Remember those bathroom readers filled with trivia, factoids, and stories? They’ve been entertaining in the throne room since 1988. Though the 35th anniversary edition came out last fall, it didn’t hit the bestseller lists. The truth is most of us have something else to distract us in the bathroom—our smartphones. We pull them out on…

Congressman Scott Perry (R-Pa.), whose personal cell phone was seized by the FBI a day after it raided President Donald Trump’s Florida home, said citizens are right to question if the agency’s actions are politically motivated. Perry, a Trump ally, was traveling with his family when three FBI agents visited him and took his personal cell phone…

“Are men talking their reproductive health away?” a 2015 study in the Asian Journal of Andrology asks. There have been “unexplained declines in semen quality reported in several countries,” according to a 2014 review in Environment International. Might cellphones be playing a role? “Radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation [RF-EMR] from these devices could potentially affect sperm development and function,”…

Do mobile phones cause brain tumors? Whenever a trillion-dollar industry is involved—whether it’s Big Food, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, or Big Telecom—there’s so much money that sometimes the science can get manipulated. When it comes to the potential human health effects of cell phone use, certainly, you might end up with a crick in your…

China recently issued conflicting sets of data for the number of cell phone and landline users in the country. But the data all reflect a net loss of millions of cell phone users, leading some to speculate whether the decline was due to the economic downturn, pandemic-related deaths, or something else all together. Today, nearly…

A U.S. intelligence agency is buying phone location data without using warrants, according to a newly released document. In a memo dated Jan. 15 (pdf) to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said analysts had searched U.S. device location data five times in the past two-and-a-half years. The Supreme Court ruled in…

A U.S. intelligence agency is buying phone location data without using warrants, according to a newly released document. In a memo dated Jan. 15 (pdf) to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said analysts had searched U.S. device location data five times in the past two and a half years. The Supreme…