Study finds young people are growing horns from cellphone use

Are smartphones turning us into monsters? In a BBC report about the changing human skeleton published last week, biomechanics researcher Dr. David Shahur of the University of The Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, says he’s noticed an increasingly common horn-like growth at the base of the neck — sometimes so large they can be seen and felt through the skin. “I have been a clinician for 20 years,” Shahur says, “and only in the last decade, increasingly I have been discovering that my patients have this growth on the skull.” These horns or “spikes,” which clinicians call an “external occipital protuberance,” were first noted in 1885, but thought to be so rare that French scientist Paul Broca — credited for his research on the area of the frontal lobe dubbed Broca’s area — argued the anomaly was undeserving of a medical diagnosis. “He didn’t like it because he had studied so many specimens, and he hadn’t really seen any which had it,” says Shahur, who decided to pick up where scientists left off at the turn of the century. (Read more)

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