School experiment finds cress won’t germinate near router (Danish)

http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2013/05/16/131324.htm

by vy8vWJlco • 13 years ago

99 95 13 years ago

dr.dk

ColinWright• 13 years ago

Google translate:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js...

jriordan• 13 years ago

there's an English version:

http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Andre_sprog/English/2013/05/17/1309...

atdrummond• 13 years ago

How did they control for factors other than the router? Did they again attempt germination when the 2 devices were completely off? I'm not convinced when entirely separate rooms were used.

abraininavat2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I'm sure school experiments have found all kinds of crazy things. Can we wait to post this until someone replicates the results?

egwor• 13 years ago

I'd love to repeat them, but then I'd be without internet for a week or two. Decisions, decisions!

On a serious note; how different can this be from the research for mobile phone interfering with nature??

johansch4• 13 years ago

Why should we only discuss replicated/confirmed results of scientific experiments?

edh649• 13 years ago

In school I once did an experiment with %112 yield.

ImprovedSilence• 13 years ago

I mean, yeah, we all know, article included, that this isnt necessary conclusive results, but it is interesting. And now these girls got lots of attention for it, and by reading the article it looks like a few academics/scientists are going to pick up on the research and do "real science" on it. Also, yes, it's not like we know/read how well the experiment was controlled. For all we know, they had an excellent control, and that's why they are getting all this press. Who knows, but it happened, the researches are on it, and it was interesting. I don't got time to wait, I want my news this minute!

jvilalta• 13 years ago

Adverse Influence of Radio Frequency Background on Trembling Aspen Seedlings: Preliminary Observations

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijfr/2010/836278/

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

That's really interesting.

    The RF shielded group evidenced more vigorous growth,
    producing 74% more total leader length and 60% more leaf 
    area than the mock-shielded group, though the number of 
    leaves produced by both groups was nearly the same.

And

    Leaves on active leaders in the shielded group were 
    substantially free of leaf tissue lesions (Figure 7), but 
    unshielded and mock-shielded leaves were all affected to 
    some extent by leaf tissue necrosis (Figure 8)

Would be nice if they had analyzed the spectrum to identify roughly what frequencies/equipment this area is exposed to.

Just like in the electronics-on-airplanes issue, it concerns and wonders me that there isn't more research being done in such basic areas.

mayank• 13 years ago

Google "Hindawi journal scam". These guys regularly send me spam soliciting publications, and are most likely a thinly veiled paper factory. I wouldn't trust a thing I read in a Hindawi "journal".

M4v3R5• 13 years ago

A fun experiment if you use an USB WiFi stick - put it on an USB extender cable and lay on any plant in your home. After few days the plant will most probably die in this place.

Tichy• 13 years ago

Why?

M4v3R5• 13 years ago

Because it's basically a small microwave, at 2.4Ghz. Its harmless from a distance, but if it's very near the antenna, it will toast the flower.

sliverstorm5• 13 years ago

Nobody knows for sure. At this point there's just a few experiments supporting the idea, no one has made any claims about a possible mechanism for action.

That doesn't mean it isn't true. I would not be especially surprised if 2.4GHz interacted in some special way with plant cells.

Ellipsis753• 13 years ago

Fun fact: This post has no sources and no one has tried it yet but many people will still believe it.

M4v3R5• 13 years ago

It's basically anecdotal evidence, something that I personally observed with my plant and my USB stick. Is it necessary to have sources for my own observations?

nwh3• 13 years ago

Literally the strangest thing I've ever read on HN. I've two large plants (spathiphyllum) that sit with their pots on either side of my wireless router. They're as healthy can be, though they do get a little brown when I get absent minded.

M4v3R5• 13 years ago

The question is probably how close they are to the antennas. In my setup, the USB stick was pasically left on the plants leaves, the plant acted as a scaffold for it. And it maybe I wasn't clear enough - the whole plant didn't die, just the exact spot when the USB stick was touching the leaves.

M4v3R5• 13 years ago

Wow, any reason I got downvoted for this? I'm not a wireless opponent or something (I'm probably using much more wireless devices in my home than most people), just stating my observation.

