mike_barton
Editor

Cell phones bring bees to knees?

news
Jul 27, 20071 min

Forget the fears that cell phones are killing you. On a recent trip to Oregon with my family, in part a break from technology, I could not get away from the news that cell phones were killing bees.

This fear came to a head when my niece was stung on the nose, not by a threatened bee, but by a hornet while picking berries at Sauvie Island in Portland. (Mind you, she and my 5-year-old son were chasing insects with a miniature bug-catching vacuum for this Habitrail-for-insects thing at home.)

But if cell phones causing bee population declines — and, as a result, flowering plant population declines — were not enough, the curse that is modern telecom was slighted again with the news that cell phones were erasing hotel security keys. This was the word from a hotel in Yreka, Calif., where we were staying on our way home.

So, the question raised by these stories becomes: Is all this anti-cell phone news an attempt to claw back to the day when mobile phones did not run our lives? Or is it for real?

mike_barton

Mike Barton started out in online slinging HTML for CNET.com in the late 1990s and began his editorial career at New Media magazine shortly thereafter. In his early days, he was an editor at Ziff-Davis's PC Computing and ZDNet.com before heading Down Under, where he produced and edited the business and technology sections of The Sydney Morning Herald online. After returning to the States in 2006, he has worked for IDG's Infoworld, PCWorld, Computerworld, and CSO Online. He currently edits and produces WIRED.com's Innovation Insights, and is a contributing editor at ITworld.

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