all around the world,

there's a lot of confusion and concern over what it is,

how it works, and if it's even safe.

So today we're gonna go over all aspects of five G.

We have our friend and tech expert MKBHD

who's gonna explain why people are so excited

about this technology.

And then we're gonna take the science angle

about how it actually works, what it does to your body

and most importantly,

what the science says on whether or not it's safe.

- We have looked at hundreds of scientific papers

and journals in order to decipher the truth about five G

and yes, we will be jumping

into some of the conspiracy theories and claims,

so stick around for the end of the video when we do that

'cause they are pretty wild.

But first, we're gonna throw it to our friend, MKBHD,

to tell us about what's going on with five G tech right now.

- Hey, what's up guys?

I'm MKBHD here.

So five G technology or the fifth generation

of these data networks has been getting a lot of hype

and it's been talked about a lot

and it's been slowly rolled out over the past year or two,

and getting insane speeds on some phones.

So the wavelengths used for five G technologies

can be split into three different sections.

There is low-band five G,

which is frequencies below about one gigahertz.

Then there is what we call mid-band five G,

which is slight above that,

which is faster but travels a shorter distance.

And then there's millimeter wave,

which is talked about the most,

which can give you the fastest speeds

and uses the highest frequencies

but travels the shortest distance.

And so with five G now we're talking about download speeds

of anywhere from 50 megabytes per second,

all the way up to those crazy millimeter wave speeds

you might have seen of like two gigabytes per second,

which is insane, I mean, that's we're talking like

a whole TV show season downloads in seconds,

so download speeds are nice

but this five G tech will be useful

for far more than just your phone.

So having these high end speeds

and low latency in the future will be essential

for things like fleets of driverless cars

all driving as a swarm and all talking,

communicating with each other to never crash,

all the way to things like a robot

and a surgeon in two different states

but that surgery being performed remotely in real time.

So I had the chance to use some early five G,

it was millimeter wave, and it was really impressive

but you could tell it has a long way to go

before it can be used and rolled out to the world.

For starters, it doesn't travel very far

and it's very easily blocked by obstacles,

that stuff I talked about in my video.

So it would take a lot of nodes and a lot of antennas

just to cover a small area like a town,

let alone a country or the entire globe,

and that would be expensive and time consuming.

But even the low to mid-band five G can still be impressive

in terms of improvement in speed.

So there's a lot going on

but it is a pretty exciting future of five G

if I say so myself,

but with that comes a lot of fears and concerns

about the potential effects of these new frequencies

on our biology and on our health.

So for that, I'll throw it back to Greg and Mitch

to talk through the science of it all.

- So how does five G work?

In order to fully understand five G

we actually have to learn about one of my favorite things,

which is the electromagnetic spectrum.

And this is a spectrum of radiation.

So yes, we will be talking today about radiation.

So it does sound scary,

but it's important that we know that radiation

is just the transmission of energy

through waves or particles.

On the left of the spectrum we have really long wavelengths,

some as long as thousands of kilometers

and as we move to the right, they get shorter and shorter

to even a fraction of the size of an atomic nucleus.

Now a wavelength size is measured from peak to peak,

or trough to trough.

Basically, the distance over which the wave shape repeats

or the size of this literal tattoo on my arm

because yes, I do love the electromagnetic spectrum.

As the wavelengths become shorter and shorter,

they have higher frequencies and energy.

Frequency describes the number of waves

that pass a fixed place in a given amount of time,

and is usually measured in hertz each set.

So a low frequency will fit less wavelengths

and a high frequency more.

- Take gamma rays, for example,

which can be 10 to the power of minus 12 meters,

which is 0.000000000001 meters.

I hope I got the right amount of zeros.

And they're generated by radioactive atoms

and nuclear explosions.

And these gamma rays along with X-rays

and higher energy UV radiation can damage DNA

and destroy cells, also known as being ionizing.

Yeah, that's scary.

As we move back to the left,

the wavelengths get longer and have less and less energy

and are no longer ionizing.

This part of the spectrum is the wavelength size

that the cells in your eyes evolved to see,

otherwise known as visible light.

Every single wavelength your eyes pick up

fall within 400 to 700 nanometers.

