51
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
51 points (94.7% liked)
Asklemmy
48798 readers
514 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Radiation, in this context, is light. Everything from old school AM radio, to microwaves, to infrared, to visible light, to UV, and finally gamma rays are all just photons. For light, there are two energy metrics: how much energy the individual photons have, and how many photons are being emitted per unit of time. Only the energy level of the individual photons determine if the radiation is ionizing, as in, powerful enough to rip electrons off what it hits, including important molecules like DNA. Ionizing radiation starts at the UV range, so anything below that is not ionizing. This is why you can get skin cancer from UV but no amount of visible light can cause cancer. And microwaves are well below even visible light so they aren't ionizing either.
Also, Wi-Fi and cellular networks operate in the microwave range. In fact, your microwave oven is 2.4 GHz, which is what older Wi-Fi equipment exclusively used, which is why your Wi-Fi connection used to crap out when you microwaved something. The reason you don't feel your hand heating up from the microwave rariation coming out of your phone is because the number of microwave photons per second being emitted by your phone is far less than a microwave oven. Your phone's antennas are 1 or 2 watts while your microwave is over 1000 watts.