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Comment by IHLayman | Hacker News Reader

Inching toward wearable millimeter-wave devices makes me pretty nervous about long term cancer effects. 5Ghz is pretty safe, but 140GHz? See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18666810 for a study on the effects of .1 THz (100 GHz) effect on lymphocytes, but I don't see a followup, and this is from 2008... so I don't know if I should bed worried or not but it gives me pause.

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I mean the big question is how far do they penetrate the skin. I'd assume it isn't too far given the frequency.

Surface level skin cancer's no biggie?

You can pretty much find pubmed links to prove the world rests on a series of turtles.

Worry when some of these "studies" (scare quotes intentional) are actually replicated.

Unfair as the cited study seems pretty well designed. And they used only 0.03 mW per cm2, and the exposure time was on the order of only a few hours to a day.

Then it should be easy to replicate. Citation needed, as the Wikipedians like to say.

Yeah, but until we have those results, caution is warranted. That we should stop replicating studies was never implied.

Caution would be warranted if there were an underlying physical interaction or principle that suggests a mechanism of action. There's not. Non-ionizing radiation is non-ionizing. "Radiation-induced low-frequency collective vibrational modes" isn't a thing, except to the extent that it is the operating principle behind a tea kettle.

And in any event, the skin depth at these frequencies is measured in fractions of a millimeter. There are even microwave weapons that take advantage of that (Raytheon's ADS comes to mind).

Heating and ionization are not the only ways in which chemical reactions can be influenced. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4340277/ for an overview (contains both positive and negative results).

Cool. All it takes is replication. The trial lawyers will beat a $100B path to your door once those pesky negative results are accounted for.

Oh, and in the meantime, I'd avoid hanging around near fireplaces and stay out of the sun, because "THz" is basically a synonym for "long-wave infrared."

> "THz" is basically a synonym for "long-wave infrared."

Yes, but this says nothing about whether the spectrum is smooth versus a spike, which could make a difference. Anyway, I think it can be a mistake to hide behind known mechanisms, while the empirical evidence shows that something else is going on.

I'll replicate it.

Fund it.

No problem, apparently. Talk to these folks:

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/19/05/18/0227204/russias-a...

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