Mobile phone myths busted

No longer live in fear of your mobile blowing up petrol stations or frying your brain. We debunk the biggest mobile myths. Source: ThinkStock

 

WE still overhear people wrongly telling others what they should and shouldn’t do with their mobiles. Here are the hard facts, people. 

A mobile phone can cause a petrol station to explode. Wrong.

It’s not gonna blow! Mobiles have never caused a petrol station fire. Source: ThinkStock

 

You have seen the warning signs at the pumps forbidding you to use your mobile on the forecourt. You may have even been shouted at by one of the attendants. Despite the fear there has not been one event where a mobile has caused a petrol station fire as they have virtually no capacity to do so.

A hoax report appears to be the cause of this myth, where three incidents of fires caused by mobiles were sent to Shell and then erroneously passed around the company. In reality, not one mobile has been the fire starter. There have been numerous studies and tests that all came up with this same conclusion. Even Mythbusters tried their hardest and failed.

The worry comes from the idea a phone battery could cause a spark — something you don’t want around flammable liquid. However, unless the battery was inexplicably faulty, mobile batteries do not spark so this won’t happen. If safety boards were worried about batteries near the pumps, what about that massive one sitting under your car bonnet? The more likely cause of petrol station fires come from a build up in static electricity, often from the material from the seat as you exit the car.

A mobile phone can cook an egg. Wrong. 

Ever since phones became mobile there have been people running for the hills from fear it’s emitting some sort of invisible ray that’s slowly cooking us. This cracking hoax about how a couple of mobiles could cook an egg surfaced on the internet and people fell hook, line and sinker. It showed an egg wedged between two mobiles and with one handset calling the other for 65 minutes it was hot and ready to eat.

Cooking an egg with a mobile

Yes, mobiles do emit radiation but it’s a fraction of a fraction’s worth of power (mobiles typically only can produce 0.25W) needed to cook an egg. It certainly couldn’t produce the 70 degrees or more to have you getting your soldiers ready. It’s been proven that not even a 100 mobiles all piled on top of an egg calling each other could warm an egg more than a degree.

What’s more ridiculous about this myth is that mobiles don’t even directly transmit to each other. They have to call a nearby relay first, so putting the egg between them makes no difference

Mobile phones cause brain cancer. Wrong (so far). 

Sleep easy in the knowledge mobiles have not been found to be linked to cancer. Source: ThinkStock

 

Much like the egg myth, the fear of radiation from our phones can make us a bit uneasy especially when we put them to our heads to use and sleep right next to handsets on bedside tables. Scientists have been studying the effects of mobile use and links to cancer for almost 20 years and have found no conclusive evidence they do. The Cancer Council explains that mobiles are ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) devices and this low-powered radio and microwave radiation doesn’t not have the right frequency or energy to ionise molecules and change DNA. In short: while there is still some uncertainty due to the lack of long term study, evidence thus far suggests there is no link between mobiles and cancer.

Excessive charging kills the battery. Wrong. 

To charge or not to charge is no longer the question. Source: ThinkStock

 

No, you don’t have to let your battery completely drain before you recharge. Back in the day, old NiCad batteries found in our early handsets would have a memory where by repeatedly charging when half full, for example, would result in unspent cells effectively dying. But modern day Li-ion batteries will come of no harm whatever the percentage of power you’ve got left.

So if a know-it-all tries to tell you otherwise if you’re plugging your mobile in everyday, you can politely inform them it’s actually the preferred method of charging.

Also, if you leave your phone on charge and it’s reached 100 per cent you don’t have to worry there. Smartphones are smart enough to stop juicing once it’s full.

Closing all your apps will save battery and make your phone run faster. Wrong. 

While this sounds like it should be right, the fact is by closing all those apps it takes it out of the phone’s memory (RAM). Again, this sounds like something you want to do to but it means when you open the app again it takes more processing effort for the phone to reload than it would have to just leave it.

Unless you’ve got background app refresh turned on (which does drain battery, especially for the Facebook app) apps freeze right at the very place you left them. They do not continue to drain memory or data. In the case of Apple’s iOS it will close apps for you if it requires more memory.

news.com.au 31 July 2014