Cellphone use may be causing young adults to grow horns on skulls

duyunne

Jedi Council Member
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A nearly three-centimetre-long, horn-shaped protrusion is seen at the back of the skull of a 28-year-old. Australian researchers say many young adults are developing bone spurs similar to these because of their posture while using smartphones and tablets. (Scientific Reports / Creative Commons)

Humans appear to be evolving to grow horn-like protrusions at the back of the head, and researchers believe smartphones and tablets may be to blame.

Two Australian academics have been studying the phenomenon for several years. Their research lays out a compelling case for the use of handheld electronics leading to a noticeable change in the skeletons of young adults.

David Shahar and Mark Sayers began looking at the issue when Shahar – a practising chiropractor who calls himself “Dr. Posture” – noticed that X-ray results of many of his younger patients showed unusual bulges protruding from the back of the skull, just above the neck.

Looking at more than 200 people between the ages of 18 and 30, Shahar and Sayers foundthat 41 per cent of them had horn-shaped bone spurs in the backs of their skulls. All of the protrusions measured at least one centimetre while the largest was approximately 3.5 centimetres long.

Up until the early part of this decade, it was largely assumed that it was much more rare for these protrusions to be seen in young people. Medical evidence suggested that they were more common in older people, who had spent several decades developing them due to long-term pressures on their spine.

Further research showed that assumption to be false. As revealed in a 2018 paper by Shahar and Sayers, people aged 18 to 30 were much more likely to have the protrusions than people in their 30s, 40s or 50s. Only once people entered their 60s did the level of protrusions even start to approach the level seen in the youngest adults.

The significant age gap allowed researchers to rule out activities such as sleeping position and bicycle posture, and focus instead on newer trends.

“We hypothesize [the protrusions] may be linked to sustained aberrant postures associated with the emergence and extensive use of hand-held contemporary technologies, such as smartphones and tablets,” the researchers wrote.

“Our findings raise a concern about the future musculoskeletal health of the young adult population and reinforce the need for prevention intervention through posture improvement education.”

Shahar and Sayers believe the increase in handheld device use is putting unprecedented strain on users’ bodies. As people tilt their heads forward to look at their screens, the researchers hypothesize, they increase the weight load on the muscles located at the back of the head, causing bone to grow to help the body cope. Better posture could help people avert this sensation, they said.

Men are more likely to have the protrusions than women. The researchers suspect this is because men are more likely to use their devices for gaming or watching sports events, requiring longer periods of holding the devices, while women are more likely to use them for shorter social activities.

“Although the ‘tablet revolution’ is fully and effectively entrenched in our daily activities, we must be reminded that these devices are only a decade old and it may be that related symptomatic disorders are only now emerging,” they wrote.



Re:
 
There was also this article on SOTT the other day: How modern life is transforming the human skeleton

From the emergence of a spiky growth at the back of some people's skulls to the enigmatic finding that our elbows are getting narrower, our bones are changing in surprising ways

It all started with a goat. The unfortunate animal was born in the Netherlands in the spring of 1939 - and his prospects did not look good. On the left side of his body, a bare patch of fur marked the spot where his front leg should have been. On the right, his front leg was so deformed, it was more of a stump with a hoof. Walking on all fours was going to be, let's say, problematic.

But when he was three months old, the little goat was adopted by a veterinary institute and moved to a grassy field. There he quickly improvised his own peculiar style of getting around. Pushing his back feet forwards, he would draw himself up until he was standing half-upright on his hind legs, and jump. The end result was somewhere between the hop of a kangaroo and a hare, though presumably not quite as majestic.

Sadly the plucky goat was involved in an accident soon after his first birthday, and he died. But there was one final surprise lurking in his skeleton.

