I have no idea whether cell phone use turns your brain into a doughnut.

But I imagine if someone were clever enough to create an iPhone app that told you how much radiation your phone was emitting, and therefore how big a hole your brain might soon enjoy, you might just be interested.

Unfortunately, it seems that though there might be such an app, you won't be able to partake of its skills on your iPhone.

According to TechCrunch, an Israeli developer called Tawkon created an app that, with the help of a finely tuned algorithm, measures your Specific Absorption Rate. This is the rate at which your whole body, not just your little brain, absorbs energy from a radio frequency magnetic field. The Tawkon app then factors in environmental conditions and phone usage in order to give you some accurate sense of your exposure to bad rays.

No, no. It wasn't radiation that turned them this color.

(Credit: CC Incase Designs/Flickr)

Something that seems quite clever to a lay(ing down) person, this app tells you in which location radiation is strongest while you are making a call.

You launch a call through the iPhone's address book and the app then vibrates to the tune of the radiation levels. An alarming tone offers the information that you'd better get out of wherever you are if you ever want to visit your hairdresser again.

If real-time search is the axis around which the world is currently turning, then real-time radiation information seems a fine thing to have at one's ear.

However, Tawkon claims that Apple has banned its invention. It says Apple called and positively radiated regret that Tawkon's app would not find a place on the iPhone as it would create confusion with respect to usability.

I am not sure what usability confusion useful information might create. But I hope that blind panic, the mass tossing of iPhones into watery graves and the elimination of cell phone user sanity were not amongst the fears that led to this decision.

I have no idea whether Tawkon's app is as fine as its makers say. Reports suggest these are serious people with some kind of serious track record. One of its founders, Gil Friedlander, has an enthusiastic and persuasive blog in which he declares that a BlackBerry version of the app is almost ready. And I just know that Google will approve this app because it's just so darned scientific.

Perhaps some time soon, we will all be rushing in and out of various locations, our phones clutched to our ears, sweat dripping from our nostrils, because Tawkon has warned us that our current location is not a safe one in which to talk to our grannies.

More : http://news.cnet.com/apple/?tag=hdr;snav