Thread by @ScienceIsDope_

1. Thread about Juhi Chawla and the 5g controversy: Why do people tend to be afraid of 5g? The word radiation gets a bad rap mainly because of its association with nuclear bombs and the radiation aftermath. I’ll talk about this nuclear radiation later.

2. The word radiation comes from the fact that these photons/particles move outward along the radius of a sphere around the source aka radiate

3. Three prominent kinds of radiation out there - alpha radiation, beta radiation and electromagnetic radiation. The first two, I’ll talk about later. The last one is what we’re all concerned about. 5G radiation is a kind of electromagnetic radiation

4. All electromagnetic radiation is just light. These are waves ranging from high frequency, low wavelength gamma waves; to low frequency, high wavelength radio waves.

5. The light that we’re familiar with - or what our eyes can see is a tiny spectrum of frequencies that appear in the middle as shown.

6. This radiation can be used to communicate wirelessly - everything from wifi to bluetooth to mobile communications uses electromagnetic radiations. Even your TV remote control or proximity sensors in airport bathrooms use electromag waves lying in the infra-red spectrum.

7. Sounds pretty useful to me, so why then does it get a bad name? Because of ionizing radiation. This kind of radiation is what causes cancer and stuff. How and why? An atom is made of a nucleus and electrons moving around it.

8. These electrons can be knocked right out of atoms if radiation with high enough energy hits them. This process is called ionization, because an atom becomes an ion because of the removal of an electron. Now how does ionization affect living tissue?

9. Every single cell in your body contains DNA. This is a large molecule with atoms that can be ionized when exposed to ionizing radiation. And the ionized atoms don’t form chemical bonds like they’re supposed to in DNA leading to cancerous mutations.

10. These mutations get carried over when the cell replicates leading to cancer. So what kind of radiation has this kind of energy? All particle radiation like alpha and beta radiation; (they're called particle radiation because they radiate particles)...

11. ...and em radiation of frequency higher than the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is typically what we're talking about if we say ionizing radiation - uv, x-rays, and gamma.

12. And nuclear explosions or reactions often produce high-energy ionizing radiation like Gamma rays as a by-product. Hence we associate the words danger and radiation with nuclear energy. But the radiation used in telecommunication is harmless.

13. Don’t take my word. Here’s the ICNIRP (International Commission for Non Ionizing Radiation Protection) where they respond to health claims related to 5G.
icnirp.org/cms/upload/pub…

14. And you know what frequency all mobile communication uses? Including 5g? Frequencies below that of infrared radiation. Even visible light has a higher frequency.

15. Even the highest frequency used by 5g is barely in the infrared region. And this makes sense right? All the visible light we see around us does no harm to us right?

16. So why would 5G radiation, which has even less energy, and is non-ionizing, cause cancer? It won’t! No cancer from any kind of radiation used in wireless tech. Another concern that a lot of people have is about how this radiation might have “thermal effects”

17. After all,we do use ovens that use microwaves that heat up food. So why can’t our tissues get heated up? The answer to that is not the frequency. It’s the density of these waves that are responsible for raising temperature. And this power density is usually measured in uW/m2

18. The power density of microwaves is more than 10000 times greater than what telecomm exposure standards we use. Here’s a table of International exposure guidelines. You’ll have to google and do some basic unit conversion to see my point.
powerwatch.org.uk/science/intgui…

19. Ok. I think I’ve sufficiently backed up my claims on why you shouldn’t be afraid of 5G. Now let’s talk about why people like Juhi Chawla or literally anyone with influence is afraid of 5G.

20. There is and probably will always be ongoing research about 5G because we are constantly trying to gather more evidence to better our understanding.

21. Some of these are extremely poor quality research with either bad sample size or poorly drawn conclusions like this one. ntp.niehs.nih.gov/publications/r…
They conclude things like cancer risks from 5G exposure.

22. And the anti 5G activists just run with it. People like Juhi Chawla get influenced by this fearmongering and file lawsuits. We, the public, don’t know what to believe. Here’s an excellent article from Scientific American that resolves this fearmongering...

23. ...and cites multiple proper studies to make their conclusions. blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/d…
There’s also one other thing that’s part of human nature that ensures that some of us fall for this fear mongering.

24. It’s called negativity bias. We have a tendency to be more cautious of risk than our acceptance of benefit. We wanna be sure there’s nothing bad about something before we accept its good.

25. This negativity bias is what leads to anti-vaxxers. As I’ve shown in my last video, one fraud study is all it took to put fear in people and bring down vaccination rates.

26. In conclusion, there is nothing to worry about 5G. There are robust studies that point to no harm. We’re still constantly studying this, so if there is any new info, we’ll know. Relax and enjoy that 1000 Mbps download speed.