INDIAN MOBILE RADIATION

By JAMES TENAFLY

Right now we are living in the Golden Age of cellphone use. Just as with cigarettes before, we’re willfully ignoring the nagging doubts about safety and potential hazards to health so we can keep jibber-jabbering: polluting the planet with bullshit-talk and radiation. And really, I only call them “nagging doubts” because dropping the euphemism and saying “major causes for concern” would be bummer-inciting and I don’t want to ruin everyone’s good time. Then again, now that cell phone radiation is stunting crop growth in the developing world like a post-industrial Biblical plague, maybe it’s time to face reality. When a country that still has leper colonies starts complaining about the side effects of modern technology, it’s hard to dismiss those charges as “fear mongering.” Studies carried out at Panjab University found that two or four hours of cell phone radiation reduced seed germination by 18 and 30 percent respectively. Other Indian research groups are finding relationships between cell radiation and honeybees, chicken eggs, and sparrows. The latter of which have all but disappeared from India after huge swaths of the population began nesting in mobile phone towers. The radiation was apparently so strong that it brain-fried the little baby sparrows in their eggs.