Actually that's a good point, you don't really need a Faraday bag because airplane mode should have the same effect.
I say should, because I keep hearing about how phones don't really turn the radios off when you put them in airplane mode. But at least you don't get phone calls in airplane mode.
> Don’t rely on a “radiation shield” or other products claiming to block RF energy, electromagnetic fields, or radiation from cell phones. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, products that interfere with the phone’s signal may force it to work harder and emit more RF energy in order to stay connected, possibly increasing your exposure.
Hi, I'm a scientist. I have a PhD in Biophysics, and I've studied a lot of biology and radiation.
The statement that non-ionizing radiation can't give you cancer is effectively false. It is based on applying the mechanisms by which ionizing radiation causes cancer. While non-ionizing radiation does not cause double strand breaks and other mutations that can lead to cancer, you cannot use that assertion to claim that non-ionizing radiation does not cause cancer. It could certainly cause cancer by other means- for example, through induction of heat shock proteins as a response to cellular heating. To my knowledge, nobody has demonstrated this convincingly, although, given the fact that heat shock protein activation can lead to cancer (or cause existing pre-tumors to start growing faster), you can see that we immediately have plausible mechanisms to study, if there is indication that cancer is occurring.
Another way of putting this: if people found strong epidemiological evidence that cell phones caused brain cancer in humans (they haven't, yet), the nature of that mechanism would be subjected to intense scrutiny.
Everything I've stated above is completely mainstream science; nothing I said is controversial. Your mention of the Einstein paper is really a canard- it bears no direct relationship to the biology of the situation.
Hi, I'm a physicist. Our community doesn't agree with your community on this issue.
Oh, and you did notice that I mentioned heating, I hope. As you know, the standard for cellphone radiation is already calibrated to prevent significant heating.
note that being overweight or sedentary is a risk factor for cancer. I don't think it's correct to say it "causes cancer" in the same way that, say, drinking a liter of ethidium bromide would.
Edit: I just had to look up how carcinogenic EB is, and all I have to say is that I'm very disappointed. I should have said radium paint.
There are plenty of things that damage DNA in the test tube, some of which cause cancer. Ionizing radiation is one such thing, and the mechanism behind it is that 1905 paper. Many other examples are chemicals.
(for the curious, he's referring to Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect, for which he won his Nobel Prize. Some consider that paper "more interesting" than general relativity, and the paper is considered an essential step in the progress from classicial to quantum physics. While very important, it bears little importance to the question of whether cell phone usage causes cancer).
It bears a lot of importance, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. But now we're just repeating ourselves repeatedly, which doesn't do anyone any good. In 20 years, when this turns out exactly like the high voltage lines cause cancer scare, we can have a beer and laugh about the whole thing. Especially about all the money wasted.
Actually, physics community agrees just fine that the possibility of non-ionizing radiation causing cancer is real (I am not aware of any papers you can point to that say otherwise, but am happy to read and evaluate if you point me to them). After all, things other than radiation cause cancer, so it does seem unlikely that non-ionizing radiation would somehow be magically excluded from that list!
Yes, I saw you mentioned heating. That's certainly the first place biologists would start, if there were a solid epidemiological case. however, given that your body has tons of receptors, some of which respond to low frequency radiation, so in theory there could be any number of causal mechanisms.
(you should be aware: I personally think cell phones don't cause cancer, through any mechanism, I'm just making the point that there is zero evidence non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer, there aren't any [reliable] examples of it doing so, either. There is simply no reliable data to make a reasoned determination, either way, because the biology of cellular response to non-ionizing radiation is complex, so making causal claims is very hard without good experimental evidence).
You might want to check out the extensive writings by Robert Parks of the APS on this issue. Before his death he was a crusader about this argument over non-ionizing radiation being the same as the disproved theory that high voltage power lines cause cancer.
BTW, how is the 1905 paper a canard when it is accepted as the mechanism behind DNA being damaged by ionizing radiation?
