🚀 go-pugleaf

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In sci.misc, bng@tropel.gca.com (Baldwin Ng) writes:

    My question is: ARE MICROWAVE OVENS (when used very frequently)
                    ALSO CAPABLE OF CAUSING CANCER??
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Microwaves are a type of radiation that has nothing to do with the
radiation commonly associated with "DANGER - CANCER".  The latter
is nuclear radiation and consists of high-energy particles such
as alpha-rays, beta-rays (electrons), and gamma rays.  The way
such radiation causes cancer is by destroying, more or less at
random, the highly evolved biological molecules.  Sometimes the
the part of a molecule that's destroyed is the gene that controls
cell division.  When cell division is uncontrolled you have cancer.

Microwave radiation does not interact with matter in this way, at
least not at low power levels.  (Nuclear radiation at low intensities
can cause cancer, however.  But intensity and power-levels are not the
same thing in this context.)   As you should have figured out by
now, microwaves HEAT matter by inducing the random motion in molecules
and atoms that is associated with heat.  If microwaves destroyed the
biological tissue in the manner that the "radar gun lawsuits" allege,
then people would be very reluctant to eat food heated in microwave
ovens.

Microwaves at high power levels cause catastrophic failure of living
things, but again through rapid heating, not through cancer.  This
is familiar to radar operators on ships that spit out multiple megawatts
of microwaves in pulses.  Hasta la vista, birdies (a reference to the
immediate deaths experienced by any birds flying in front of the 
radar antenna when turned on).

Alex
"Ignorance is bliss, but only for lawyers."
or
"Multiple millions await the ignorant"