Do smartphones cause cancer? Maybe not but they do kill your desire for chocolate. And marijuana.

Okay, part of that I made up. In my novel, The Empty Spaces, the very popular smartphone app (The Empty Spaces) does not appear to cause cancer. I wrote in the book, as I believed, that smartphones probably have a minimal impact on cancer rates and, let's face it, we've all made our choice. We choose smartphones.

Of course, this being a novel and all I explained how smartphone radiation effectively sterilized select receptors in the brains -- the very ones, and they are the same, that promote the feelings of being 'high' from consuming marijuana, or eating chocolate.

Time will tell if this was prescient or just wild ass storytelling. Time will not tell, it seems, at least not in a definitive way, if smartphones actually do cause cancer. Via the "largest study" undertaken:

Proving a negative in science is really, really hard — and that may well be the task that researchers trying to evaluate the potentially carcinogenic effects of cell phone use may have before them.

To wit: in a new study published in the BMJ, European researchers — looking at more than 300,000 Danes who had used cell phones — concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that using a cell phone increased the chance of developing a brain tumor. That was true even for people who had used cell phones for more than a decade, and the BMJ study is the biggest so far to look at cell phone radiation and cancer. As the study authors themselves wrote in the conclusion:

In this update of a large nationwide cohort study of mobile phone use, there were no increased risks of tumours of the central nervous system, providing little evidence for a causal association.

Case closed, right? That all depends on your perspective. Other researchers and activists were quick to criticize the study, arguing that it was still not broad enough to fully exonerate cell phones. Devra Davis, an expert in the environmental causes of illness and the president of the Environmental Health Trust, said in a statement:

From the way it was set up originally, this deeply flawed study was designed to fail to find an increased risk of brain tumors tied with cellphone use. In order for any study of a relatively rare disease like brain tumors to find a change in risk, millions must be followed for decades.

[Brian: bonus points for their use of 'to wit' which I'm the only one that I ever see using that ol phrase]