Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?

Remember the last time you used your phone and it left a nice warm spot on your face? - Is that causing cancer? Michael Aranda tells you all about the radiation on your cell phone.

Hosted by: Michael Aranda
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[alexr.]

NOW I HAVE THE EVIDENCE, NOW I CAN PROVE HER WRONG...
ummm... mom?... we need to talk....

[xiaoxiao]

wait, i thought we left this question in the 90s, what is it doing here now?

[PilotPlater]

wish this video went like this:

<intro video>
"Nope"
<3 minutes and 50 seconds of black screen>

[ARK-brat]

I wish that a law is passed that requires all parents to watch this video. Also, translate this video to every major language so that parents of all nationalities can get some sense.

[letsnot]

The answer is no, YouTube comments do.

[get-the-joke]

Good to know that microwaves don't do any harm. I'll use my microwave oven as a hair drier.

[chepperino]

Well, phewwww I thought I was gonna FUCKIN die!

[loupax]

So... I can keep eating cell phones then?

[brandonschwartz]

This was reassuring, I didn't even want to be near my phone when I was told it caused cancer.

[imbeluga]

Me: *sleeps*
My brain: Hey, do you think you can get cancer from using a phone too much?

And here I am

[Nauskills]

Remember kids, don't get cancer.

[MilitantPeaceist]

It's amazing that we live with signals all around us from multiple transmitters since the 50's & yet people look at a piddly little phone as if it were satan's spawn.

[Acetyl]

Cell phone emissions are absolutely not safe, this has been known since the 70's. Work on the effects of electromagnetic fields on biological systems actually began the moment man could generate electricity in a controlled form, and EMR very shortly after Hertz described his methods. The earliest known papers were out of France, d'Arsonval 1893.


There are two main questions which are connected but still distinct.
-How can an input stimulus well below the threshold of ambient thermal noise have any effect? This became known as the kT paradox among Soviet authors. "Microwaves can only act by heating."
-Microwaves are non-ionizing and therefore cannot break bonds.


The answers to both are actually fairly simple. It's a matter of transduction and downstream amplification. The bulk of the effects are not directly due to the energy deposited, but the information. Biological systems are a) periodic systems, b) their structures are designed to resist random noise and to pick up on periodic or polarized signals. It's like if someone said "scenery can't possibly effect your emotions, the visible light lacks the penetration depth and energy to organize all your brain activity". Of course in actuality (for the most part) there's initial transduction by structures in the eye, and way downstream the body utilizes its own energy production machinery to effect sometimes massive downstream amplification and widescale changes in the entire body. At a different different scale, during the cold war a single light on an instrument panel, a few photons entering someone's eye, could trigger large scale "state change" sufficient to end the bulk of the terrestrial life on this planet several times over. Systems in some states don't have, or lose the capacity to dampen certain inputs. Biological systems are in many ways coupled oscillators, and under undisturbed conditions they go to great lengths to constrain their collective activity to certain ranges, avoiding damage. However if their communication is disrupted in some form that changes. A good example of periodicity (taken from Tian Yao Tsong of University of Maryland) is a sumo guy altering the course of a several ton pendulum by acting on it at a specific point. Or our ability to change the course of a several ton vehicle moving 80 mph, but only by acting or not acting on the steering apparatus. Other use of energy does not achieve that effect.


The primary mechanism is an alteration of calcium flux, which has strong experimental verification. The characteristics of animal tissues are actually very good at propagating frequencies more deeply than industry claims. The intercellular space is essentially a conductive fluid full of negatively charged structures (membrane bound glycoprotein tips) protruding and crisscrossing around. It's an "electrical gutter". The movements of these charges puts forces on other structures, in this case most relevant is the charge groups in the calcium channel's voltage sensing subunit. When they're moved in roughly the same direction at the same time at activates the channel, which is a transmembrane protein (a pore) connected the cell interior with the extracellular space. Calcium flows into the cell. This is involved in signalling and other things. Essentially, if you have aberrant activation of these channels you're going to have the cell behaving incorrectly (anything from neurotransmitter release to immune function), and you're going to have chronically elevated intracellular calcium. That's where the DNA damage etc comes from, saturated and overwhelming processing pathways for downstream reactions. Like the nitric oxide synthases. Put shortly, there will be an increase in NO production and an increase in superoxide production Superoxide is remove by superoxide dismutase by turning it into H2O2. That's then turned into water and O2 by catalase or glutathione peroxidase. However, if it's not, hydrogen peroxide can do a bit of damage, but worse, it can be turned into hydroxyl radicals (eg via fenton reaction). Once NO and superoxide are at a certain threshold concentration they begin to combine to form peroxynitrite, a potent oxidant. They do this at a rate 5x faster than superoxide dismutase can act. It's a runaway process, structures and enzymes in the cell are damaged, DNA is damaged, lipids are oxidized. Cell damage or death results. There's also a kinetic mechanism at specific frequencies (like continuous wave 2.45 GHz), where some results show the DNA molecule begins to thrash around violently and will break off its histone groups etc. This is at fairly low intensities. Work by Reba Goodman and Martin Blank have identified characteristics of fractal antennas in DNA.


