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Rating Your Cell Phone
It's amazing that no matter how much time we dedicate to a topic (20 minutes, 30 minutes, or even the whole hour!), there's always something we can't get to.
Today on our segment reacting to the new World Health Organization statement that cell phone radiation may be carcinogenic to humans, one of our callers asked what cell phone she should buy. We were short on time, and though the question did get addressed to a degree, here's what we didn't get a chance to clearly lay out: Phones have SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) ratings related to the radiation they emit. However, our guest, Joel Moskowitz says this rating system is actually misleading because it's based on the maximum output of the phone. He thinks we should be paying more attention to the average output. He also says you can get different exposures even with the same basic phone, based on the carrier you choose. Some operate closer to the maximum output all the time, while others are much lower more of the time.
A final behind the scenes note: We producers pick the photo to accompany our show posts, often using this handy Flickr search tool. There were many possibilities for this story, and I eventually settled on something different, but I really liked the aesthetic of this one:
Photo credit to Esther Gibbons on Flickr!
