Legislator Wants Cancer Warnings For Cell Phones

Cytalk writes "A Maine legislator wants to make the state the first to require cell phones to carry warnings that they can cause brain cancer, although there is no consensus among scientists that they do and industry leaders dispute the claim. The now-ubiquitous devices carry such warnings in some countries, though no US states require them, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. A similar effort is afoot in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom wants his city to be the nation’s first to require the warnings."

Comments

Nitrogen Warning

[handy_vandal]

For one of the facilities where I work, I had to take site-specific safety training before they would issue me a key. Included in the training was a note that there "may be nitrogen present in the air". This was included due to LN2 tanks being present in the basement, but it's a sorry state of affairs when you have to warn people that they MAY inhale some nitrogen.

May be a legitimate concern. LN2 (liquid nitrogen) tanks might leak, causing an asphyxiation hazard.

Same with helium tanks. Break the valve, and you might suffocate an entire room filled with balloon-twisting clowns and the children they were entertaining ....

Mythbusters confirmed it spectacularly.....

[Ellis D. Tripp]

They used a rig that would cleanly sever the valve from a compressed air tank that was laying on the ground, simulating the frequent stories of a welding tank that gets knocked over, snapping the valve off in the fall.

The tanks performed EXACTLY as claimed, shooting across the floor at high speed, and punching cleanly through a cement block wall.

There is a metric buttload of stored energy in a high pressure gas cylinder...