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Then the FCC divided that number by ten, and that is the specification within which we now all live. For digital phones it is an average of 200 milliwatts, which is a really tiny amount of power. It is, for instance, less than 1/100th of the power used by the light bulb inside your refrigerator. In addition, the frequencies used by cell phones are "non-ionizing", which means that there is not enough power in the individual photons to disrupt chemical bonds. So the only source of danger is heating, and one fifth of a watt is really not a great deal of heat. Add to that the fact that most of the time the phone is not operating at maximum power, and the fact that most of what it does broadcast is not absorbed by nearby humans, and you can see that the actual total amount of energy to which you're being exposed is really very tiny. You get a heck of a lot more just by standing in the sun. (About a thousand times as much, in fact. And unlike cell phones, some of sunlight is ionizing and can cause cancer.) Nonetheless, there is a great deal of what from my point of view is superstitious hysteria about the potential for cancer caused by cell phones. Some of this was fanned a couple of years ago by a rather sordid incident. A certain researcher looking into (and not finding) dangers from cell phones had been getting funded by the cell phone industry itself. They ultimately decided they were wasting their money and when his grant ran out they didn't renew it. He tried to convince them to give him more and they refused. So he went to the media and started raising a stink. Ultimately this resulted in a segment about "potential dangers" of cell phones (full of inuendo and there might be's and suggestions of a coverup, and no solid data at all) being broadcast on ABC's "20-20" program. Not surprisingly, it ended with the conclusion that "more research was needed". (Guess by who?) Then the shit really hit the fan. Well, the cell phone industry can read the writing on the wall and knows when it's licked. It gave the guy more money, and he shut up. But the damage had been done, and even though there still isn't any evidence that cell phones are dangerous, and plenty of epidemiological proof that they are not, now lots of people are convinced that there is some sort of coverup. So now this story appears, indicating that cell phone companies have been working on "shields" and might incorporate them into their phones. And this morning, I received email from someone asking me whether this might not convince me that maybe the cell phone companies really have all along known about the danger. No. There isn't any danger. But it has to be understood that sometimes useless features get incorporated into products solely because customers think they are important. That makes a product which has the useless feature sell better than one which doesn't. This has been going on for a long time. For instance, about ten years ago there was a craze for putting vitamins in all sorts of things where vitamins made little or no sense, because vitamins had a reputation for being "healthy". It reached the pinnacle of foolishness when someone brought out an anti-perspirant which contained Vitamin E (for no reason which was at all obvious). And products were sold, and customers were happy, and no harm was done, so why not? It may indeed be the case that Nokia or Motorola will incorporate radiation shields into their phones. It's not that they'll make any difference, or that the resulting phones will be "safer" (since they are safe already) but rather that it will convince people that they are safer and make certain people select those phones to buy absent any other way of differentiating the products. As such, it's a good investment by the phone manufacturers. (Anything which increases sales is a good thing.) If you think about it, you should realize that these shields cannot possibly work. A cell phone works by transmitting and receiving radio waves. If the shield prevents this, then the phone can't work. If the phone is working, then the shield isn't blocking the RF. Most of the RF coming from a phone is coming from the antenna anyway (which is the function of the antenna) and a shield built into the body of the phone won't have any affect on that (and if it did it would cause the phone to cease working). But if it makes the customer happy to know that the plastic case has copper mesh built into it, and if it doesn't add a substantial amount to the manufacturing cost of the phone, why not do it? (annotate) |
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