Another mechanism involves altering the structure of water around structures attached to the cell membrane which either has a slight "drying" effect, or in some cases will cause conformational changes of proteins, and generate solitons in structures able to carry them. At millimeter wave frequencies, when the field is pulsed, the membrane will experience acoustic effects and according to soviet literature generate "temporary structures" which "remain long after irradiation has ceased.". Other effects of millimeter waves are demyelination and fragmentation of peripheral nerves, and broad degenerative changes in multiple organs and enzyme systems. This was in rats with exposure for 15 minutes per day, for 60 days, power density of 1mW/cm2. The papers included illness in occupationally exposed humans.


A third mechanism is disrupted radical pairing around eg magnetite, and thus free radical generation. Also some stuff with cryptochromes.


Refer to "-Documents, links, information.txt" in:
for more information, including we could have possibly going to this point. In brief, it came from early medical use, cold war era desire to freely use and install radar domestically and abroad, the EPRI, and then with all these old feet in the door, telecom picking up most of the work in the early 90's. By 1996 they got language in the 1996 Telecommunications act federally preempting local zoning denying cell tower placement based on environmental (health) concerns, so long as such emissions comply with FCC guidelines. And so the capturing of the FCC was already well underway, now, according to a Harvard ethics review and many other sources, it's pretty much complete. I've sat in on telecom lobbying, occasionally they slip up and talk as though they are the FCC. It should be no surprise that corporations and a multi-trillion dollar global industry would lie and manipulate.
"_Index.txt" includes ~2500 other studies.



Anyway, mechanisms are nice but from a public health perspective they aren't even needed and never were. Evidence from human studies, occupational exposure, animal studies, in vitro work, was overwhelming and damning by the 1970's. Do we need to know how cyanide kills things to not eat it? Or the damage of lead? Or Paris green? Or playing in the xray machines at the shoe store? Or breathing asbestos at the factory all day? Inhaling polonium and combustion byproducts of however many chemicals in and added to tobacco? Here we are again, we had the data and a subset of our population completely failed to use it. I really want to stress that it is bad, and we're all in a very bad spot. The end result of this is neurodegeneration and most likely population level irreversible infertility. This is what happened to mice exposed to an antenna park in Greece in the mid 90's. Refer to Magras and Xenos. We're already seeing this beginning now.


To SciShow. At this point I strongly recommend researching further and posting a follow up to this video. Heat shock proteins are just stress proteins, they don't necessarily relate with heating or non-uniform energy deposition (micro-heating), microwave irradiation also elevates corticotropin releasing factor, another stress indicator. Which downstream acts on opioid systems, the endorphins and enkephalines, these things are addicting. With 5G coming real information and awareness of the last 100 years of literature, is long overdo.

[NatashaAndZekeLover]

Literally been told for years now by teachers and parents that I'm at risk for cancer because I sleep with my phone in my bed and kept my phone in my front pocket. Stumbled across this video and it's given me peace of mind! Thank you!!! :D

[SupaDanteX]

I'm not gunna lie, a big part of me really wanted this to be a 7 second video.
Opening Theme
Just you saying the word: No.
End credits.

[jincyquones]

I can't believe people are still asking this question.

[michaelshultz]

My dad was a radar and missile guidance technician and died in 1974 the doctors said it was caused by long term exposure to low level microwave radiation.

[communistpootisbirb]

Yes they certainly can! When I accidentally clicked a Leafy video I got cancer.

[creestee]

My mother had her face done. Botox. And everytime she puts a cellphone near her ear, it swells up noticably. Landline phones dont. Now, she uses her cell phone in speaker phone.

[ds]

But sometimes I go to the Internet and it gives me cancer.