Are his opinions representative of the field? Are there other people backing him up?
You can't point at a disproved theory of high voltage power lines cause cancer and use that as evidence about cell phones at all. Completely different scenario. Anyway, epidemiologists showed a long time ago that it was much more likely that poor health associated with living near power lines was due to poverty/real estate associations.
"""All known cancer-inducing agents—including radiation, certain chemicals, and a few viruses—act by breaking chemical bonds, producing mutant strands of DNA.... Microwave photons heat tissue, but they do not come close to the energy needed to break chemical bonds, no matter how intense the radiation."""
His claim that "all known cancer causing agents ... act by breaking chemical bonds" is both biologically naive, and misleading. For example, the cancer-causing and cancer-preventing molecules I studied for my PhD work only through hydrogen bonding and van der waals forces (they do not make or break chemical bonds as Parks means it).
So basically, if that's representative of Parks position, then I claim he is basically wrong, due to known mainstream biology directly contradicting him.
> The fact that scientists were able to expose animals to nonionizing radiation (like that emitted by cell phones) and those animals went on to develop tumors but that exposure did not significantly raise the animals' body temperatures was “important” to release, Bucher says.
My one comment as a biologist is that the biology community calls the rats they used in that study (Sprague Dawley) should be called "cancer rats", because they seem predisposed to getting cancer no matter what you give them. It's not clear to me whether this is humor, or not.
Even a physicist should accept that the argument made by greglindahl above doesn't hold water, logically speaking. I don't want to make an appeal to authority here as the sole reason you should believe me.
Good point. The topic at hand involves both physics and biology, and even if it were more constrained, it isn't "owned" by any particular discipline, and thus the argument itself should be judged.
BTW, I really am serious that I'd love to read any good papers from the physics community making the case that nonionizing radiation cannot cause cancer. I am unable to find any, after doing some literature search (challenging because of all the non-scientific noise associated with this issue).
The trouble with this is that it boils down to "we don't have conclusive evidence that it isn't dangerous". And that can be applied to anything.
You talk vaguely about plausible mechanisms in the plural, but the only one you can name is heating -- which is tiny. We should certainly ban hair dryer and centrally heated shops before we worry about phones.
That is why I am waiting for strong epidemiological evidence, before suggesting we actually pursue the physical mechanism.
I think most of the reporting around cell phones is needlessly alarmist. It's not helped by a number of scientists who persist in running low-quality studies and producing vague, unactionable results, coupled with lots of PR.
Another way of putting this: if people found strong epidemiological evidence that drinking water caused obesity (they haven't, yet), the nature of that mechanism would be subjected to intense scrutiny.
Really don’t understand how or why people trust the government. It’s one thing not to buy into FUD. It’s another thing to say the government having a page on the Internet is some conclusive thing.
The government is paid to say things by lobbyists and currently denies global warming. A year ago global warming was a national security threat.
I don’t trust Verisign. But I rely on companies that have their profits at stake when they conduct business. Which is not the case for government, which gets its revenue by coercion and spends it haphazardly, spasmodically with abandon.
Trusting entities that aren’t your closest relatives and friends is naive and careless.
> And who makes money from our worrying about cell phone cancer?
Every news outlet that got clicks on the subject. The Worry Industry, broadly. Why do you think people took the time to report on it? Altruism? Boredom? You think techcrunch.com is a hobby? Every day these people go to work and identify click bait so they can keep their jobs. Many people make money from this.
I just bought a $99 phone. Forget the name right now, but it came with a little book. The book was 39 pages of legalese on cell phone radiation. Kinda suprised me.
It said hold the back of the phone at least a 1 cm away from the body--that's a FCC requirement.
Yes, the lawyers are probally being proactive, but in my county, a local doctor who had a running column reluctantly said he just had three young patients with temporal tumors.
The patients were all heavy cell phone users. He told his readers, the science says it's safe, but-----.