Nursie• 13 years ago

Yeah, just like that experiment with the 'evil' microwaved water I bet.

dnautics9• 13 years ago

One suspicion I've always have is that high frequency radio waves can induce microcurrents in supercoiled DNA. It's been speculated by the Barton lab¹ that the base excision repair error-correction mechanism actively surveys DNA by injecting electrical current into the DNA and 'searching' for lesions which disrupt the conductivity of DNA. Some circumstantial evidence for this is that a major "base excision repair" component has a redox-active iron-sulfur cluster, and at least one study shows that the oxidation state of this iron-sulfur cluster can change how well it attaches to DNA.

The mantra that we always hear is that if the radiation isn't ionizing it's harmless. While this mechanism for worrying about non-ionizing radiation doesn't directly cause harm, it's not quite 'harmless' either.

This mechanism would render quite a few results not surprising. Biologically, there are many stages where not having DNA error correction could be more catastrophic than usual. It makes sense that seed germination is one of these; temporarily decreased sperm count in human males would be another.

The experiment to check this hypothesis is pretty obvious, and I'll probably be doing it sometime in the next few years, especially if I can get my nonprofit research org. up and running.

Edit: Footnote [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Barton

dnautics9• 13 years ago

wow, since there seems to be quite a bit of interest in this, I'll definitely be writing up a project prospectus. Check back in January of 2014, which is when my 501(c)3 status will clear. It's a reasonably easy experiment and a yes/no answer can be figured out within two years (that's an overestimate).

carbocation• 13 years ago

Why not run a kickstarter type thing and do this sooner, as a for-profit?

api• 13 years ago

Very, very interesting. Evolution has been trying things for billions of years, and chances are it exploits all kinds of very subtile properties of matter. It's probably found all kinds of uses for quantum effects too.

It would be a rather bad thing if this were the case, though what I'd want to know is: what's the required dose? Radiation diminishes with the square of the distance, so do you have to be right next to the emitter? Or will just having WiFi within, say, 10ft do it?

That being said, there is a solution: use lower frequencies. The frequencies used by WiFi are very high largely because all the lower frequencies are being squatted on. In particular, many devices uses the 2.4ghz band because this is the wide-open "water absorption band" that is only lightly regulated by the FCC. This band also turns out to be the band most likely to be biologically active, as it resonates with the hydrogen bonds in water.

cyanoacry• 13 years ago

I find this pretty unlikely, for the same reason that nanobots have difficulty communicating: it's hard to make an antenna at those size scales that can receive a signal, much less contribute to chemical-level energy changes.

At the point where the wavelength of the EM radiation is small enough to get detected by DNA-scale antennas, it's probably already classified as ionizing radiation.

dnautics9• 13 years ago

DNA molecules are pretty long. And this isn't a Nyquist law issue (I don't think) because there isn't a need to transmit coherent information. You just need to apply enough of a voltage to kick over the redox state of two iron atoms (midpoint potential ~ -20 mV) every so often.

bifrost• 13 years ago

I find it hard to believe that the school built a faraday cage for this experiment :)

X45• 13 years ago

Relevance? You, plants and animals don't live in a Faraday cage, so this would distort the results. But I agree that if they were not school children, but grown up, then they should do the same test but additionally try it again using a faraday cage.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

It wouldn't "distort" the results. It would enable you to get results at all. The number of likely uncontrolled results in this "experiment" means that it was worthless for anything other than getting children excited about science.

lifeformed6• 13 years ago

This is pretty off topic, but this reminds me of a weird thing that happened to me:

Over the weekend, I rearranged the furniture in my computer room in my home, and had just settled in to this new layout. Everything was working fine: my computer and my internet connection were all good to go. I booted up Counter-strike to play some rounds. However, the in-game server browser failed to find any servers. I closed the game and checked my internet connection: everything was fine. Maybe the master server was down? I went to bed.

The next day, I tried it again, and the same thing happened. No one else reported an issue. I tried playing TF2, and the same thing happened: all online functionality was nonexistent. It seemed like it must be a router configuration issue, but I hadn't messed with that in a while, and my games all worked fine last week.

I was able to play the same games on other computers without any issue. But as soon as I loaded up a game on my primary computer, I noticed the internet would go out for every system in my room. Maybe it was something with Source engine games? I tried a completely different game (some 2D indie puzzle game), and the same thing happened. Every game! The internet would go out, and turn back on as soon as I closed the game. It wasn't Steam either: non-Steam games did the same.

