There is a reason cell phones are outlawed in Green Bank, West Virginia, home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: even a single cell phone, even from miles away, would blind the radio astronomers there and make it impossible for them to see the stars. Astronomers measure radio waves in units called janskys. A typical star shines at 10 to 100 janskys. The Sun shines at about 500,000 janskys. When you hold a cell phone against your head, you are pumping energy at the rate of about 100,000,000,000,000,000 janskys into your brain.[1]
If we are going to save this planet, we have to be able to think and reason. And we have known since 1975 that microwave radiation damages the brain. In that year, Allan Frey published his ground-breaking article, “Neural function and behavior: defining the relationship.”[2] In a study on rats, he found that low-level microwaves — one hundred times lower than what people’s brains are exposed to from their cell phones today — damage the blood-brain barrier. This is the anatomical barrier that keeps toxic chemicals, bacteria and viruses in your blood from entering your brain. It is also the barrier that maintains the inside of your head at a constant pressure and prevents you from having a stroke.
At least twenty laboratories in many countries confirmed Frey’s work over the years. Finally, in 2003, neurosurgeon Leif Salford, at Lund University in Sweden, proved the obvious: that disrupting the blood-brain barrier causes brain damage. He exposed rats to a cell phone, once for two hours, at very low power, and sacrificed them fifty days later. Two percent of the exposed rats’ brain cells were damaged or destroyed.[3] He later exposed rats to a cell phone, again at very low power, for two hours once a week for a year, and found that they were cognitively impaired.[4]
And in 2020, a study has been published showing that the same thing happens in humans. A team of scientists at Heidelberg University in Germany used MRIs to examine the brains of 48 young adults between the ages of 18 and 30. They found that the more hours per day their subjects habitually spent on their smartphones, the less gray matter they had in their brains and the less brain activity was detected.[5]
[1] 1 jansky = 10-26 W/m2/Hz. The values given are for cell phone frequencies.
[2] Frey AH et al. 1975. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 247:433-39.
[3] Salford L et al. 2003. “Nerve cell damage in mammalian brain after exposure to microwaves from GSM mobile phones.” Environmental Health Perspectives 111(7):881-83.
[4] Nittby H et al. 2008. “Cognitive impairment in rats after long-term exposure to GSM-900 mobile phone radiation. Bioelectromagnetics 29:219-32.
[5] Horvath J et al. 2020. Structural and functional correlates of smartphone addiction. Addictive Behaviors 105:106334.