Cell Phone Dangers ?

Wondering why cell phones could possibly be so dangerous to teenagers - there were warnings on the radio all this week - I decided to do a little research myself.

The topic also gives me an excuse to use the diagram pictured. I got almost as pleasant a jolt of 'instant understanding' from a diagram like that as when I was first introduced to the periodic table. If you could enlarge the picture, you would recognize that what we call light has a much broader range or spectrum than the small portion of it we can actually see as the colours of the rainbow. Interesting that birds and bees can ‘see’ a little on either side of our visible spectrum.

Well established theory says that light is made up of particles called photons that travel in waves at the speed of light. The length of the waves gets shorter and shorter as you go from left to right in the diagram. The wiggly lines representing wavelengths run from the straight baseline up to the arc. Radio waves on the left have the longest waves from 20 meters long down to 1 mm. Next to them are the more energetic microwaves with wavelengths from 1 mm. to 25 millionths of a meter or 25 micrometers. Next, as you see, are infrared through visible to ultraviolet to X-rays and Gamma rays. The x- rays are so energetic they can do damage to cells on occasion.

Fundamentally there is no difference between the radiation emitted by cell phones and microwave ovens except for power – they overlap in the electromagnetic spectrum of frequencies. Since cell phone waves can penetrate 4 - 6 cm (1.6 - 2.4 in) into the human brain the worry is that, if

more powerful microwave frequencies (shorter wavelenghs) are used, the young developing brain may be harmed by the breaking of weak molecular bonds.

One solution is that cell phones almost all have a feature that allows you to use them as speaker phones so you don’t have to hold them up to your ear except for private calls. Or why not start texting or twittering more ? Rie