Tag Archives: devra davis


Posted by in podcast, wellness

Cell Phone Safety: I am (not) SAM!

by Sean Croxton

My friend SAM has a humongous head.

That thing must weight at least eleven pounds.

Then again, SAM’s a pretty big guy in general. In fact, he’s a beast.

Standing in at six-foot-two, his size and mass are about equal to the top 10-percent of all military recruits.

I like to give SAM a hard time about his head. I hope he doesn’t mind me blogging about it.

Sometimes I wonder if there are any brains in that noggin. There are days when I could have sworn I heard water sloshing around in there!

But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. At SAM’s age, I would imagine his brain is fully developed with a nice thick skull. But you never know. His weird habit of talking on his cell phone for only six minutes at a time makes me wonder. Dude doesn’t like to talk much.

Okay, okay! SAM isn’t really one of my buddies. He’s a figment of scientific imagination created back in 1996 to estimate safe exposures to cell phone radiation.

His given name is Standard Anthropomorphic Man.

SAM’s brain is unlike any human I’ve ever known. He has no hypothalamus or medulla oblongata (I love saying that). Nope, his brain is perfectly uniform. In the 90s, scientists poured liquids of differing densities into SAM’s plastic dome to measure how much radio frequency (RF) radiation reached specific parts of his “brain” as a cell phone is held ten millimeters (about 1/3 of an inch) from his ear. (Davis, 75)

When was the last time you held your cell phone 1/3 of an inch from your ear?

SAM may have liquid for brains, but at least he practices cell phone safety. Then again, Blackberry phones come with instructions suggesting that you hold your device at least 0.98 inches away from your body.

SAM didn’t read the fine print.