Sunday, April 15, 2007
On cell phones and bees
Glenn Reynolds rounds up the reax to Drudge's front page story, "Are Cell Phones Wiping Out Our Bees?" The TigerHawk sister, who happens to be an entomologist and is therefore more qualified than most to evaluate the science of the matter, responds with her trademark skepticism:
Different species will not necessarily be affected the same way as humans, especially such distantly related groups such as insects, but as of yet I, as an entomologist who does not specialize in bees, doubt that cell radiation is causing CCD. The article quotes some one knowledgeable about cell radiation, not insects, in asserting the likelihood that it does. Most important, bees navigate primarily via polarized light, which is in a completely different part of the EM spectrum from radio waves. How radio waves could possibly impact their use of light for navigation (any more than it does humans' use of light for navigation) is at best nonintuitive, so I would never believe it until I saw the published paper showing me the evidence. I am not holding my breath for that paper to appear.
4 Comments:
By 
Lanky_Bastard, at
Sun Apr 15, 05:24:00 PM:
I had a cell phone that caused interference on nearby speakers. Worse, the time I left it on my TV, the whole set went black and white when I got a call. I don't have a great explaination for why that happened either, but ever since I've been very careful to turn it off when boarding planes.
By Purple Avenger, at
Sun Apr 15, 08:07:00 PM:
I don't know about bees, but there are some big FPL transmission lines cutting through a nature preserve I've been working in recently.
You don't see much in the way of wild life near those power lines. 1/4 mile to the side it starts to crawl with birds and alligators, a mile away there's so many gators and birds you can't shake a stick at'em.
Three miles into the place it starts to become clear that you ain't at the top of the food chain anymore in that neighborhood ;->
By 
, at
Mon Apr 16, 01:53:00 AM:
Damn--the Tigerhawk sister is as bright as her bro!
By , at
Mon Apr 16, 10:24:00 AM:
Its kind of like these eco-freak jerks trying to blame sonar fir cuasing the whales to go swimming aground when its acuialy those jerk from GREENPEACE who drive the wahles wacky with their stupid protests