I could tell he was a man of science, but felt a need to pass antidotal info along.
Bluetooth radiation is considerably less powerful than cell network or WiFi signals. Most headphones belong to Bluetooth Class 2 which limits the maximum output power to 2,5 mW (4 dBm). 2.5 mW is pretty safe even in a close contact with the body.
Saying that, I would still recommend to minimize the exposure. The less 2-10 GHz radiation you get, the better your health is.
I was hoping this article published new findings from a medical study, or at least some evidence. Nope. I think their lawyers are just freaking out preemptively just in case anyone finds an effect and a cause.
i purchased an OBDII reader and it had a "this cable contains PVC and may cause cancer" warning label on it. i thought wtf? after some research the cause was clear: California.
So does non-ionizing radiation cause health issues or not? I get called a conspiracy nut for worrying about ELF radiation even though there are studies showing some correlation with health issues.
Non-ionizing radiation does not cause health issues.
The definition of non-ionizing radiation is:
Non-ionizing (or non-ionising) radiation refers to any type of electromagnetic radiation that does not carry enough energy per quantum (photon energy) to ionize atoms or molecules—that is, to completely remove an electron from an atom or molecule.[1] Instead of producing charged ions when passing through matter, the electromagnetic radiation has sufficient energy only for excitation, the movement of an electron to a higher energy state.
How can you be so sure if e.g. everything we eat both prevents and causes cancer [1]? Do we have proof that exciting electrons won't do anything on a higher level like enzyme production, or one of the many metabolic pathways?
Has anyone here looked at these studies? In what way are cell phones supposed to be dangerous? Do the studies say that they raised mice with smart phones in their cage and they got cancer or something?
If you discovered a mechanism by which it was possible for a cell phone to cause cancer, you'd win a Nobel Prize in physics.
Not "you discovered that they did, in fact, cause cancer"; just discovering a way that it is physically possible for them to do so.
This dates back to Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect: it's easy to show (and the only thing consistent with all of 20th century physics!) that light can only cause molecular damage if individual photons carry enough energy, which in turn only happens if the radiation is of sufficiently high frequency (like UV light, X-Rays, or gamma radiation.) Any radio signal from a cell phone isn't. End of discussion.
Unless you are being actually cooked by a microwave, your cell phone does not and cannot cause cancer.
"Radiation" is a scary word for non experts, but the California Health Department should know better.
I was under the impression that low frequency waves (all the studies being on frequencies lower than those used by cell phones, so I still haven't been concerned, but maybe I should be) showed that they could vibrate DNA and chance how it is folded, adjusting its epigenetic profile. Why do you assume that the only way to cause cancer is "molecular damage"?
Biomolecules are remarkably fast (picosecond timescales) at dissipating excess heat into the solvent, like heat from an excited vibrational mode. In order to cause serious damage through unfolding, I think, you would need much higher intensities than a few milliwatts from a cellphone. Serious local heating requires visible, UV light and above. Sunlight, however, does massive damage to all parts of your skin, including base pair changes in your DNA beyond epigenetics but your body has repair mechanisms, which recover changes and/or destroy damaged cells. Proof of cellphone induced damage would be remarkable.
> light can only cause molecular damage if individual photons carry enough energy, which in turn only happens if the radiation is of sufficiently high frequency (like UV light, X-Rays, or gamma radiation.)
Then we can presume you wouldn't mind being microwaved? Or simply heated to 6000 Kelvin? Both would be low frequency options.
Science is not a static. Believing absolutely in a specific scientific result and refusing to accept that it may be wrong is as harmful to our advancement as those who refused to acknowledge that the earth isn't flat (they also used their limited understanding to justify their position).
To reuse your opening statement, you'd also win a Nobel Prize if you could conclusively prove that "your cell phone cannot cause cancer" and "any radio signal from a cell phone [doesn't]."