For centuries, scientists had thought that our bones were fixed - that they grow in a predictable way, according to instructions inherited from our parents. But when a Dutch anatomist investigated the goat's skeleton, they found that he had begun to adapt. The bones in his hips and legs were thicker than you would expect, while the ones in his ankles had been stretched out. Finally his toes and hips were abnormally angled, to accommodate a more upright posture. The goat's frame had started to look a lot like those of animals which hop.

Today it's an established fact that our skeletons are surprisingly malleable. The pure white remains displayed in museums may seem solid and inert, but the bones beneath our flesh are very much alive - they're actually pink with blood vessels - and they're constantly being broken down and rebuilt. So although each person's skeleton develops according to a rough template set out in their DNA, it is then tailored to accommodate the unique stresses of their life.

This has led to a discipline known as "osteobiography" - literally "the biography of bones" - which involves looking at a skeleton to find out how its owner lived. It relies on the fact that certain activities, such as walking on two legs, leave a predictable signature behind, such as sturdier hip bones.

And from the discovery of a curious spiky growth on the back of many people's skulls to the realisation that our jaws are getting smaller, to the enigmatic finding that German youths currently have narrower elbows than ever before, it's clear that modern life is having an impact on our bones.

[...]

"I have been a clinician for 20 years, and only in the last decade, increasingly I have been discovering that my patients have this growth on the skull," says David Shahar, a health scientist at the University of The Sunshine Coast, Australia.

The spike-like feature, also known as the "external occipital protuberance" is found at the lower back of the skull, just above the neck. If you have one, it's likely that you will be able to feel it with your fingers - or if you're bald, it may even be visible from behind.

Until recently, this type of growth was thought to be extremely rare. In 1885, when the spike was first investigated, the renowned French scientist Paul Broca complained that it even had a name at all. "He didn't like it because he had studied so many specimens, and he hadn't really seen any which had it."

Feeling that something might be up, Shahar decided to investigate. Together with his colleague, he analysed over a thousand X-rays of skulls from people ranging from 18 to 86 years old. They measured any spikes and noted what each participant's posture was like.

What the scientists found was striking. The spike was far more prevalent than they had expected, and also a lot more common in the youngest age group: one in four people aged 18-30 had the growth. Why could this be? And should we be concerned?

Shahar thinks the spike explosion is down to modern technology, particularly our recent obsession with smartphones and tablets. As we hunch over them, we crane our necks and hold our heads forward. This is problematic, because the average head weighs around 10 pounds (4.5 kg) - about as much as a large watermelon.

Text neck

When we're sitting upright, these hefty objects are balanced neatly on top of our spines. But as we lean forwards to pore over famous dogs on social media, our necks must strain to hold them in place. Doctors call the pain this can cause "text neck". Shahar thinks the spikes form because the hunched posture creates extra pressure on the place where the neck muscles attach to the skull - and the body responds by laying down fresh layers of bone. These help the skull to cope with the extra stress, by spreading the weight over a wider area.

Of course, bad posture was not invented in the 21st Century - people have always found something to hunch over. So why didn't we get the skull protuberances from books? One possibility is down to the sheer amount of time that we currently spend on our phones, versus how long a person would previously have spent reading. For example, even in 1973, well before most modern hand-held distractions were invented, the average American typically read for about two hours each day. In contrast, today people are spending nearly double that time on their phones.

Indeed, for Shahar, the biggest surprise was just how large the spikes were. Before his study, the most recent research was conducted at an osteological lab in India, in 2012. That's a lab specialising entirely in bones - as you can imagine, they have quite a lot of skulls - but the doctor there only found one with the growth. It measured 8 mm, which is so small, it wouldn't even have been included in Shahar's results. "And he thought it was significant enough to write a whole paper about it!" he says. In his own study, the most substantial growths were 30mm long.

[...]

On the other side of the world, in Germany, scientists have discovered another bizarre development: our elbows are shrinking. Christiane Scheffler, an anthropologist from the University of Potsdam, was studying body measurements taken from school children when she noticed the trend.

