Hakei wrote:
CrazeD wrote:
Apparently CRT monitors give off radiation too.
Does anyone know of anyone who has gotten a brain tumor from using a CRT?
Toasters give off radiation, in fact -- I think almost every electrical appliance can give of radiation.
Yup, any accelerating electron causes an EM wave to propagate (acceleration creates changing electric field which causes changing magnetic field etc.).
For instance a bend in your toasters wire will cause an EM wave to propagate although weakly. More importantly, the fact that your toaster is running off alternating current directly causes EM waves (alternating current = change in electric field = change in magnetic field etc.).
And yes we are bombarded with radiation 24/7 and any radiation has the potential to interrupt your DNA replication and cause cancer, but the probabilities are insanely low for things like WiFi, FM/AM etc. Also you have to keep in mind the skin depth of different types of radiation. For instance UV radiation can't penetrate very deep, but it can give you skin cancer if you play the odds long enough (sit in sun in low ozone areas for long times = Australia etc.).
Radiation at higher frequencies penetrates less deeply (it undergoes more cycles and looses energy faster is an easy way to think about it), which means that frequencies like 2.4/5 Ghz do not penetrate deeply and at worse could give you skin cancer or eye cancer but that's a ridiculously long shot and you'd practically have to shove your eyeball in a powerful transmitter for 10 years to do it unless you are one of those really unlucky people who's DNA fucks up on a long shot. Lower frequencies can penetrate deeper, so potentially if you stood near a powerful enough transmitter you could fry your insides like a microwave does, but the frequencies would have to be way lower to have that effect on the thickness of a human. Microwaves don't have to have a high skin depth to cook your food because it isn't very thick, but to cook a human would require a lower frequency and/or a lot more power. Imagine trying to cook a turkey in your microwave. Hot outside and frosty middle lol.
Don't stick your head in front of a radio station transmitter though (really powerful radiation), but beyond that you ought to be pretty safe. Same thing with power lines, everyone fears kids get cancer from power lines, but the evidence is hardly scientific. Technically anything could cause some damage, but like I said the probabilities are insanely low. It's the same thing with electronics on flights; any electronics in use will not interfere with the flight controls... but the airlines play it safe rather than sorry. You'd have to have a huge transmitter in the plane at the same frequencies as the equipment to even begin to jam signals and fuck shit up!
So in the end, the question is what are the risks of using WiFi vs the benefits? The risks are virtually 0, you have more chances of electrocuting yourself plugging your router in than you do of getting cancer from it. The thing with CRT's and eye cancer was always a mothers tale, it could happen, but you were more at risk for developing near sightedness and eye strain and being a fat geek than you were of getting eye cancer lol.
/graduating E. Engineering (6 years of pain)
EDIT: I did some research because I was curious and it turns out the skin depth concept applies more to metals than human flesh. Apparently even at high frequencies of 2MHz a high voltage electric field can penetrate a human up to 60 inches and will prefer to flow along the wet ionic solutions in our nervous systems etc. Basically what this means is that you could get fried by extremely powerful radiation even at high frequencies but it would have to be very strong. So what I said about WiFi is technically true, it isn't going to penetrate you very deeply (insert joke) but if you ramped up the power on the WiFi transmission frequency (which you can't do on your routers obviously) it could fry you if it was insanely high - you'd need to broadcast a high power 2.4 Ghz radio wave for instance. I guess I covered this ground already, but I was shocked to find out that it can still penetrate up to 60 inches at high power but remember this is at 2Mhz and WiFi is 2Ghz range, so the pentration depth would not be 60 inches, but 60 inches is still higher than I thought it would be for 2Mhz.
Last edited by [CANADA]_Zenmaster (2008-01-24 12:08:26)
