have to search for something that could cause you cancer, perhaps those rather carcinogenic compounds your phone is made out of could be studied instead? Although I prefer just not to pulverize my phone and breath in the resulting dust. :-)

[willis936]

There has been a fabled danger of low levels of non-ionizing radiation without an explained mechanism for decades. There is no data to support it, but there will never be enough “studies” to disprove it.

[cogman10]

What gets me is that these people still walk out in the sun.

We are talking about orders of magnitude weaker radiation than what you get dosed with every time you go outside. But further, sunlight does contain ionizing radiation (hello UV).

[willis936]

I can’t believe people are still flying on commercial airliners; over the poles no less!

[fsh]

Flight attendants indeed have a significantly increased cancer risk which is most likely due to radiation exposure: https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...

[willis936]

Yes, commercial airliners do pose a real health risk. There’s an understood mechanism and impact. I know I was joking about it, but only to highlight how crazy it is to push personal electronics use down for radiation health concerns, while airplanes continue to operate with no changes.

[tzs]

> If the energy isn't enough to ionize, then what is there to study?

DNA is conductive, and there are researchers who believe that this might be an important component in how the cell detects and repairs damage to its DNA [1].

There have been a couple of papers that claim that DNA can act as a fractal antenna allowing it to react to wavelengths that you would at first expect to be way too large to affect it. Here's one [2], which claims it interacts over a wide range of frequencies with a resonance at 34 GHz.

If DNA charge transport does turn out to play an important role in how the cell identifies damaged DNA, and if it turns out that those fractal antenna claims are true, then we'd have a potential mechanism for non-ionizing, non-heating radiation to increase cancer rates.

Note that it would not cause cancer, but it might prevent a cell from finding and repairing damage that if left unrepaired will lead to cancer.

The first part of the above, that DNA is conductive, is firmly established. How the cell detects damaged DNA is not known. That charge transport plays a role in that is currently just one theory that researchers are studying, but it is a theory that if it turns out to be true will not surprise anyone.

I haven't been able to find much on fractal antennas, especially very small ones, so can't tell if the claims about DNA acting as an antenna have merit.

[1] http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jkbgrp/Research.htm

[2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-5699-4_...

[vardump]

Interesting. Fractal antennas are pure black magic, so I don't dare to speculate either way.