Cell Phones Aren't Killing Us After All

I'm generally the type to throw caution to the wind when it comes to the supposed quiet killers of modern life, (I drink diet coke, if that's any indication) but I can sometimes kind of appreciate the vague dread of new technology for aesthetic reasons. It's not that I particularly want my phone to incite my brain cells into rebellion, but I'm a fan of Don Delillo. I like to look at microwaves and power lines sometimes and wonder if they're having some effect on the world we can't see.

Well, there's good news, if kind of a letdown to technophobes and conspiracy theorists. Evidence is mounting that the radiation from cell phones just isn't dangerous to humans. Not even over the long term. The latest study covers up to ten years of use, and examines the effects of different kinds of phones on different areas of the brain.

If you can believe it, our phones aren't killing off the bees, either.

In part, the kind of paranoia that bee-killing theories and cancer fears speak to is practical. It's not smart to stand back and let the world fill up with dangerous technologies, especially we get to the point where we use them every day and can't get rid of them. Staying on top of what's dangerous and what's not is a part of living responsibly.

A little bit of paranoia can take our mind off our problems, too. Who really cares about what went wrong at work today if our cell phones are giving us cancer, processed food is starving us, and we're about to run out of bees?

Still, it can be easy to get the wrong idea about the latest hidden menace, even if most people just sweep the stories aside and get on with their lives. A scrap of shocking news can hit the net and spread like wildfire, but clarifications and corrections sometimes get lost.

Now, while I want to scare you and make you think, I don't want to mislead you.

For the purposes of this blog, unreliable stories that I find worth mentioning as food for thought will be clearly identified as such, and corrections and updates will also figure prominently if they're needed.

Because while it's fun to think about our cell phone towers killing off massive amounts of bees, at the end of the day it's important to understand it was actually the bee rapture.