To see exactly how much their skeletons had changed over time, Scheffler undertook a study of how robust, or "big boned", children were between 1999 and 2009. This involved calculating their "frame index", which is how a person's height compares to the width of their elbows. Then she compared her results with those from an identical study that was 10 years older. She found that the children's skeletons were becoming more and more fragile every year.

"And so we were thinking about that, what could be the reason," says Scheffler. Her first idea was that it could be genetic, but it's hard to see how a population's DNA could change that much in just 10 years. The second was that perhaps the children were suffering from poor nutrition, but this isn't really a problem in Germany. The third was that today's youth are a generation of couch potatoes.

To find out, Scheffler conducted a new study - together with some colleagues this time - in which she also asked the children to fill out a questionnaire about their daily habits, and to wear a step counter for a week. The team found a strong link between how robust the children's skeletons were and the amount of walking they were doing.

It's already well known that every time we use our muscles, we help to increase the mass of the bones that support them. "If you use them again and again, they build more bone tissue, which is measured as a higher density and bigger girth of bone," says Scheffler. The children's shrinking skeletons look like a straightforward adaptation to modern life, since it doesn't make sense to grow bone that you don't need.

But there was one surprise lurking in the data: walking was the only type of exercise that seemed to have any impact. Scheffler thinks this is because even the most avid sports fans actually devote very little time to practising. "It's not helpful if your mother takes you in the car for one or two hours per week," she says.

And though no one has looked at whether the link holds up in adults, it's likely that the same rules apply: it's not enough to simply hit the gym a couple of times a week without also walking long distances. "Because our evolution tells us that we can walk for almost 30km (19 miles) per day."

[...]

The final surprise hidden in our bones may have been happening for hundreds of years, but we've only just noticed. Back in 2011, Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel from The State University of New York at Buffalo, was studying skulls. As an anthropologist, she was keen to find out to if it was possible to tell where one was from, just by looking at its shape.

In her quest for an answer, Cramon-Taubadel had been scouring the collections of museums from all over the world for skulls to compare, and painstakingly measuring them. It was indeed the case that, on the whole, you could tell roughly where a skull was from, and who its owner was related to, just from its shape. But there was one part where this wasn't the case: the jaw.

It soon became clear that instead of being determined by genetics, the shape of the jaw was mostly affected by whether that person had grown up in a hunter-gatherer society, or a community that relied on farming. Cramon-Taubadel thinks it's all down to how much chewing we do as we're growing up. "If you think about orthodontics, obviously the reason we do that with teenagers is because their bones are still growing," says Cramon-Taubadel. "Bones are still malleable at that age and they will respond to different pressures."

In modern, farming-based societies where the food is soft and palatable, we can wolf down a meal without needing to mash it up much first. Less chewing makes for weaker muscles, which means our jaws don't develop as robustly. Another idea is that it's down to breastfeeding, because the age at which mothers wean their children varies widely, and dictates when they begin chewing more solid food.

But there's no need to mourn your weak farmer's jawline just yet. Cramon-Taubadel says the impact chewing can have on the lower face is actually fairly subtle to the naked eye. Instead, it's likely to show in our teeth. "So the main problem is that especially in post-industrial populations, we're much more likely to suffer from dental problems - dental crowding, crooked teeth, etc.," she says. "Right now, what the research is showing is that having a slightly more biomechanically tough diet, particularly in children, might be useful for counteracting some of the imbalance between the way that our teeth grow and develop and push through.".

And here there's an unexpected twist. Incredibly, it now seems that the changes to our jaws and teeth have had one welcome side effect at least - on the way that we speak. A recent study found that, as societies discovered agriculture in the Neolithic period, roughly 12,000 years ago, the changes to our bites may have allowed us to pronounce new sounds, such as "f" and "v". The researchers estimated that this transformed the languages that people spoke, from containing just 3% of these difficult sounds to 76% today.

