It’s believed that cellphones — along with peanut butter, microwaves and just about everything else in life — might cause cancer. Could be true, might be false. But now, a shrewd group of inventors are banking that the potential for nuking our brains with a smartphone will help sell a device called a Pong (pictured).
The Pong, which retails for about $60, is a silicon case currently available only for iPhones. It uses a sliver of gold-plated copper to channel the radio waves away from people’s heads.
“I am convinced that cellphone radiation can cause [physical] damage and that 10 or 20 years from now we will see more cancers linked to it,” says Alfred Wong, the manufacturer’s chief scientist and the designer of the device. Wong, a professor emeritus of physics at UCLA, says the Pong’s internal antenna absorbs the radiation emitted by the phone. He called his invention a Pong because the device bounces radiation away “like a pingpong paddle, without lessening its resonance.”
But some experts aren’t convinced just yet. According to Anders Cohen, chief of neurosurgery at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, there is little evidence to link cancer and cellphones. In fact, humans absorb the equivalent of 10 X-rays just “by flying from New York to San Francisco.
“We’ve never seen an increase or any change in the patterns of brain cancers,” says Cohen. “Cellphones have been around since the 1980s — and you’d think that after more than 25 years, if there was going to be some sort of a problem like this linked to them, we’d have seen it by now.”
Cohen wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a link, however. “Because nothing is 100 percent, but the only change in brain cancer that we’ve seen since the 1980s is that people who get it are living longer.”