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Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

wow - I have no clue (obviously) but possible reasons :

- better home heating (less open fires, more heated bedrooms)

- increased time from atmospheric nuclear bomb testing (and the various dispersals of plutonium in the 60's and 70's)

- better nutrition in general

- higher genetic diversity in breeding populations; not many peoples grandparents all come from the same village in the developed world now

- less pollution in the west; import of finished goods rather than local manufacturing

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> increased time from atmospheric nuclear bomb testing (and the various dispersals of plutonium in the 60's and 70's)

Ambient radioactivity, under a certain threshold (which is disputed) has actually shown some positive effects. If I remember correctly, folks living in naturally more radioactive areas have been showing lower cancer rates vs the average.

This is a great big citation needed. Come on, you can't "if I remember correctly" a statement like "some radiation is good for you."

OK, I'll supply a citation, which argues the opposite. See the Wikipedia page on "radiation hormesis". Scroll down to "cobalt 60 exposure".

TL,DR: Many apartments in Taiwan were radioactive, because the steel in the structure had been mixed in with 60Co. Residents got big doses of gamma rays. And yet they didn't get much cancer! It turns out that no, gamma rays are not good for you; rather, most residents were young, biasing the sample (few young people get cancer). The study didn't account for this bias.

What? Source?

You beat me to it. My guess would be increased time from those atmospheric nuke tests.

Those were crazy days! The Tsar Bomba. What was the world thinking?

I can't find any evidence that nuclear testing causes any form of global health risks. The amount of material dispersed is negligible on the global scale, and while I've found a few sources that state this material can cause thyroid cancer, it's so small on a worldwide scale it won't really affect anyone.

Gasoline, lead, poor living conditions on the other hand all have well proven links with bad health.

We might actually benefit from some amount of radiation, rather than assuming that increased amount of radiation equals higher cancer risk.

It's called radiation hormesis. Though I don't think there's a scientific consensus on this issue.

Unlikely, we've evolved with ever present background radiation and have a dna repair mechanism to counter act it but that does not mean radiation makes us stronger.

IIRC genes related to DNA replication are highly conserved; thus our DNA repair mechanism was probably evolutionarily "optimized" for conditions a long time ago. Have background radiation levels remained constant on timescales of hundreds of millions of years? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it varied significantly considering that cosmic radiation is a significant source and the strength of the Earth's magnetic field fluctuates significantly.

It's probably more beneficial for evolutionary 'creativity' than the complex pathways in biology you depend on; and that's gotta be the only reason a quirk like that is still around.

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