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Great.  Our kids' addiction to cell phones has not only turned them into automatons who only respond when the house is on fire, have helped them lose all social graces and can now break up in a text.  But a new study says their addiction may now lead to academic failure, as well. According to newswise.com, women college students spend an average of 10 hours a day on their cellphones and men college students spend nearly eight, with excessive use posing potential risks for academic performance. A new study notes that approximately 60 percent of college students admit they may be addicted to their cell phone, and some indicated they get agitated when it is not in sight, according to researcher James Roberts, Ph.D., The Ben H. Williams Professor of Marketing in Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business. The study — based on an online survey of 164 college students — examined 24 cellphone activities and found that time spent on 11 of those activities differed significantly...

So now it's stroke?  A while back all the news was aflutter about the brain cancer risk of cellphones.  And now it's stroke. According to The Daily Mail, the metal used in some  cellphones  doubled the risk of stroke of users in a recent study. Current exposure to the metal is low, the newspaper reports, but it's being used more and more in mobile phones, computers and even light bulbs. Eight thousand adults in the U.S. between 18 and 74 were followed for 12 years (I didn't even  know  what a cellphone was, 12 years ago!) and strokes occurred more frequently in this group than those who used cellphones significantly less. The metal is tungsten and high levels of it can cause stroke, especially in people younger than 50. During production, small amounts of this metal escape into the environment, landing in rivers and farmland, where food crops are grown, and also in the air. It seems to affect some people more than others, although scientists do not ...

Have you ever wanted to kill (oops, contain) someone yakking on their cellphone next to you on the bus?  Had to read the same paragraph over 12 times to get its meaning?  Been unable to work on an assignment your boss needed yesterday? A new study has found why.   It's because our brains feel the need to fill in the blanks when we only hear one side of a conversation. According to Douglas Quenqua, "College students who were asked to complete anagrams while a nearby researcher talked on her cellphone were more irritated and distracted — and far more likely to remember the contents of the conversation — than students who worked on the same puzzles while the same conversation was conducted by two people in the room." As Tyger Latham reports, "According to Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman, authors of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us , the reason cell phone conversations are so grating to most of us is because they are in fact "half conversations," in whi...

We may learn from cow brains how cellphone radiation affects ours. http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/mri-maps-heat-from-cellphone-radiation-in-jarred-cow-brains/8951?tag=main;river