> Believing absolutely in a specific scientific result and refusing to accept that it may be wrong is as harmful
You are missing the primary thrust of the argument. They are saying: "This goes against known science -- proving otherwise would be a massive scientific discovery which would require reconceptualizing a century of work. This is highly unlikely".
Assuming the commenter is operating with robust scientific understanding [1], then there isn't any dogmatic belief here.
[1] I haven't researched this cellphone cancer thing personally so I can't strongly argue that point one way or another. However, my cursory understanding is that there isn't strong evidence for it.
There are good scientific reasons to think cellphones don't cause cancer. However, if enough compelling evidence was found otherwise, then it would be important to update our understanding accordingly.
The wording “X causes Y” is slippery. Saying “X increases the probability of Y”, is another thing. Thinking about smoke, with “smoke causes cancer” I expect every smoker to have cancer. It isn't so. If the effect of X on the probability that Y occurs is too much small, maybe it's just that we haven't enough statistical data (yet) to see it. Then, even if the effect could be statistically seen, telco companies could always say that it's safer than driving a car… Or a new business for body-cellphones shields could be made… Or, more likely, some people will pay more attention at to where they put their cellphones.
That only accounts for ionization which is the most common way of damaging cell tissue and most importantly DNA through the breaking down of molecular bonds.
However other effects can also cause biological processes to differ or fail for example heat e.g. boiling an egg.
Now I’m not saying that the radiation form a cellphone can cook you but we don’t have a clear understanding of how non-ionizing radiation affects all biological processes such as protein folding but we know that it does:
I wonder if the studies that do find weak correlations (but are rarely replicated) also ask the participants about air travel, where one is exposed to ionizing radiation (both from the higher altitudes and backstar x-ray, etc..) I.e., frequent air-travelers could be more frequent cell phone users.
Photobiomodulation is known to have a beneficial effect on cells, but excess infrared light can have adverse effects. This is widely known, and it‘s the reason infrared therapy devices don’t operate at 1kWh, but rather 2-4 orders of magnitude lower. Exciting electrons is enough to stimulate or stifle cytochrome-c-oxidase.. and there are other similar processes in the body that are simply not well researched. And this is no BS research but a field with 1k+ papers, many of them well cited. Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation. I don’t see how people like you can still be so sure of that „no adverse effects“ claim. If there are beneficial effects, there must also be detrimental effects at some point.
If you are interested, look at Prof Hamblin‘s work.
Okay, so we've had maybe a good ten or fifteen years or so of a significant portion of the American population carrying cell phones very close to their bodies for several hours a day. If this were a significant cause of cancer, wouldn't we have more concrete evidence of it by this point? If not now, then when?
Any tinfoil hat expert can claim the recent trends of increase in (fill in illness here) is a direct result of cell phone use.
The problem is no direct correlation can be found that proves this because we live in a world of so many rapid changes and the effects get lost by a host of other factors.
Will they also recommend to opt out of millimeter wave scanners? If we're going to talk about risks of one type of nonionizing radiation, why not that one too?
When people try to convince me my cellphone is giving me cancer, I ask them to prove to me that using a cellphone for fifteen minutes is worse than going outside in the sun for fifteen minutes (sunlight is objectively more likely to give you cancer).
Cellphones communicate via microwaves, which is just electromagnetic radiation (EMR) of a lower-energy (per photon) wavelength than visible light. Yes, the UV component of sunlight can give you cancer because it's just barely high enough energy to be ionizing. Visible light won't do that, and microwaves are safer still.
Oh, thermal burns can cause cancer too you say, and we use microwave ovens to cook things! Yes. My phone has never cooked me though. A 3.7V, 3700mAh cell phone battery contains about 10 Wh of energy. A typical microwave oven uses around 1000W, so it would drain a cell-phone battery completely in around 36 seconds. Try putting a kilogram of something that's mostly water in a microwave oven for just 36 seconds. It's barely going to warm up. I wouldn't be worried about my cellphone cooking me even if it lasted just 36 seconds on a charge, but mine lasts for many hours.
