Digital AustinMan Exposes Himself to Cell Phones to Study Radiation

(LiveScience) To study the effects of cell phones on the human body, researchers have created a virtual body that is unmatched in its richness of detail.

"AustinMan" is a virtual receptacle for radiation, an ultra-high-resolution, three dimensional map of the human body; he is helping researchers understand more about the potential health-related effects of wireless devices.

He was born of a National Science Foundation grant, the hard work of University of Texas at Austin researchers and students, as well as a publicly available, extremely high-resolution scan of the human body made possible by a man on death row who donated his body to science.

Overall, AustinMan contains more than 100 million voxels (three dimensional versions of pixels) that interact with one another during virtual cell phone calls — experiments designed to predict how different parts of our bodies absorb electromagnetic power.