No Shit!

I noticed this article on my usual quick scan of the news this morning, and the only thing that came to mind was a commonly (if somewhat flexibly) used phrase: NO SHIT!

Male Infertility, Cell-Phone Use May Be Linked, Scientists Say
By Patrick Donahue

Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The number of hours a man talks on a cellular phone each day may affect his fertility, with sperm count and quality deteriorating as the duration of calls increases, according to researchers in reproductive medicine.

Scientists in Cleveland, Mumbai and New Orleans tracked 364 men who were being evaluated for infertility, and split them into three groups based on sperm count. In the group whose sperm counts were within the normal range, those who used a cell phone more than four hours a day produced on average 66 million sperm per milliliter, 23 percent less than those in the group who didn't use the phones at all.

The proportion of the cell-phone users' sperm that possessed ``normal forms'' was 21 percent, almost half the 40 percent of normal sperm produced by men who didn't use the phones, said the researchers, who presented their conclusions this week in New Orleans at the annual convention of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

The effect of cell phones on sperm parameters may be due to the electromagnetic radiation the devices emit or to the heat they generate,'' the group said in a summary of the research. Further studies will be necessary to identify the mechanism involved in the reduction of sperm quality due to cell phones.''

The researchers involved in the study are from Ohio's Cleveland Clinic, the Karthekeya Medical Research and Diagnostic Center in Mumbai and the Tulane University Health Science Center in New Orleans. They said they received no outside financial support for the study.

I guess this falls into the broad category of: what you don’t know can hurt you! As someone who makes a living teaching science (among other things) I have long noticed peoples’ complete lack of understanding when it comes to electromagnetic radiation (and a host of other things, but we’ll save that for another day). You see (pun intended) the light we see by, the radio waves we listen to, the T.V. signals we watch, the radar waves that catch us in a speed trap, the x-rays that diagnose our broken bones, the gamma rays that created Godzilla and irradiated the good citizens of Hiroshima, and the microwaves that cook our food are all the same thing: electromagnetic radiation at various frequencies. Cell phones operate at frequencies of 824 to 849 megahertz, which puts them squarely in the microwave section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Hmmmmn… microwaves??!!

Cooking food with microwaves was discovered by Percy Spencer while building magnetrons for radar sets at Raytheon. He was working on an active radar set when he noticed a strange sensation, and saw that a peanut candy bar he had in his pocket started to melt. Although he was not the first to notice this phenomenon, as the holder of 120 patents, Spencer was no stranger to discovery and experiment, and realized what was happening. The radar had melted his candy bar with microwaves. The first food to be deliberately cooked with microwaves was popcorn, and the second was an egg (which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters – it’s fun, try it sometime).

A cell phone is emitting microwaves at all times when the power is on, thus when it is in your pocket or on your belt your cell phone is quite literally cooking your cojones, nuking your nads…well…'nough said.