Some of you might have been similarly fooled by a certain email that is circulating. It's about cell phones having the ability to pop popcorn...and thus, possibly taking a similar toll on your brain while you use them...or maybe you were not fooled...and you're laughing right now. Regardless, check out the video that has convinced many to keep perpetuating this spoof by forwarding it all their bff's and even work-colleagues.
The "YouTube" quality clip documents three different groups of people arranging their cell phones around a few raw kernels and after simultaneously calling each phone, the result is popped corn! Well I have to admit, it had me and a few co-workers intrigued enough to try it ourselves after it had been forwarded to us. Sure enough, we set up the experiment with all of its constants, and after calling all three cell-phones at the same time, each of us reached the voicemail without the birth of a single crunchy morsel. A website called snopes.com has an article that also validated our results with the popcorn; in addition to this, it debunks a rumor that had previously circulated about cell phones poaching an egg. We were disappointed that the email had fooled so many...and that this meant our cell phones wouldn't be cooking dinner for us anytime soon...but very relieved that our brains were not currently being subjected to the same electromagnetic activity powered in that one-minute pop setting on a microwave! Most young professionals, myself included, don't even own a house phone because we would never be home enough to use it. This would mean some serious pop-corn brains for us!
I do not mean to discount any claim that cell-phone usage may pose a long-term danger to our health, consumers should be compelled to wonder whether pointing radio waves at our heads from satellites in the sky has an effect on our health. But this absurdly lame spoof, that's easy to debunk with a few cell phones and minutes of your time, did get me thinking about how much credibility our society gives these forwarded emails we constantly circulate. It also made me sad that there really are people out there who actually spend their time constructing spoof videos to generate false claims to fool the masses. What other health advice have we taken from gmail or MyYahoo? I'm going to practice what I preach and take a second look before I "forward".
