Lately, a little bit of press has been given to people who claim to be sensitive to wireless network or cellphone signals, some of whom have convinced school systems to remove wireless networking from entire buildings in order to protect themselves and their children. This has always been a little fishy to me (I posted about an Oak Park, Illinois debate back in October of 2003); these signals are pretty much omnipresent at this point (for example, microwaves put out quite a bit of energy at the same frequency as WiFi), so getting rid of a single WiFi access point or cellphone isn’t really making that big a dent in the total sum of non-ionizing radiation that surrounds any one person. Well, thankfully, there’s now some science to support that position: the British Medical Journal performed a double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled study and found that those who claimed to be sensitive to GSM cellphones were unable to identify the presence or absence of a phone with any reliability. Better still, when individuals with ostensible symptoms of sensitivity were told that the wireless signal had been discontinued, their symptoms improved whether or not a signal had been discontinued. The same study hasn’t been done with WiFi yet, but it’s just a matter of time. (Thanks to Glenn for the pointer.)