Could Cell Phones Be Killing Off Bees?

Researchers in India are concerned that cell phones might possibly be assisting in the decline of the honeybee population all across the world. Due to these concerns, researchers at the Punjab University in Chandigarh decided to investigate whether or not these claims had any basis.

Over the past years, many different countries have seen an undeniable decline in their bee populations. Now many could say that there are a variety of natural causes for this decrease such as climate change, pesticides, and viruses. Despite these possible natural causes, Indian researchers felt that cell phones might also be a plausible culprit. They decided to perform a controlled experiment to explore the possibilities of cell phone interference with the life process of the honeybees.

For the experiment, they had three separate bee hives. One hive had several cell phones placed around it, another had several fake cell phones surrounding it, and the final hive had nothing around it. The real cell phones placed around one of the three bee hives were GSM 900MHz. “The exposure given was 15 minutes twice a day during peak bee activity.”

At the end of three months, the researchers were able to observe some very interesting results. The hive that was surrounded by the real cell phones suffered a significant decline in population. The queen bee of the hive surrounded by cell phones laid less than half of the eggs that the queen bees of the hives that had the fake cell phones or nothing around them. There was also no pollen or honey to be found in the hive that had been surrounded by cell phones.

The researchers that conducted the experiment, Ved Parkash Sharma and Neelima Kumar, stated that they chose to conduct the experiment because there was a growing amount of evidence that electromagnetic fields are to blame for the decline in the bee population. They are afraid that all the radiation from cell phones might possibly be messing with bees’ ability to navigate their way back to the hive.

Certainly more experiments will need to be conducted, but I feel that this information is quite interesting. It definitely seems that cell phone radiation could possibly be killing off honeybees. Hopefully after some more research, a conclusion will be reached as to whether or not cell phones are at least partly the reason for the decrease in the bee population across the world.

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Why Do Cell Phone Conversations Annoy Us Sometimes? Scientists Might Know the Answer…

So scientists think that they have now discovered why you might get completely annoyed when you overhear someone’s cell phone conversation. Scientists from Cornell University say that it takes more concentration and attention to listen to half of a conversation instead of just overhearing two people talking.

Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study that is set to be published in the Psychological Science magazine, says, “We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation (or halfalogue) than when listening to a dialogue…Since halfalogues really are more distracting and you can't tune them out, this could explain why people are irritated.”

It was recorded this year that the amount of minutes that Americans spend talking on their cell phones has increased over ninefold since 2000. Last year Americans spent over 2.3 trillion minutes talking on their cell phones.

According to the U.N. agency, the International Telecommunications Union, there are over 4.6 billion cell phone subscribers throughout the world. This is equivalent to about two-thirds of the world’s population. This means that there are very few corners of the world that aren’t plagued by the chatter of cell phone users.

China and India lead the polls in terms of the number of cell phone users that they have. China has 634 million users, India has 545 million, and the United States has 270 million.

Emberson says that the reason that people get so annoyed with cell phone conversations is because they try to make sense of little snippets of the conversation and then predict what the speaker will most likely say next. She states, "When you hear half of a conversation, you get less information and you can't predict as well…it requires more attention."

All of the information that Emberson and her co-author and fellow researcher Michael Goldstein collected was based off of a study that they conducted with 41 college students. They had them perform different concentration exercises while hearing either one or both parties who were having a conversation on their cell phone.

After the experiment was conducted, it was concluded that students made more errors when they only heard one side of a conversation. Emberson says that this shows how overhearing a cell phone conversation can cause disruption to our every day tasks and, that includes driving. She states, "These results suggest that a driver's attention can be impaired by a passenger's cell phone conversation."

I felt that this study that was conducted was extremely interesting. Now I have a better understanding of why I get annoyed when people around me are on their cell phones sometimes. When I really think about it, it is because I’m trying to guess what the person on the other end of the conversation is saying, and I’m attempting to predict what the speaker will say next. The only thing that the study didn’t come up with was a solution to tune the halfalogue out. So I guess for now we will all have to continue to be annoyed by cell phone conversation and do our best not to be too annoyed.

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Cellphones Are Making Landlines Obsolete

U.S. reporters stated on Wednesday that about twenty-five percent of U.S. homes have abandoned their landlines and taken to just utilizing their cellphones. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has also found that about fifteen percent of household who do have the standard landlines with plug-in phones almost never use them.

The NCHS, which is a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost completely depends on telephone surveys to gather their information about the American public’s health. This decrease in use of landlines could cause some problems with their information gathering.

Some of the information that the NCHS collected shows some interesting implications for the cellphone industry in America. The data was taken from 21,375 different households across America. 40,619 of those surveyed were adults and 14,984 were children were under the age of 18.

The reports stated that, "One of every four American homes (24.5 percent) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cellphones, or mobile phones) during the last half of 2009 -- an increase of 1.8 percentage points since the first half of 2009. In addition, one of every seven American homes (14.9 percent) had a land line yet received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones."

Almost 52 million Americans live in a household that only utilizes cellphones. The study also found that nearly half of adults aged 25 to 29 lived in a household that doesn’t use a landline.

Honestly, this information does not come as a shock to me. It’s crazy how much people use there cell phones. Really what’s the point of a landline for young adults? Some people, like my grandparents, hold on to their landlines and appreciate their simplicity. In the next few decades, I believe that the use of landlines is likely to almost disappear. Everything is going cellular. It’s so much easier to the younger generations. Although these statistics may seem drastic, expect to see the numbers rising even more in the future.

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