Just Like Radium Watches and Fluoroscopes

I found a comment on slashdot that tells perfectly what I think about cell phones:

I look at this as the thing that we will be laughed at by people in 100 years. Think 100 years ago, people used to wear radioactive radium watches, and 60 years ago, people exposed themselves to harmful amounts of radiation to make sure their shoes fit properly. Hell, Marie Curie, the father (mother) of modern radioactive theory kept a beaker full of radium next to her bed because it made a swell nightlight. Now, nobody is going to accuse her of being stupid, seeing as how she developed the initial scientific theory leading to most of what we know about physics today. It’s just that they didn’t know any better. Nowadays, we say “She did what?!?”

I think in 100 years they will be saying “They did what?!? They put microwave transmitters right next to their brains! What morons!” The cell phone industry can fight it all they want, but the cigarette industry didn’t acknowledge that cigarettes were addictive until the 1990’s.

This remembers me of a study project friends at college did 5 years ago. Put a cell phone and 12 eggs at different distances inside an incubator. Three eggs are in a Faraday cage made of metallic mosquito net, preventing microwave radiations from reaching them. Wait 3 weeks. Can you guess the results?

I can’t remember the details, but what I recall is that the nearest eggs all died while those in the Faraday cage hatched. Between the two, the farther the eggs where from the phone, the more likely they were to survive. So it definitely have an effect on biological beings.

Now the human body is probably more resistant to microwaves than avian embryos, but humans also wear a cell phone a lot longer than two weeks. And the cell phone in this experiment was only waiting for calls; phone emissions are stronger during a call and the phone is (usually) closer to the head.

I think this explains why I’m not going to wear a cell phone anytime soon.

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