9 Times The Media Tried To Scare Us With Bad Science

Watch out. There's a dangerous cloud of something hanging in the air and giving you brain tumours. It's called "Electrosmog".

Oh wait, no there isn't.

Based in everybody's deep-seated paranoia that there is something about our modern daily lives that is making our society sick, the idea that our modern gadgets are swamping us with dangerous levels of "radiation" is a tenaciously popular bit of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo.

Incidentally "radiation" is one of the favourite buzzwords of the like of Noel Edmonds and other media alarmists. It sounds sciencey and dangerous, we all know that nuclear radiation can make you sprout two heads, so why on earth are we bringing it into our homes? Quick, smash the router and go live in a cave.

The thing is, all of the scaremongering is based on a basic misunderstanding of what radiation actually is. Heat is radiation, light is radiation and, yes, WiFi signals are radiation. However, the amount of radiation from a WiFi signal is 100,000 times weaker than a microwave oven, and is spread out over a much greater area. It has no greater effect on the human body than the cosmic background radiation left over from the beginning of the universe, that is, none at all.

Despite Edmonds' claims that "We’re covering ourselves in the wrong sorts of electromagnetism" (hmm), there is precisely no evidence to confirm the existence of any health consequences related to WiFi exposure.

So you can relax, take off your tin foil hat and turn your WiFi back on now.