Can I prove that your phone isn't giving you cancer? No. That's not how science works. I can't prove the theories of gravity or relativity either. When I admit this, some people pounce on that as if this lack of proof is something that must be acted upon. Well, I can't prove a meteor won't crash through your roof and kill you tonight, or that a mega-eruption won't end civilization tomorrow, or that a parasite from some half-cooked beef you ate last week won't spontaneously mutate into a chest-burster like in "Alien". What are you going to do about those smart guy?
Is this the same department that requires the carcinogen label on every product under the sun? I'm probably being pithy, but that alone pushes me to ignore their recommendations. Never mind the dodgy physics...
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadGood luck with that!
I say should, because I keep hearing about how phones don't really turn the radios off when you put them in airplane mode. But at least you don't get phone calls in airplane mode.
> Don’t rely on a “radiation shield” or other products claiming to block RF energy, electromagnetic fields, or radiation from cell phones. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, products that interfere with the phone’s signal may force it to work harder and emit more RF energy in order to stay connected, possibly increasing your exposure.
[1] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/EHIB/CDPH%20Do...
But in all seriousness, I don't see this recommendation even coming close to being considered until there are proven side effects.
"Keep cellphones away form body, but we won't tell you how far away or what the consequences might be"
It's not ionizing radiation, so it can't give you cancer. See Einstein's Nobel-prize winning paper from 1905.
The statement that non-ionizing radiation can't give you cancer is effectively false. It is based on applying the mechanisms by which ionizing radiation causes cancer. While non-ionizing radiation does not cause double strand breaks and other mutations that can lead to cancer, you cannot use that assertion to claim that non-ionizing radiation does not cause cancer. It could certainly cause cancer by other means- for example, through induction of heat shock proteins as a response to cellular heating. To my knowledge, nobody has demonstrated this convincingly, although, given the fact that heat shock protein activation can lead to cancer (or cause existing pre-tumors to start growing faster), you can see that we immediately have plausible mechanisms to study, if there is indication that cancer is occurring.
Another way of putting this: if people found strong epidemiological evidence that cell phones caused brain cancer in humans (they haven't, yet), the nature of that mechanism would be subjected to intense scrutiny.
Everything I've stated above is completely mainstream science; nothing I said is controversial. Your mention of the Einstein paper is really a canard- it bears no direct relationship to the biology of the situation.
Oh, and you did notice that I mentioned heating, I hope. As you know, the standard for cellphone radiation is already calibrated to prevent significant heating.
-some random guy in his underwear.
* Genetics
* Natural mutations
* Viruses
* A huge list of substances (called carcinogens), including alcohol
* Being overweight, sedentary, or otherwise unhealthy
Edit: I just had to look up how carcinogenic EB is, and all I have to say is that I'm very disappointed. I should have said radium paint.
Yes, I saw you mentioned heating. That's certainly the first place biologists would start, if there were a solid epidemiological case. however, given that your body has tons of receptors, some of which respond to low frequency radiation, so in theory there could be any number of causal mechanisms.
(you should be aware: I personally think cell phones don't cause cancer, through any mechanism, I'm just making the point that there is zero evidence non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer, there aren't any [reliable] examples of it doing so, either. There is simply no reliable data to make a reasoned determination, either way, because the biology of cellular response to non-ionizing radiation is complex, so making causal claims is very hard without good experimental evidence).
BTW, how is the 1905 paper a canard when it is accepted as the mechanism behind DNA being damaged by ionizing radiation?
You can't point at a disproved theory of high voltage power lines cause cancer and use that as evidence about cell phones at all. Completely different scenario. Anyway, epidemiologists showed a long time ago that it was much more likely that poor health associated with living near power lines was due to poverty/real estate associations.
