I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people speculate, joke, or jokingly speculate that their cellphone might be giving them cancer. It comes from a very reasonable place of discomfort — few people understand how radiation works, we put our phones right beside our brains all the time, and technology in general often feels like it ought to be causing some sort of societal ill.

So what’s the deal? Cellphones have been around for three decades now — shouldn’t we have the answer to whether they lead to cancer in humans? Well, sort of. Our current understanding of radio waves says that, in theory, phones shouldn’t give you cancer. But we’re still doing research to find out whether that’s true in practice.

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