So you’re from another planet—Zargon, to be specific, in the Nexxon quadrant—and you’ve come to Earth on holiday. Walking through a jungle, you come across a stripy animal. It’s rather big and furry, and it’s fast asleep. Being super inquisitive, you decide to prod it awake. After all, you’ve come all this way and you’d like to find out what it is.

Turns out it’s a tiger. And now you’re looking pretty stupid. And, in a matter of seconds, you’re dead. You’re thinking to yourself—or at least your disembodied alien soul is—that maybe you could’ve been a little more cautious. Now you have all of eternity to mull it over, it seems there were some clues—the size of the muscles, the huge paws, the claws—that the furry, stripy animal was at least potentially bad for your health.

For the purposes of this article, the tiger I’m referring to is that most ubiquitous of modern day devices, the cellphone. Rescuing us from the agony of having to stand in one place while speaking to someone, the mobile phone has brought many amazing advantages: enabling us to never be out of reach from our boss; not having to get out of the car to press our friend’s gate buzzer; and last, but not least, thumb cramp from texting.

Admittedly, on a purely functional level, cellphones are quite amazing. Think back to when they arrived. We couldn’t help ourselves. Getting one was a no-brainer. But even then there were murmurings that these miraculous machines were a little less than friendly to our brains. The claws of this particular tiger, retracted though they may have been, were microwave radiation.

I’m sure everyone, even the boldest amongst us, has worried at some stage whether our cellphones are cooking our heads. I know I do. I’m always swapping my phone from ear to ear, spreading the perceived risk from right hemisphere to left.

But what does the science say about the radiation from cellphones, a decade and more after their mainstream uptake? Unfortunately, every time a study is completed, it seems the answer becomes less and less clear. The mobile phone industry punts research showing no link between brain cancer and phone usage, while various health authorities point to other studies that do.
A helpful point to start from is to consider how cellphones work and how their use might affect us. A cellphone is actually a radio. It transmits our conversations via radio waves. The waves cellphones emit don’t fall on the dangerous end of the spectrum like X-rays or Gamma rays, but they do have the ability to heat human biological tissue, the men in white coats say. In much the same way a microwave heats food, charmingly enough. Except, of course, the electromagnetic energy a microwave creates is much stronger.
What scientists don’t and can’t know at this relatively early point is what the long-term effects of holding these tiny speaking microwave ovens up to our heads could be. Professor Leif Salford, Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Lund University, Sweden, is rather blunt. “The voluntary exposure of the brain to microwaves from hand-held mobile phones... [is] the largest human biological experiment ever.”

Which is a lovely way to put it, especially to a natural worrier like myself. But then we’ve always known that was the case. I remember watching an interview on Larry King Live back when CNN first arrived on our airwaves, where a cellphone company representative openly admitted they simply didn’t know if there were health risks or not. It was just too early to tell. Over a decade later, the science, frustratingly, is still inconclusive.

There is something revealing about many of the latest studies, though. The ones producing a positive link to cancer and other ailments such as Parkinsons and Altzheimers are the ones that encompass longer-term cellphone usage (10 years and more) and higher frequency of use (around 30 minutes a day). This is true of the World Health Organization (WHO) announcement in June of 2011, a review of published research to date, which declared cellphones ‘possibly carcinogenic’. Slipping by seemingly unnoticed (we were probably on our phones at the time), the WHO report grouped cellphones in the same risk category as lead, engine exhaust fumes, and chloroform. Cough.

In an interview with the American public TV station PBS, Dr Keith Black, head of neuroscience at world-famous Cedars-Sinai Hospital in California, explained that according to his research, the risk of brain cancer doubled among long-term users. Admittedly, the odds of getting cancer are still pretty low—up to 12 people out of 100 000 from the normal rate of 6 out of 100 000—but that’s no consolation when it’s you sitting in the doctor’s rooms being told you have the disease, one of the most destructive you can get.
What’s most worrying, and what most studies haven’t addressed, are the ramifications for children. Their heads, or skulls and scalps to be more graphic, are much thinner than ours and more permeable to microwave radiation. Plus they’re on their phones a lot. And will be using them much longer than we will.

But before we collapse in a wobbly heap of angst at how our beloved technology is nuking us, it’s important to know there are some effective, commonsense measures we can take to reduce the risk. It may sound drastic, but for kids: no phone calls unless it’s an emergency. Only texting. For us thicker-skulled grown-ups: hold the phone away from the body—as you do when texting—or better yet rest it on a desk or other surface while you talk on speakerphone. Wireless headsets are not necessarily the solution—they still emit some radiation and often result in the phone being clipped to your belt or left in your pocket. Which, yes, simply shifts the cancer risk from your brain down to the bone marrow of your hip region or your testes or ovaries. Cue an uncomfortable, testicle-raising cough for any men reading this.

Another useful tip is not to use your phone in an enclosed space such as a car or lift, because this interferes with the phone’s connection to the tower, causing it to step up power of the signal and therefore the radiation.

And here’s one last wild idea, tossed out into the ether. Turn your phone off. Very few of us are that important that we need to be on call every minute of the day. Try turning your microwave unit off every now and then, watch that overburdened little screen go dead, and experience the old-fashioned peace and quiet it brings.

I’ve always leant towards cellphones being a risk, and regardless of what the cellphone giants say about their dazzling little devices of distraction, I’m going to set up camp in Cautionville on this one. As for the science, we can only really wait to see how hazardous they are or aren’t. What really did it for me, though, what nudged this reluctant user of head-warming technology back into his cave, was when the interviewer on PBS asked the eminent master of brain surgery in his reassuring blue hospital outfit whether the results of the research would change how he uses his cellphone.

“Oh no,” the doctor said unemotionally, this man who regularly peers into open craniums without flinching. “Not at all. I never hold my cellphone up to my brain. Never have. I always use it on speaker phone.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was all the science I needed.