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Friday, 22 August 2008 09:27 |
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A friend posted me this video on You Tube about several groups of people around the world using ringing mobile phones to pop corn, suggesting that the radiation from mobile phones is dangerous to human users — ie can literally fry your brains as it did the corn.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=bz26L8PDfQ4
What appears to be done here is to have four phones arranged in a cross with their tops facing each other, with raw pop corn placed between them and to call the telephones and leave them ringing, which appears to be when the electromagnetic signal emissions are the greatest and are able to cook the corn, causing it to pop.
However, people don’t don’t normaly put the phone to their ear when it’s ringing, so it’s unlikely that it can cause any harm at this stage.
Another test is to call one of the four phones from one of the others and take the call, then repeat for the remaining pair, then put the raw corn between them and see if it pops after a while. At this stage, we normally have put the phone to our ear and are talking and if the corn pops at this stage, then it would suggest the possibility of harm.
Some scientists say that while holding a phone to your ear for prolonged periods results in increasing the temperature of the surrounding flesh and bone a little, the nature of the radiation is non-ionising, hence does not cause cancer.
The key in the above argument is not that there’s no radiation at all, in which case the phone would not be able to communicate but that the radiation is non-ionising — meaning that it does not split electrons away from their atom, leaving positively and negatively charged particles which can be cancer causing.
Is non-ionising radiation harmless?
Well a microwave oven which emits non-ionising radiation at an international standard 2.45GHZ frequency would cook your hand through dielectric heating if you put it in while the oven is operating and that frequency is pretty close to the non-ionising radiation emited from that WiFi access point in your office, home or cafe. More on microwave ovens at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven
The difference is in the power of the microwaves. The peak power radiated from a GSM phone is estimated to be two watts, 3.6 watts for an old analogue phone used in the US and about one watt for digital CDMA and Digital AMPS phones.
On the other hand, a typical consumer microwave oven radiates 700 watts of microwave power.
There are however other concerns unrelated to heating effects and these include modifications in the structure of DNA and so on but so far studies conducted have not been able to prove that using mobile phones is dangerous to human health but are these dtudies reliable? Posted by Charles
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