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By editorial@silicon.com, 17 July 2001 17:30

COMMENT Hands up who knows what SAR means? Anybody? No, thought not. Well, the good news is this. The big three mobile phone makers are now going to tell us what the SAR on their handsets is. The bad news is that few people will be enlightened and nobody will be reassured. It's hard enough to understand a mobile tariff plan let alone whether a SAR of 0.5 is better than 1.0. So, what exactly is SAR? It stands for specific absorption rate - the rate at which it warms up your head, measured in watts per kilogram. The maximum permitted level of SAR for a mobile is 2.0. Understanding radiation itself is even more complicated. Basically, there is a lot of it about and it comes in a dazzling range of flavours - alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, microwaves, electric fields, magnetic fields, UV, VLF, ELF, you name it, it's there. The various research papers on each different kind of radiation basically run along the same lines. They say: "We can measure it. We exposed some small animals to it. At massive doses it seems to be bad for them. There is some rather sketchy evidence that in massive doses it's bad for people. But it's only sketchy, and hardly anyone gets those doses. Otherwise, your guess is as good as ours." What about all those papers, that say they make you think faster? Give your brain cancer? Cause tumours in your left eye? Well, they're not very persuasive either, and once you get this far from GCSE physics, science isn't a very convincing business. On a precautionary principle, you might stop your kids using mobiles, if only because they may never learn to use vowels if you don't. In twenty years time, we will know a little more - but only because any ill effects will have started to emerge. In the mean time, it's nice to know that someone official is paying attention even if the rest of us are still more worried about crossing the road.