Not long ago, Five Nerds made a semi-tasteless (alright, completely tasteless) joke about the longstanding hypothesis that cell-phones give you cancer.

We said that it wouldn’t be long before people were shouting about the risks of radiating our noggins, and it appears we were right.

Submitted for your reading pleasure, an article about a recent study which suggests that people who use their phones actively have “significantly higher” brain activity in the area closest to the telephone antenna.  The National Institutes of Health study measured glucose metabolism of the brain as an indicator, and it is still too early to predict whether the effects are long-lasting or dangerous. 

The article further suggests that wireless earpieces might be a lower wattage alternative to holding your antenna so close to your dome.

With that said, if you have the choice of radiating your brain, or not radiating your brain, it really doesn’t seem like a choice, does it?

So it’s just a matter of time before people start re-hypothesizing that cellphones give you cancer, especially in light of recent news that Steve Jobs is on indefinite hiatus.

Rather than take the high-road, we decided to be first into the pit, and created this clever infographic to illustrate how the iPhone 4’s antenna might be a game-changer.

We encourage you to sign up for Tumblrs for Humanity if you are offended (or even if you aren’t).

Most fans of science and academia would agree that Berkley University is one of the top institutions when it comes to research.

One of their defining achievements is BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).  For those unfamiliar, BOINC is a Distributed Computing Platform, which uses distributed systems to solve computational problems. In distributed computing, a problem is divided into many tasks, each of which is solved by one computer.  Essentially many computers around the internet can work together to solve small pieces of a much bigger problem.

Researchers found that distributed computing can be used to solve all kinds of problems, including those found in mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics; and volunteer computing was born.

Computer users on various platforms all over the world donate spare processing power from their computers, when idle.  If you are surfing online, working on a project, or playing a game; the distributed computing software stays dormant, and does not affect your user experience.  Volunteer computing is like donating to a worthy cause without any cost to you. 

Today, we created a new account with World Community Grid, which is hosted on BOINC, and hosts some great causes like Computing for Clean Water; The Clean Energy Project; Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy; Help Fight Childhood Cancer; Help Conquer Cancer; Human Proteome Folding; and FightAIDS@Home.  Help Fight Childhood Cancer is a cause near and dear to my heart, but there might be a cause that appeals more to you.

I encourage you to take action. Download and install secure, free software that captures your computer’s spare power when it is on, but idle. You will then be a World Community Grid volunteer.  Use your Tumblr screen name if you want, and help promote your blog.

We also created a team, called Tumblrs for Humanity.  Please join so we can see the good work that socially minded bloggers can do!

My hope is that you will not only join this great cause, but that you will spread the word.  Would you kindly consider joining and/or re-blogging this to spread the word to the Tumblr community?