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Comment by lighteater | Hacker News Reader

There's a new male contraceptive, it's called "keep your phone in your pocket, next to your balls". Now with 10x the dose!

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There's no evidence that phones cause cancer (nor impotence). It's a reasonable assumption to make, but the evidence doesn't back it up:

> The only consistently recognized biological effect of radiofrequency radiation in humans is heating. The ability of microwave ovens to heat food is one example of this effect of radiofrequency radiation. Radiofrequency exposure from cell phone use does cause heating to the area of the body where a cell phone or other device is held (e.g., the ear and head). However, it is not sufficient to measurably increase body temperature. There are no other clearly established effects on the human body from radiofrequency radiation.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...

To be fair, overheating your scrotum will in fact mess up your fertility. The need for temperature regulation is the whole reason we have them in the first place.

The majority of the power in a smartphone is used to light up the screen. If your phone is in your pocket, it's a reasonable assumption that the screen is turned off.

It's not impossible, but the phone would have to be quite inefficient to have any measurable effect. Laptops are probably a bigger problem if you keep them in your lap regularly, since in that scenario they do operate at full power close to your scrotum.

The fix for that is to wear boxers though. Or not wear anything at all. Your phone is receiving most of the time. And when it transmits it does so very briefly and coalesces background transmissions into a single burst to conserve battery. There's just not enough transmit power to heat anything up, and even if there was, blood would carry the heat away quite readily.

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