So, here's an example of Parks writing: https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/93/3/166/2906431
"""All known cancer-inducing agents—including radiation, certain chemicals, and a few viruses—act by breaking chemical bonds, producing mutant strands of DNA.... Microwave photons heat tissue, but they do not come close to the energy needed to break chemical bonds, no matter how intense the radiation."""
His claim that "all known cancer causing agents ... act by breaking chemical bonds" is both biologically naive, and misleading. For example, the cancer-causing and cancer-preventing molecules I studied for my PhD work only through hydrogen bonding and van der waals forces (they do not make or break chemical bonds as Parks means it).
So basically, if that's representative of Parks position, then I claim he is basically wrong, due to known mainstream biology directly contradicting him.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/major-cell-phone-...
> The fact that scientists were able to expose animals to nonionizing radiation (like that emitted by cell phones) and those animals went on to develop tumors but that exposure did not significantly raise the animals' body temperatures was “important” to release, Bucher says.
Actual site: https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/results/areas/cellphones/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014341601...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531/
Do you know of any examples where cancer is caused by non-ionizing radiation, outside of obvious extremes?
You talk vaguely about plausible mechanisms in the plural, but the only one you can name is heating -- which is tiny. We should certainly ban hair dryer and centrally heated shops before we worry about phones.
I think most of the reporting around cell phones is needlessly alarmist. It's not helped by a number of scientists who persist in running low-quality studies and producing vague, unactionable results, coupled with lots of PR.
http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2015/02/this-just-in-bein...
NIH has a whole page dedicated to this https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...
And who makes money from our worrying about cell phone cancer?
I don’t trust Verisign. But I rely on companies that have their profits at stake when they conduct business. Which is not the case for government, which gets its revenue by coercion and spends it haphazardly, spasmodically with abandon.
Trusting entities that aren’t your closest relatives and friends is naive and careless.
> And who makes money from our worrying about cell phone cancer?
Every news outlet that got clicks on the subject. The Worry Industry, broadly. Why do you think people took the time to report on it? Altruism? Boredom? You think techcrunch.com is a hobby? Every day these people go to work and identify click bait so they can keep their jobs. Many people make money from this.
Been kicking around going wifi-only anyway, with a crappy burner on a prepaid plan in the car for emergencies.
https://app.secure.griffith.edu.au/news/2017/08/17/concerns-...
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cellphone-5g-health-20...
https://www.electricsense.com/12399/5g-radiation-dangers/
Couldn't be more vague, what a useless recommendation.
And just how are we supposed to do that? Do double blind testing with ourselves in every group? Wait until we have a tumor?
It said hold the back of the phone at least a 1 cm away from the body--that's a FCC requirement.
Yes, the lawyers are probally being proactive, but in my county, a local doctor who had a running column reluctantly said he just had three young patients with temporal tumors. The patients were all heavy cell phone users. He told his readers, the science says it's safe, but-----.
I could tell he was a man of science, but felt a need to pass antidotal info along.
Saying that, I would still recommend to minimize the exposure. The less 2-10 GHz radiation you get, the better your health is.
You can see that the worst frequency range is 30 to 300 MHz meaning that range has the lowest acceptable power levels that are considered safe.
The entire short article is quite good.
And that any power level below 7 Watt (eg any mobile phone) is completely exempt.
i purchased an OBDII reader and it had a "this cable contains PVC and may cause cancer" warning label on it. i thought wtf? after some research the cause was clear: California.
The definition of non-ionizing radiation is:
Non-ionizing (or non-ionising) radiation refers to any type of electromagnetic radiation that does not carry enough energy per quantum (photon energy) to ionize atoms or molecules—that is, to completely remove an electron from an atom or molecule.[1] Instead of producing charged ions when passing through matter, the electromagnetic radiation has sufficient energy only for excitation, the movement of an electron to a higher energy state.
1: https://www.sciencealert.com/everything-we-eat-both-causes-a...
Released as a partial report last year; a quick search didn't find if it had been completed yet or not.
