Consider this: the allure of cellphones has been so great that it has encouraged about 50% of North Americans to adopt them, despite historic and current aversion to electronic snooping devices and invasion of privacy, despite Snowden’s leaks, and despite massive cybercrime events such as the Target hack.

In light of that, I would predict that even if cellphones somehow managed to make men completely operationally infertile, just as long as they can still “perform” in the bedroom, they won’t worry about it.

The research that’s actually needed is to find as many additional factors as possible that each reduce sperm count by a statistically significant degree, even if the effect size of each is relatively small. Then combine all of them into some kind of consumer trend that will go viral.

Here’s to hoping that “contraceptive cellphones” are as addictive in the rest of the world as they are in the USA. If this keeps up, we might get the birth rate down to a sustainable level in a decade or so.

Sure … i”ll go with that. It has just enough sciency sounding stuff to sound like science and ties into vaguely understood concepts like antenna theory and voltage differentials to sound plausible, and it ties in nicely to the underlying theme of technology being destructive to basic biological processes in some essential but nebulous way. Which IMHO is why the word ‘toxic’ gets bandied about so often.

Now let’s see if people buy into that story. If they do you can come back and observe the origin of radio-energy driven bio-electrical spermicide hypothesis.

Petr Beckmann, in his book “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear” coined a useful term when comparing the relative risk of nuclear power plants adding radionuclides in the environment that might cause mutations and/or reproductive disorders: “Pant-Years”, viz, the number of years that a man would need to wear tight-fitting trousers (or tighty-whities, we might assume) to have an equivalent increased risk of fertility problems as he would otherwise if living within a mile of a 1GW nuclear power plant.

So, how many pant-years equivalent is it carry a cell phone in your jeans pocket?

I suspect that Vitamin C intake overwhelms all of the above, though. Anecdote regarding the biological importance of male consumption of adequate amounts of Vitamin C (i.e., “not the USRDA”, which was determined non-scientifically) for proper sperm production/motility/viability: I suggested to a guy who’d had been trying to get his wife pregnant for a couple of years to take 1g+ of VC daily. His wife was pregnant within 2 months… (It WAS just coincidence, I know… No doubt!)