Can the Death Grip Fry Your Brain?

I’m more than a bit dubious.

How does an app measure radiation from the phone if the phone itself doesn’t a means to detect it (last I looked most phones were not equiped with EMF detectors?!)?

This seems to be science quackery at its worst. I’d hope you’d check out the validity of the tool before publishing something that will 1) scare people, and 2) scientific studies of the issues have come out as inconclusive.

I like your site, but I’m disappointed that you chose to publish a piece so lacking in any substance.

@Gilbert Thank you for sending me the link. Ironically, it supports my contention that this is (at best) weak tea and (at worst) crank science. I’ve quoted from their web site, below:

All the information related to the radiation emitted by the mobile phone is available / stored in the phone itself. This information is required by the phone for its normal operation as it needs to know how much power to transmit in order to keep the voice or data connection while the user is talking or on an active data session (browsing, VOIP, etc).

tawkon extracts this information in the form of different RF and network parameters such as: Network – whether the phone is connected to second (2G) or third generation (3G) network, Band – each phone model supports different bands e.g. GSM (850, 900, 1800, 1900Mhz) or WCDMA (850, 1900, 2100Mhz, etc) and many others.

All of these parameters in addition to various other smartphone capabilities such as motion and proximity sensors, GPS and compass are inputs to tawkon’s patent pending technology that presents the user his exposure to non-ionizing radiation.

So, what they are doing is pulling in data stored on the phone about its broadcasts, i.e., what the phone is reporting. This information doesn’t include the attenuation effects of radiation 1)passing through the device itself, 2) of the phone case, 3) the effects of a 3rd party case, 4) the effects of the hand holding it, etc.

It’s like saying, because my internal thermostat in my house is set at 68 F, that’s the temperature in the house. It could be cooler (because it’s warming up) or hotter (because it over shot).

They then claim to calibrate this in their RF laboratory. 1) I’d like third party verification this lab exists and 2) understanding all the parameters they are testing. For example, how would the program know if you using the ‘grip of death’ on the iPhone or not? All it is doing is extracting data stored on the phone regarding transmittance parameters. How can it then know if it is being gripped by hand, in a 4rd party case, in a weak signal area, etc.

Finally, the scientific jury is still out on whether the ionizing radiation from cell phones is any more dangerous than what we are continually bathed in from other devices. So, I stand by my original thesis that this article is alarmist, based on likely pseudo-science, is effectively a marketing infomercial, and shouldn’t have been published.

Recent test with rats showed rats with the Alzheimer’s disease had less progression of their Alzheimer’s when under phone-like-radiation.

They are now researching further into this, looking for ways to slow down Alzheimer’s disease through radation.

So radiation could turn out be benificial instead of harmfull.
🙂