LG Wireless Phone

How does a cell phone use radiation to function?

How does a cell phone use radiation to function? What type of radiation do cell phones use? Compare and contrast this type from other types of radiation. How can radiation be harmful to people? Do we know for sure if cell phones cause health risks? Why or why not? Based on what you heard in this podcast, do you think you are “frying your brain” with your cell phone? Why or why not? If you were a scientist, how would you test if cell phones cause health risks? What type of experiment might you design to figure out if you are frying your brain with your cell phone?

Public Comments

1. YES YES IT DOES
2. There are 10 questions there, and this looks awfully like homework. Notice the reference to a podcast? (I am not even sure you read it, this looks like copy and paste) Have you considered listening to the podcast and doing your own homework? No? Then tough luck. I will not do it for you. Especially not 10 questions.
3. Cell phones emit electronic signals, sometimes described as radio waves and sometimes described as radiation. Because of the confusion and fear regarding radiation that is almost universal, that's really a poor, as well as an inaccurate, word. They are radio signals/waves. They are of a very low power, and do not penetrate the skull, therefore they cannot do brain damage. They are also not potent enough to damage the eyes. Although a study done in Sweden appeared to suggest cell phone signals can be harmful, the study was poorly designed and conducted, and the results published were confusing at best. The study has been discredited by the scientific and medical communities and in fact has been withdrawn by the journal in which it was published. To date, no irrefutable evidence exists to suggest cell phone usage is dangerous. Knowing this is my job: I'm an x-ray technologist and in the Army was a radiation protection specialist in addition to that. We dealt with radiation from all sources, including intensely powerful radio waves. Cell phones simply haven't the power to do physical harm to users.
4. cell phones use 2 bands of electromagnetic radiation. They receive and transmit radio waves in order to communicate with cell towers and hence with other users, and they emit visible radiation in order that the user can read the screen. electromagnetic radiation is a continuous spectrum from long wavelength radio up to gamma rays. EM radiation with a frequency (hence photon energy) corresponding to UV and higher is ionizing and can cause chemical reactions, such as tanning and triggering cancer in animals. EM radiation with sufficient power (intensity) has a thermal effect - it cooks things. So any EM radiation is harmful to people if sufficiently intense - don't stand in front of a military radar, or in a solar oven. A flux of certain particles is also confusingly called "radiation". E.g. beta radiation is high-energy electrons, and alpha radiation is high-energy helium nuclei, while a neutron beam may be called radiation. All those are ionizing, and can cause a chemical effect hence cancer (neutrons are not directly ionizing, but can collide with atomic nuclei and create ions and change chemical elements) Testing whether cellphones cause a health risk is really hard. You could raise several generations of mice in identical conditions. Some have an operating cellphone hidden in their box, some have a dead cellphone in their box, and some have nothing. The experiment is done double-blind so that the people looking after the mice and recording their health don't know whether there's a phone or not.