Despite looking like something built by a supervillain and sounding like an angry violin, high-voltage power lines are not secretly murdering the population—the electromagnetic fields they produce are low-frequency, can’t damage DNA, drop off to basically nothing within 100 feet, and get absolutely smoked by the hair dryer you point at your own head every morning. Yes, one study found a slight leukemia correlation in kids living very close to them, which got ELF magnetic fields classified as “possibly carcinogenic”—a category that also includes coffee and pickled vegetables—but after decades of research, scientists still can’t find any biological mechanism that would explain how these weak-ass fields actually cause harm, and the overwhelming consensus from the WHO on down is that there’s no convincing evidence they do. The real danger isn’t the towers; it’s the comment section.

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