Rather than having bites, like we do now, where the upper incisors (upper front teeth) covered the lower ones, previously adults would have had bites where they met instead. To catapult your jaw back to Neolithic times, try pushing out your lower jaw until your upper and lower teeth touch, then attempt to say "fish" or "Venice".

So what will future archaeologists make of our skeletons, when they examine them from their spaceships? If we're not careful, they'll reveal unhealthy diets, staggering levels of inactivity, and a morbid attachment to technology. Perhaps it's best to be cremated.
 
I wonder if this growth is exacerbated by DNA alteration and the occipital ridge. Also, does such a protuberance alter the youth's ability to look up into the sky?
 
I have one of those protrusions! 😞
I have a well defined occipital bump but I don’t think it’s the same thing that’s being observed in Australia. I’ve seen xrays of my head from the dentist and it doesn’t have a sharp downward pointing ridge like it does in the image above. I suspect you don’t have that either?

I’m part of the Nintendo generation, where instead of spending age 7 - 12 looking down at a screen I sat on the floor looking up at a black and white tube tv playing games or watching ghostbusters.
 
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I wonder if this growth is exacerbated by DNA alteration and the occipital ridge. Also, does such a protuberance alter the youth's ability to look up into the sky?

I don't know if the protuberance itself would affect the ability to look up, it may be possible? Technology use and the associated postures certainly contribute to dysfunctions of the upper spine, limiting range of movement. The image below shows how much weight is added to the cervical spine with head forward posture... shocking!!

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Here's a counterpoint to "cellphones are causing people to grow horns":


This week, the Washington Post grabbed plenty of attention for a story that claimed that kids are actually growing "horns" because of cell phone use. The story, which leans on 2016and 2018 research out of Australia, was cribbing off of this more nuanced piece by the BBC on how skeletal adaptation to modern living changes are kind of a thing. The Post's more inflammatory take was accompanied by a wide variety of other stories proclaimingthat today's children are growing horns and bone spurs because they use their durn cellphones too much!


The Washington Post put it this way, with an accompanying, scary X-Ray pulled from the initial research:

"What we have not yet grasped is the way the tiny machines in front of us are remolding our skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviors we exhibit but the bodies we inhabit. New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments."

The problem is that while the research did find that human skeletons are shifting and changing in the modern era due to postural and other behaviors, they weren't able to prove that cellphones were the culprit. There's a wide variety of modern human behaviors that could influence skeletal shifts, from watching television and reading books to terrible posture resulting from a lack of meaningful exercise. Only a few reporters could be bothered to note that at no point did the researchers directly, actually link the "horns" to cellphone use. In fact, technology isn't even mentioned in the source data:

"The researchers don’t mention technology or smartphones at all in their 2018 research, but they do make a statement in the discussion section of their 2016 paper. They make an educated guess that the prevalence of enthesophytes may have to do with “the increased use of hand-held technologies from early child-hood."
Their research does not prove that device use causes these bony appendages. They don’t even claim that device use and appendages are correlated. They simply make an educated guess in the discussion section, pointing to a topic for future research."
As journalist Caroline Haskins notes, the whole hysteria is reminiscent of the "smartphone pinky" scare that bubbled up a few years ago, which proclaimed that people's fingers were being "deformed" by the way they hold their electronic gadgets and smartphones. And it's tangentially related to the recent panic over the recent "Momo" hoax, which proclaimed that a viral game making the rounds on services like WhatsApp and YouTube involved a demonic-looking chicken lady goading young children into acts of violence or even suicide.

We love a good moral panic. And such panics often go viral because Americans are (if that hadn't been made clear in recent years) immeasurably susceptible to bullshit. But it's a problem made so much worse by a media that can't just focus on the amazing science and technology news and issues of the day, but instead quickly falls prey to nonsensical bullshit to generate additional ad revenue. And because the debunking stories see a quarter (or less) of the attention of the original inflammatory reports ("A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," as the old saying goes), there's a huge chunk of the public walking around with fluff and nonsense in their heads where factual data should be.
 
