cell phones
gregladen | June 14, 2014The tl;dr: maybe a little but for benign reasons. If fertility is important to you and you are a man, don’t put hot things in your pockets. This may fall into the category of switching from tidy whities to boxer briefs.
A study came out in September suggesting that it does. It is a meta-analysis by Jessica Adams et all, published in Environmental International, called “Effect of mobile telephones on sperm quality: A systematic review and meta-analysis.”
The study considered the effects of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMR) on sperm motility (movement), viability, and…
oracknows | May 11, 2014Besides yesterday being Mothers' Day yesterday, I had a lot of grant stuff to do, which means that this one will be a quickie. On Saturday, a reader sent me a link to one of the most useful sites I've ever encountered. I realize that over the weekend it's spread around the skeptical blogosphere like the proverbial wildfire, which is unfortunate (for me) given that I've made it a personal rule that I don't post on the weekend any more, barring amazing developments. Still, this one tempted me. It's a website called Spurious Correlations, and it is exactly what it claims to be. Its usefulness…
egrossman | January 16, 2014In 2012, a Frontline and Pro Publica investigation of the cell (or wireless) tower industry found that between 2003 and 2010 the average fatality rate for the US tower industry was more than 10 times greater than that of the construction industry. A January 6, 2014 story by KUOW reporter John Ryan about the death in January 2013 of tower climber Mike Rongey in Mount Vernon, Washington is a reminder that the industry remains extremely dangerous. It is also a reminder that the employers of the workers killed in these incidents may only be fined minimally and that the wireless service providers…
oracknows | June 26, 2012No matter how you slice it, I've been at this blogging thing a long time. it's been over seven years now. It's been even longer than that, though, because before that cold gray Saturday afternoon in September when I started farting around with Blogger and ended giving birth to the first iteration of Respectful Insolence, I had been sparring with quacks, cranks, and various other promoters of pseudoscience for at least five years before. Even after all that time, however, it's humbling and amazing to contemplate that I haven't seen it all, no matter how much at times I might feel that I have.…
lborkowski | May 29, 2012By Kim Krisberg
Wally Reardon stopped climbing towers for a living back in 2002 due to an injury. He had spent years putting up communication antennas anywhere employers wanted them — smokestacks, buildings, grain silos, water tanks. Just about anything that rose up into the sky, Reardon would find a way to scale it. It was exhilarating.
"I can't explain that freedom that we felt," Reardon told me. "I just liked the adventure of climbing towers. I just totally loved it. It was a crazy lifestyle and we were like a bunch of nomads. We lived by our own rules."
It was also dangerous. In fact,…
sastyk | February 10, 2010Increasingly, the cost of staying wired is eating up a huge part of people's budgets accordinging to The Times:
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on…
pronald | February 7, 2010At the risk of offending half of the human race, I will say this: Men have no manners when it comes to cell phones.
I am traveling this week with plenty of time to pay attention to strangers, not that I have much of a choice. In the airport, men have cell phones pressed to their ears relaying critical information to their business partners such as "HI! I JUST LEFT YOU AN EMAIL AND A VOICE MAIL ABOUT THE DEAL THAT I HOPE TO DO IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS. I HOPE YOU GOT MY MESSAGE, I WILL CALL AGAIN BEFORE THE PLANE LEAVES AND AGAIN WHEN IT LANDS TO BE SURE YOU GOT MY MESSAGE."
And today in an…
denialism | February 6, 2009
What do this cartoon and the latest edition of PLoS One have in common? Well, reading Bora's blog this week I saw an article entitled, Risks for Central Nervous System Diseases among Mobile Phone Subscribers: A Danish Retrospective Cohort Study and my ears perked up. We have been mocking the idea that cell phones cause everything from brain cancer to colony collapse disorder and it's always fun to see what cell phones are being blamed for based on weak associations and correlations.
In this article the authors identified more than four hundred thousand cell phone subscribers and linked…
sporte | September 19, 2008Every now and then, people hire me to travel places and give workshops for college instructors and teachers on using bioinformatics. In a couple of weeks, I'll go to Long Branch, NJ. This week, I went to Corpus Christi, Texas and gave two workshops at Del Mar College; one on using Cn3D to understand protein DNA structure, and another on using BLAST to identify the source of unknown DNA sequences.
Del Mar College has a beautiful science facility, with an amazing assortment of fancy high tech equipment. The workshops were fun and I enjoyed seeing the student posters showcasing work on the…
ddobbs | September 5, 2008You want mail, write about cell phones and DNA.
Earlier today, when I posted a heads-up to a Science story about questions raised about data-tampering in what Science called "The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers" showing strong links between cell phone use and DNA mutations, I noted I was surprised at the lack of press coverage about this, given how heavily most papers on the subject are reported. Two hours later I got a note from Louis Slesin, who blogs on such issues at Microwave News, asserting that the Science story oversimplified the situation. Slesin pointed me to his Sept 3…
grrlscientist | January 22, 2008tags: technology woes, humor, streaming video
Since you are all starting your work week after a wonderful football- and booze-filled three-day weekend, I thought I'd share this video of people who are really having a bad day -- thanks to technology. Music is "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter [4:16]