If we keep moving left,

we go through microwaves and radio waves,

which are also called radio frequency radiation.

This low energy, low frequency radiation

has been used in technology like radios

since the late 1800s,

but it wasn't until the 1980s

that the first generation of cellular technology

or one G began.

- This next chart is from NASA, ever heard of her?

She's famous and it breaks down all the generations

of cellular technology frequencies.

One G cellular attack, we're talking in the 1980s,

used 150 megahertz aka UHF, ultra high frequency waves.

Two G was using around 450 megahertz,

more ultra high frequency waves.

Three G was allocated frequencies between 450 megahertz

all the way up to three gigahertz.

This was in the spectrum known as super high frequencies.

Four G was allocated similar frequencies to three G

but was taking advantage of some of those higher frequencies

which takes us now to five G,

which is allocated between 600 megahertz

to as high as between 38 to 90 gigahertz.

So it is also using a super high frequency section

but for the first time in cellular network technology,

it's moved into the extra high frequency section

with millimeter wavelength technology

leaving the radio wave section

in this graph and chart that we saw earlier

to the section of now microwaves.

Of course, none of these words

help make any of this sounds,

radiation, super high frequencies,

extra high frequencies, microwaves.

Thankfully, the electromagnetic spectrum

is regulated to keep us all healthy.

An important regulating body in all of this

is the International Commission

of Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection,

which is essentially a conglomeration of epidemiologists,

biologists and physicists

and people who understand this technology very deeply,

who take all the most up-to-date science

and make sure they understand

and regulate what this radiation is doing to all of us.

It's also important to note that this regulating body

isn't connected to any one government

or a country or commercial corporation.

- Which leads to the big question,

how do five G waves affect us?

We know that five G frequencies are not ionizing radiation,

but should we be worried

about them impacting our body in other ways?

After decades of research on health effects,

the ICNIRP found the only substantiated effect

of radio frequency exposure is heating of exposed tissue.

These wavelengths can cause vibration

of charged or polar molecules inside of us,

which creates friction and thus heat.

But the higher the frequency,

the lower the penetrative depth in the body,

which might seem a little unnerving

and I think it's fair to have concern

because technically there is a thermal threshold

that if we pass can cause adverse health effects on us.

But that's why all these regulating bodies are there

to make sure that our exposure

never goes over that threshold.

In fact, acute and long term effects

of radio frequency exposure below the thermal threshold

have been studied extensively

without demonstrating adverse health effects.

Research has even been done on headaches, sleep quality,

cognitive function, etc, and has shown no issues.

One other thing that was found

was a small effect on brain activity when measured by EEGs,

but the biological implication of what that means

is pretty small

and they haven't actually seen any negative effects

associated to this brain activity.

- So why do some people say that five G can cause cancer?

There are a few studies that often get quoted.

And one, lab rats and mice

were exposed to radio frequency energy used in cell phones

for nine hours a day starting before birth

and for two years after,

and found an increased risk of some types of tumors

in the male rats.

But the male rats exposed to the radio frequency radiation

actually ended up living longer than the other rats,

and the female rats and all of mice in the experiment

didn't have an increase in tumors at all.

Some other epidemiological studies

have found a small increase in some brain tumors

in people who are heavy users of cell phones,

but it was actually found that there were reporting biases

and weaknesses in these studies.

Also it's important to remember

that these studies are on cellphone use.

So they're actually talking about three G,

four G and five G frequencies.

The consensus among scientists

is that five G technology will not cause cancer

but it is very confusing to figure out this information

when you are looking online.

For example, even this article in "Scientific American"

would make you worried that cell phones

and five G could cause cancer

even though the studies are not corroborated

and some of it's claims

are just opposite of what the study actually says.

This happens a lot with scientific information

that gets cherry-picked to mislead people.

Read "Scientific American" a week later

and you get most of the prior articles information debunked,

but both of these articles

are from seemingly scientifically accurate sources.

So it can be very confusing,

no shade, I guess, to "Scientific American".

At the end of the day what it comes down to

is scientists looking at large trials

with large sample sizes and controlling variables.

One very large 13 countrywide study

found that there was no causal relationship

between brain tumors and cell phone use.

And another really great Danish study, large study,

I sound like Trump right now,

great, huge and large study (laughs)