Holy smokes!

I'd heard a brief mention or two of this phenomenon recently, but only just finished reading this thread.

This calls back to early Cass transcript stuff of the most outlandish variety:



Q: (L) Can I ask my question now?
A: Okay, Laura. Go for it.
Q: (L) The other night we were talking about the "Mark of Cain" and I lost part of the tape. I would like to go back over that a little bit more at this time. What was the true event behind the story of the "Mark of Cain?"
A: Advent of jealousy.
Q: (L) What occurred to allow jealousy to enter into human interaction?
A: Lizard takeover.
Q: (L) Wasn't the Lizard takeover an event that occurred at the time of the fall of Eden?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Was this story of Cain and Abel part of that takeover?
A: Symbolism of story.
Q: (L) This was symbolic of the Lizzie takeover, the advent of jealousy, and the attitude of brother against brother, is that correct?
A: Partly. The mark of Cain means the "jealousy factor" of change facilitated by Lizard takeover of earth's vibrational frequency. Knot on spine is physical residue of DNA restriction deliberately added by Lizards. See?
Q: (L) Okay, Jan is going to move her hand up my back and you tell her when to stop at the "knot".
A: Okay.
Q: (L) You mean the occipital ridge?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) What was the configuration of the spine and skull prior to this addition?
A: Spine had no ridge there. Jealousy emanates from there, you can even feel it.

Q: (L) Do any of these emotions that we have talked about that were generated by DNA breakdown, were any of these related to what Carl Sagan discusses when he talks about the "Reptilian Brain"?
A: In a roundabout way.
Q: (L) Okay, at the time this "Mark of Cain" came about, were there other humans on the planet that did not have this configuration?
A: It was added to all simultaneously.

Q: (L) How did they physically go about performing this act? What was the mechanism of this event, the nuts and bolts of it?
A: Are you ready? DNA core is as yet undiscovered enzyme relating to carbon. Light waves were used to cancel the first ten factors of DNA by burning them off. At that point, a number of physical changes took place including knot at top of spine. Each of these is equally reflected in the ethereal.
Q: (L) Is that all?
A: No. But, do you need more?
Q: (L) Well, the question I do have is, how many people were there on the planet and did they have to take each one and do this individually?
A: Whoa.
Q: (L) How many people?
A: 6 billion.
Q: (T) That's 500 million more than there are now.
A: No, 200 million.
Q: (L) Okay, there were this many people on the planet, how did they effect this change on all of them?
A: Light wave alteration.
Q: (L) And light waves, actual light waves, affect DNA?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) What was the origin of the light waves?
A: Our center.
Q: (L) What is your center?
A: Our realm. STO.
Q: (L) So, how did the Lizzies use the light from the Service to Others realm...
A: They used sophisticated technology to interrupt light frequency waves.
Q: (L) Well, what I am getting out of this that you are saying from what you are not saying is that it was almost like,... well, was there a battle and you guys lost?
A: Yes.



And...



Q: (L) I don't like the implied hardness... I am not a hard person.

A: It is not hardness. The "feelings" you describe are related to ego, and by relation, pride, two things that were deliberately implanted into the 3rd density human psyche by the 4th density STS 309,000 years ago, as you measure time. Refer to the transcripts with regard to DNA alteration and the occipital ridge. Believe it or not, you, Laura, will be rid of these, eventually. It is not what some individuals respond to you that matters. It is sharing the information that counts. Also, remember, these persons do not perceive your feelings and sensitivities as keenly as you do, nor do you perceive theirs, likewise.


~~~~~~~~~~~~


I wonder if these bone growths in the same spot are evidence of more 4D STS tampering. I wonder how it relates to 5G. I wonder if SJW kids are more likely to have horns than sane and nice kids? I wonder, I wonder...
 
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