Hasta La Ideas

Ten years ago it was tough finding Wi-Fi, even here in NYC. But now it emanates from every Starbucks, McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts, not to mention many of our homes and public spaces like Bryant Park. No one can deny the convenience of Wi-Fi. But as it continues to proliferate, a group of five ninth-grade females in Denmark have conducted a study that reveals a potential downside.

The girls didn’t set out to study Wi-Fi specifically; what prompted the study was that the students reported they occasionally had trouble sleeping, and concentrating the next day, if they slept with their cell phones next to their beds. They wondered if their phones’ radiation was mucking with their bodies, but their school lacked the equipment to measure such things. So instead they substituted wireless routers for cell phones (presumably because they sit in a fixed position) and plants for human bodies, placing one next to the other for 12 days. As described by Canada’s Global Research website,

The students placed six trays filled with Lepidium sativum, a type of garden cress into a room without radiation, and six trays of the seeds into another room next to two routers that according to the girls calculations, emitted about the same type of radiation as an ordinary cellphone.

What they observed over the next 12 days was disturbing: The seedlings in the non-Wi-Fi room grew normally, whereas the ones in the Wi-Fi room “turned brown and died.”

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