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Bananas have different radiation than mobile phones. Atomic vs. Electromagnetic
by sigi45 8y ago
Bananas have different radiation than mobile phones.
Atomic vs. Electromagnetic
- ShorsHammer 8y agoBananas 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_exposure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation#Radiation_e... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation#Health_risks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation#Health_...
- ohiovr 8y agoForget 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?
- pasta 8y agoEver seen that glowing ball in the sky?
- ohiovr 8y agoOr 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?
- ShorsHammer 8y agoPlease read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation#Health_risks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation#Health_...
- emsy 8y agoIf you've ever taken antibiotics, I think I have bad news for you...
- kakarot 8y agoA 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.
- ohiovr 8y agoTake 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?
- kakarot 8y agoEven 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.
- jdietrich 8y agoA 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.
- kakarot 8y agoJust for clarity, is that energy measured at the source, or at a certain distance?
- microcolonel 8y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
- kakarot 8y agoI'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.
- microcolonel 8y agoMy 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.
- jdietrich 8y agoThat'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.
- ShorsHammer 8y agoThe 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.
- justinjlynn 8y agoThere'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.
- ShorsHammer 8y agoCan 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?
- justinjlynn 8y agoNo, 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.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoArc lamp / microwave tower is still heat damage, not ionization damage.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> 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.
- ohiovr 8y ago1 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-clear-evidence-cellphone-radiation-causes-rat-tumors 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.
- justinjlynn 8y agoThe 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?
- basch 8y agoIs 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.
- Nasrudith 8y agoYou 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.
- pmontra 8y agoThe 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.
- cwmma 8y agoBananas emit both beta particles (e.g. electrons) and gamma rays