Telecom
Cell Phones Causing Young People to Grow Horns on Skulls- Research
Researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia have found evidence that our frequent use of mobile devices could be causing horn-like bone spurs to appear on younger adults.
New research in biomechanics suggested that mobile phones are remolding human skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviours but the bodies we inhabit.
According to the research, 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 weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion.
The result is a hook or hornlike feature jutting out from the skull, just above the neck.
In academic papers, a pair of researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, argues that the prevalence of the bone growth in younger adults points to shifting body posture brought about by the use of modern technology.
They say smartphones and other handheld devices are contorting the human form, requiring users to bend their heads forward to make sense of what’s happening on the miniature screens.
The researchers said their discovery marks the first documentation of a physiological or skeletal adaptation to the penetration of advanced technology into everyday life.
Health experts warn of “text neck,” and doctors have begun treating “texting thumb,” which is not a clearly defined condition but bears resemblance to carpal tunnel syndrome. But prior research has not linked phone use to bone-deep changes in the body.
“An important question is what the future holds for the young adult populations in our study, when development of a degenerative process is evident in such an early stage of their lives?” ask the authors in their most recent paper, published in Nature Research’s peer-reviewed, open access Scientific Reports.
The study came out last year but has received fresh attention following the publication last week of a BBC story that considers, “How modern life is transforming the human skeleton.”
Since then, the unusual formations have captured the attention of Australian media, and have variously been dubbed “head horns” or “phone bones” or “spikes” or “weird bumps.”
Each is a fitting description, said David Shahar, the paper’s first author, a chiropractor who recently completed a PhD in biomechanics at Sunshine Coast.
“That is up to anyone’s imagination,” he told The Washington Post. “You may say it looks like a bird’s beak, a horn, a hook.”
However it is designated, said Shahar, the formation is a sign of a serious deformity in posture that can cause chronic headaches and pain in the upper back and neck.
Part of what was striking about their findings, he said, was the size of the bone spurs, which are thought to be large if they measure 3 or 5 millimeters in length. An outgrowth was only factored in to their research if it measured 10 millimeters, or about two-fifths of an inch.
The danger is not the head horn itself, said Mark Sayers, an associate professor of biomechanics at Sunshine Coast who served as Shahar’s supervisor and co-author. Rather, the formation is a “portent of something nasty going on elsewhere, a sign that the head and neck are not in the proper configuration,” he told The Washington Post.
Their work began about three years ago with a pile of neck X-rays taken in Queensland. The images captured part of the skull, including the area where the bony projections, called enthesophytes, form at the back of the head.
Contrary to conventional understanding of the hornlike structures, which have been thought to crop up rarely and mainly among older people suffering from prolonged strain, Shahar noticed that they appeared prominently on X-rays of younger subjects, including those who were showing no obvious symptoms.
The pair’s first paper, published in the Journal of Anatomy in 2016, enlisted a sample of 218 X-rays, of subjects ages 18 to 30, to suggest that the bone growth could be observed in 41 percent of young adults, much more than previously thought. The feature was more prevalent among men than among women.
The effect — known as enlarged external occipital protuberance — used to be so uncommon, Sayers said, that one of its early observers, toward the end of the 19th century, objected to its title, arguing that there was no real protrusion.
That’s no longer the case.
Another paper, published in Clinical Biomechanics in the spring of 2018, used a case study involving four teenagers to argue that the head horns were not caused by genetic factors or inflammation, pointing instead to the mechanical load on muscles in the skull and neck.
And the Scientific Reports paper, published the month before, zoomed out to consider a sample of 1,200 X-rays of subjects in Queensland, ages 18 to 86.
The researchers found that the size of the bone growth, present in 33 percent of the population, actually decreased with age. That discovery was in stark contrast to existing scientific understanding, which had long held that the slow, degenerative process occurred with aging.
They found instead that the bone spurs were larger and more common among young people. To understand what was driving the effect, they looked to recent developments — circumstances over the last 10 or 20 years altering how young people hold their bodies.
“These formations take a long time to develop, so that means that those individuals who suffer from them probably have been stressing that area since early childhood,” Shahar explained.
The sort of strain required for bone to infiltrate the tendon pointed him to handheld devices that bring the head forward and down, requiring the use of muscles at the back of the skull to prevent the head from falling to the chest. “What happens with technology?” he said.