Not "you discovered that they did, in fact, cause cancer"; just discovering a way that it is physically possible for them to do so.
This dates back to Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect: it's easy to show (and the only thing consistent with all of 20th century physics!) that light can only cause molecular damage if individual photons carry enough energy, which in turn only happens if the radiation is of sufficiently high frequency (like UV light, X-Rays, or gamma radiation.) Any radio signal from a cell phone isn't. End of discussion.
Unless you are being actually cooked by a microwave, your cell phone does not and cannot cause cancer.
"Radiation" is a scary word for non experts, but the California Health Department should know better.
Then we can presume you wouldn't mind being microwaved? Or simply heated to 6000 Kelvin? Both would be low frequency options.
I just don't subscribe to the preposterous belief that only extremely short wavelengths matter.
Science is not a static. Believing absolutely in a specific scientific result and refusing to accept that it may be wrong is as harmful to our advancement as those who refused to acknowledge that the earth isn't flat (they also used their limited understanding to justify their position).
To reuse your opening statement, you'd also win a Nobel Prize if you could conclusively prove that "your cell phone cannot cause cancer" and "any radio signal from a cell phone [doesn't]."
You are missing the primary thrust of the argument. They are saying: "This goes against known science -- proving otherwise would be a massive scientific discovery which would require reconceptualizing a century of work. This is highly unlikely".
Assuming the commenter is operating with robust scientific understanding [1], then there isn't any dogmatic belief here.
[1] I haven't researched this cellphone cancer thing personally so I can't strongly argue that point one way or another. However, my cursory understanding is that there isn't strong evidence for it.
Seems to be exactly what a lot of folks here are trying to do - „non-ionizing radiation cannot cause cancer, period.“
There are good scientific reasons to think cellphones don't cause cancer. However, if enough compelling evidence was found otherwise, then it would be important to update our understanding accordingly.
However other effects can also cause biological processes to differ or fail for example heat e.g. boiling an egg.
Now I’m not saying that the radiation form a cellphone can cook you but we don’t have a clear understanding of how non-ionizing radiation affects all biological processes such as protein folding but we know that it does:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4007673/#!po=2....
https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/119421
The fact that nonionizing radiation can affect biological processes has been well documented and is being studied.
Again this doesn’t mean that cellphones cause cancer or any other harm but you really don’t need new physics for them do so.
If you are interested, look at Prof Hamblin‘s work.
The problem is no direct correlation can be found that proves this because we live in a world of so many rapid changes and the effects get lost by a host of other factors.
So is there proof of damage? Sure.
Can we isolate it to be from cell phone use? No.
Can we be sure that it is not? No.
[0] https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/general-info/proposition...
Cellphones communicate via microwaves, which is just electromagnetic radiation (EMR) of a lower-energy (per photon) wavelength than visible light. Yes, the UV component of sunlight can give you cancer because it's just barely high enough energy to be ionizing. Visible light won't do that, and microwaves are safer still.
Oh, thermal burns can cause cancer too you say, and we use microwave ovens to cook things! Yes. My phone has never cooked me though. A 3.7V, 3700mAh cell phone battery contains about 10 Wh of energy. A typical microwave oven uses around 1000W, so it would drain a cell-phone battery completely in around 36 seconds. Try putting a kilogram of something that's mostly water in a microwave oven for just 36 seconds. It's barely going to warm up. I wouldn't be worried about my cellphone cooking me even if it lasted just 36 seconds on a charge, but mine lasts for many hours.
Can I prove that your phone isn't giving you cancer? No. That's not how science works. I can't prove the theories of gravity or relativity either. When I admit this, some people pounce on that as if this lack of proof is something that must be acted upon. Well, I can't prove a meteor won't crash through your roof and kill you tonight, or that a mega-eruption won't end civilization tomorrow, or that a parasite from some half-cooked beef you ate last week won't spontaneously mutate into a chest-burster like in "Alien". What are you going to do about those smart guy?