I have no data on this.

So many people put their laptop right on their stomach while using it.

When I measure the energy coming off of my laptop, the different types of electrical energy, it’s somewhat high. I almost always put it on a pillow before putting it on my stomach. I know many devices are FCC approved, but I don’t know if the FCC takes hours of use on a stomach into account.

Have researchers ruled out this as a possible cause of the increased rate of colorectal cancers?

(Also is the flouride in my water making me see conspiracies that don’t really exist?)

I’ve just been wondering about this recently and there are so many smart people on lemmy I figured someone here would have a smart opinion on this. I know the prevailing theory is colorectal cancers are possibly due to more ultra-processed foods, but has anyone thought about laptops? Is this illogical as a possible cause? It may be that the energy levels aren’t high enough to be a cause or that the colon is too far away from a laptop on a stomach to impact anything.

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    The energy you’re reading is non-ionizing, can’t cause cancer.

    If an energy source is high enough frequency, and strong enough, it can knock electrons out of their orbit, creating ions. Hence the name. Ultraviolet rays from the sun can knock your DNA around, cause cancer. Radio waves simply cannot. Get the idea?

    Nothing coming out of a laptop is energetic enough to even begin stripping electrons from the atoms in your cells.

    I could probably tell a little more if you can say how and what “energy” you’re measuring.

    • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
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      21 days ago

      As an ignoramus: From what little I understand, if you cranked a CB radio up to 1,000,000 watts you still couldn’t get ionizing radiation, right?

      Same with WiFi, cellphone radio, etc. You gotta get up over ultraviolet before you could cause cancer even if you wanted to.

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        A radio spitting 1MW of anything on your stomach is going to give you a pretty nasty burn from waste heat, but wifi range - 2.4Ghz is gonna cook your water molecules real good. Still no ionizing happening.

        Key thing here is your talking about power, and individual atoms don’t care about that sort of thing. They care about the individual quanta they’re interacting with.

        1000 radio frequency photons will never have the individual energy to bump an electron. 1 UV (and shorter wavelengths) photon can bump an electron