“People are more sedentary; they put their head forward, to look at their devices. That requires an adaptive process to spread the load.”
That the bone growth develops over a long period of time suggests that sustained improvement in posture can stop it short and even ward off its associated effects.
The answer is not necessarily swearing off technology, Sayers said. At least, there are less drastic interventions.
“What we need are coping mechanisms that reflect how important technology has become in our lives,” he said.
Shahar is pressing people to become as regimented about posture as they became about dental hygiene in the 1970s, when personal care came to involve brushing and flossing every day. Schools should teach simple posture strategies, he said. Everyone who uses technology during the day should get used to recalibrating their posture at night.
As motivation, he suggested reaching a hand around to the lower rear of the skull. Those who have the hornlike feature can likely feel it.
Starlink has become a major internet service provider in Nigeria, driven by its reliable, high-speed access.
Its success has led to local internet service providers losing subscribers and raising concerns about unfair competition, according to restofworld.org, which reports global tech stories.
Critical institutions have avoided using Starlink’s network because of national security concerns.
In the sprawling electronic market of Lagos’ Computer Village, an item is flying off the shelves: the Starlink kit.
These satellite dishes, with their distinctive white faces and plug-and-play simplicity, represent more than just easy internet availability in Nigeria. They symbolize a technological coup in Africa’s most populous nation, where terrestrial broadband or wireless options are unreliable or inaccessible.
“I have about 20 pieces in the store, but I’m sure they will go before today ends or at the latest tomorrow morning,” Quadri AbdulFatai, a local electronics vendor who claims to have sold more than a thousand units in just 13 months, told Rest of World. “Starlink is very hot now.”
In January 2023, Nigeria became the first African market that Starlink entered.
Two years later, it now ranks second among internet service providers, which are classified separately from large telecom players by the Nigerian authorities.
With over 65,500 users at the end of the third quarter last year, Starlink is second only to 16-year-old Lagos-based ISP Spectranet, according to data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country’s telecom regulator.
At current growth rates, analysts predict Starlink will become Nigeria’s top internet service provider by mid-2026.
The secret to Starlink’s meteoric rise lies in a simple market reality: Nigerians are desperate for reliable, high-speed internet, which local providers have consistently failed to deliver, according to Temidayo Oniosun, managing director at Space in Africa, a market intelligence company focusing on the continent’s space and satellite industry.
Telecom companies and traditional ISPs in Nigeria suffer from frequent outages, sluggish speeds, and spotty coverage, especially in rural areas where terrestrial infrastructure is limited or nonexistent.
“Nigerians want high-speed and reliable internet, and Starlink’s technology offers that better than anyone else,” Oniosun told Rest of World.
“That’s why it is growing at an incredible speed. While the services aren’t the cheapest, launching with different pricing in different African markets shows that Starlink understands the markets.”
Starlink has made investments in building infrastructure in Nigeria. It has built a base station in Lagos and plans to add facilities in neighboring Abeokuta and Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s oil hub.
These stations will enable the company to beam low-latency internet directly to its rapidly growing user base throughout the country. Low latency is the ability of a network to respond with minimal delay.
Starlink’s success has unsettled competitors. When the company increased subscription prices last October, local operators cried foul, accusing regulator NCC of applying double standards by ignoring their requests for tariff reviews.
The regulator eventually granted local providers a 50% tariff increase in January, but customer perception had been damaged.
The regulator has fostered a fair and enabling environment that empowers all licensed operators, including Starlink, “to compete, innovate, and grow in response to market needs,” an NCC spokesperson told Rest of World.
The regulator has fostered a fair and enabling environment that empowers all licensed operators, including Starlink, “to compete, innovate, and grow in response to market needs,” an NCC spokesperson told Rest of World.
The regulator has licensed over 27 satellite-based communications services providers and issued over 90 landing rights to space segment operators, which include established providers like Eutelsat, SES, Viasat, and YahClick.
“In recent times, the commission has observed growing interest from both established global players and new entrants (especially those providing emerging satellite services) seeking to enter the Nigerian market,” the spokesperson said.
“This level of engagement reflects growing investor confidence in Nigeria’s digital economy and the enabling environment provided by the commission.”
