I’ve always wondered about this…
UK professor concludes: cellphones don’t cause gas station fires
Maybe MythBusters isn’t a solid enough scientific authority for Connecticut state senator Andreas Stillman, who wants to ban the use of cellphones when you’re filling up your car, but a professor from University of Kent in the UK has decided to settle once and for all whether cellphones can cause gas station fires (technically he studied whether cellphones cause petrol station fires, but we’re pretty sure his research applies to the rest of the world). He studied all 243 gas station fires from the past 11 years that were supposedly sparked by cellphones and determined that not a single one was actually caused by a handset. The actual cause of most of these fires? Static electricity, which is what everyone who actually knows anything about this stuff has been saying all along.