Cellphones could damage human tissues in totally new way

Posted by Emma Woollacott

A theoretical biologist at the government's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico says that cellphone radiation could be interacting with human tissue in a completely new way.

a paper titled What does photon energy tell us about cellphone safety?, Bill Bruno describes a new mechanism by which this type iof microwave radiation could cause damage.

It's previously been argued that the radiation emitted by cell phones can't damage biological tissue because microwave photons don't have enough energy to break chemical bonds.

But Bruno argues that this only applies when the number of photons is less than one in a volume of space equivalent to a cubic wavelength.

When the density of photons is higher than this, he says, interference can bring other effects into play. It's similar, he says, to optical tweezers, in which coherent photons combine to move small objects such as cells.

While optical tweezers generally work at infrared frequencies, Bruno believes a similar effect could work for microwave photons.It would depend on whether there is a high enough density of microwave photons from cellphones to generate a big enough force; and whether there are structures in the body with the required dielectric properties to be susceptible.

And, says Bruno, the density of microwave photons from cell phones and cell phone is easily high enough; and there are plenty of vulnerable structures, including neurons up to a meter long.