Nigeria has 241 licensed ISPs, of which only 124 had active users as of the third quarter of 2024, collectively serving more than 300,000 subscribers, according to NCC data.
Starlink’s arrival has been nothing short of catastrophic for incumbents. Market leader Spectranet lost 8,428 subscribers between the last quarter of 2023 and the third quarter of 2024, while Tizeti lost about 700 in the same period.
While the losses appear modest, they are significant in the context of the small size of the market served by Nigeria’s ISPs.
The internet landscape is more dominated by mobile network operators MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and 9mobile, which collectively serve 132.4 million subscribers, providing both internet access as well as traditional phone services.
The playing field is fundamentally uneven, said Temitope Osunrinde, chief marketing officer at Tizeti.
The challenges for local operators include buying spectrum and building local capacity, hiring talent, and paying multiple taxes. If digging for fiber, they have to contend with multiple local government right-of-way permits and also area goons.
“You can’t compare Starlink with local companies because they don’t have to set up local capacity, nor hire and set up an office,” Osunrinde told Rest of World.
Gbenga Adebayo, chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), believes Starlink’s success reflects not a failure of local providers but “a challenging operating environment, which includes issues such as multiple taxes, multiple regulations, high right-of-way charges, infrastructure vandalism, and the rising cost of foreign exchange.”
Yet for ordinary Nigerians, these industry complaints hold little water compared with the tangible benefits of reliable connectivity. “For me, it was less speed and more concern about constant internet blackouts during meetings,” Olumide Lewis, a Lagos-based tech worker who recently installed Starlink, told Rest of World. “Since we bought our Starlink, we have had some peace of mind. We don’t spend our time thinking about the bad internet again because everything just works.”
MTN Champs Season 3 Lagos Continental Relays concluded on April 12, 2025, with a vibrant closing ceremony at the Yabatech Sports Complex.
This event marked a historic moment in Nigerian athletics, featuring the debut of the Olympics-approved mixed relays and showcasing exceptional talent across various track and field events.
The final day was a blend of intense competition and entertainment, drawing families, friends, and MTN Nigeria staff to the stands. Guests enjoyed music, games, and the much-anticipated MTN Staff Relays, where teams from different departments competed for medals and bragging rights. The Innovators emerged victorious, clinching gold in both male and female categories.
MTN executives also joined the fun, participating in 50m sprints and emphasizing the importance of physical activity. Chief Human Resources Officer, Esther Akinnukawe, highlighted the company’s Go M.A.D (Make A Difference) campaign, encouraging individuals to stay active and impactful in their fields.
The Lagos Continental Relays attracted over 2,500 entries from 155 schools, with participants competing in four age categories: Cadet (U-14), Youth (U-17), Junior (U-20), and Senior. The event not only celebrated athletic excellence but also reinforced MTN’s commitment to nurturing future Olympians and building a legacy of sports development in Nigeria.
Season 3 of MTN Champs continues with the grand finale scheduled to take place in Uyo at the Godswill Akpabio Stadium from April 30 to May 3.
MTN Group, Africa’s leading telecommunications provider, has joined forces with Meta to improve the quality and reliability of voice and video calls on real-time calling applications such as WhatsApp across 12 MTN markets.
The collaboration, which began at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024, focuses on optimizing application-aware networks and network-aware applications to deliver a seamless and high-quality user experience. By leveraging data analytics and conducting comprehensive testing, MTN and Meta have successfully developed solutions that enhance the interaction between mobile networks and real-time calling applications.
Nigeria, MTN’s largest market, was the first to implement these enhancements. Early results indicate a remarkable 50% improvement in key performance indicators (KPIs), significantly enhancing the user experience for MTN Nigeria mobile users.
“This implementation further demonstrates our commitment to enhancing our customers’ digital experience.
“We’re pleased with the remarkable improvement in our real-time communication services, reflecting our commitment to innovative customer solutions,” said Yahaya Ibrahim, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at MTN Nigeria.
Diego Marí, Head of Network Ecosystems Engineering at Meta, added, “The collaboration allows us to deploy advanced solutions for an unparalleled real-time experience in Nigeria and showcases our dedication to elevating service quality and improving user experience, while striving for continued efficiency in traffic delivery.”
The partnership underscores MTN and Meta’s shared vision of delivering cutting-edge solutions to enhance digital communication across Africa.
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