WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 25 Sep 09 Washington, DC

1. CELL PHONES: "INCONCLUSIVE" MEANS THEY FOUND NOTHING.
Last week, Senate hearings were held asking whether cell phones cause brain
cancer. Brian Walsh, writing for Time, described the outcome
as "inconclusive." A collective groan rose from the nation’s
physicists. "Not again?" It's been almost 17 years since David Reynard,
whose wife died from brain cancer, was on Larry King Live. Reynard was
suing the cell phone industry. He said his wife, "held it against her
head, and talked on it all the time." That was enough for Larry King.
However, all known cancer agent act by breaking chemical bonds, producing
mutant strands of DNA. It would be like suing me for hitting someone with
a rock thrown across the Potomac River. George Washington is said to have
thrown a silver dollar across the Potomac. I can't throw that far, and
microwave photons can't break chemical bonds. Not until you get up to the
near ultraviolet, about 10,000 times more energetic than microwaves, are
photons capable of causing cancer
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/93/3/166 .

2. LIMITS TO GROWTH: NOW IT’S CALLED "PLANETARY BOUNDARIES."
It seemed to many of us that the culture police must have outlawed any
mention of Earth's ultimate problem. The word "population" is now rarely
mentioned by the media. This week in Nature, the population problem is
given a new name. "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity" is the Feature in
today's issue. It’s an edited summary of a longer paper available at the
Stockholm Resilience Centre. The study was led by Johan Rockstrom. To
facilitate debate and discussion, Nature is simultaneously publishing a
number of linked commentaries from independent experts. It may be the most
important project Nature has ever undertaken. Numerical boundaries to
human activity beyond which our planet would risk not recovering are:
anthropogenic climate change, ozone depletion, ocean acidification,
biodiversity, freshwater, the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and
change in land use. In the case of anthropogenic climate change and human
modification of the nitrogen cycle we may already have crossed the
boundary. It could be argued that the boundaries are simply surrogates for
the overriding problem of reducing human population.

3. SNIFFER: PORTABLE BOMB DETECTER LOCATES PIGEONS.
According to NPR, Iraqi authorities have spent millions of dollars to
outfit checkpoints with handheld devices that point to explosive
materials. Many U.S. officials scoff that it’s about as reliable as
dowsing for water, but others think dowsing works too. In fact, the
Pentagon has bought a few
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN98/wn092598.html .

4. NASA: AUGUSTINE’S HEAVTY DOSE OF REALITY THERAPY.
The Augustine summary was mostly advice on living within your budget. The
summary advises extending the life of the ISS, but not because any
important discoveries are likely. Rather, as the Economist put
it, "spending a quarter of a century building something and then scuttling
it looks bad, even if the science that’s been done on board could be
written up on the back of a postage stamp."

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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