And it ONLY happened with games. Almost every other application worked fine. I was about to reformat, but I first tried booting into a separate OS on my computer and the SAME THING happened.

Finally, I noticed it failed with Unity and also with Photoshop. These programs all had one thing in common: they were GPU accelerated. How did that affect anything? Well, it only started happening after I rearranged my furniture. I had moved my router to sit on top of my computer. I moved it away by 1 foot, and then everything worked fine. It turns out, my laptop has Nvidia Optimus, which toggles between the discrete GPU and integrated graphics chip. When I launched a GPU accelerated program, my GPU would kick in, and I guess its operation emitted some electromagnetic field that interfered with my router.

brador• 13 years ago

It might be the fan. Do more experiments and report back. You can also purchase Em field detectors or make one yourself.

lifeformed6• 13 years ago

What do you think the fan would do?

rorrr2• 13 years ago

The universe is telling you to stop playing games and do something useful.

lifeformed6• 13 years ago

But that's my job :(

c0nsumer• 13 years ago

Did you have a self-assembled machine? This is one of the big reasons for all the shielding in big-brand computers: mitigating the potential for weird interference like this.

lifeformed6• 13 years ago

I didn't assemble it, but it's not a big-brand computer - it was hand assembled by a small shop.

The router is cheap though.

scott_s• 13 years ago

Back when I lived in the dorms in college, I had a metal loft bed. My desk, with computer and monitor, was underneath it.

At the end of the year, I gave back the loft. The next time I turned on my monitor, the screen was messed up. Distorted with purple waves. I stared at my monitor for a few moments, baffled.

Then I hit the degauss button, and everything was fine. My monitor had been normalized to the presence of a metal frame around it, distorting the magnetic field.

dghughes• 13 years ago

Sometimes even in a room made of wood no large metal objects nearby and then moving a CRT monitor 90 degrees is enough to mess it up requiring it be degaussed.

I'd say the metal frame had ferrous metal in it which is magnetic your monitor was affected by it, I can't see if fixing it. Once removed the source caused your monitor to require degaussing because a large source of nearby magnetism was removed.

As to why it wasn't affected right away when it was new my guess is a lot of monitors have built-in degaussing each time it is powered on, so gradually the metal nearby was affected by the degausing coil in the CRT monitor. When metal bed frame was removed the loss of such a large piece of nearby magnetism was too much for the normal start-up automatic degaussing to handle.

danmaz74• 13 years ago

This is very interesting, but I would wait for some confirmations. If I read correctly, they didn't even repeat the experiment themselves.

lifeguard• 13 years ago

Every time my aunt's back hurts the Dow Jones average drops 3.7 points! Is she a stock genius?

saurik2• 13 years ago

When I was in 8th grade I did an experiment that found that mold grew better nearer a cathode ray tube computer monitor. I had, however, in retrospect, failed to control for the CRT monitor being a source of heat and light (if not much). I also did not verify it wasn't just due to the one side if the table being closer to something unrelated in my basement. I did very well in the science fair anyway (I have a plaque somewhere, and I think I had gotten it for the state-wide level), as for a "school experiment" the competition bar is quite low, and there are a ton of other factors on which you are being judged than "scientific accuracy". This kind of research is really no better than the people reporting homemade experiments constantly whom we often label "crackpots".

omd• 13 years ago

Here's a crazy thought. What if they use this opportunity to teach kids about the processes of scientific discovery and how it is sometimes based on pure chance. What if they then teach those kids about the scientific method and how to conduct a controlled experiment. Even if the story turns out to be a dud I guarantee the experience would make the students much more excited about science than growing some cress in a window sill.

Or we could explain how a bunch of scientists are crackpots for even thinking such a thing.

saurik2• 13 years ago

I feel like you are arguing with me. I am saying this because a some people are commenting here about what the ramifications of this discovery is; others, asking "serious" questions about the quality of the research, as if they should have taken certain things into account. I am pointing out that this isn't the right context for that analysis.

Also, that education is not news to post here in the first place. This is not a website where children are learning about science. There are tons of "discoveries" made as school experiments: I don't expect to see them on the front page of Hacker News (unless, like, there is some kind of serious interest in the larger science community). ;P

Havoc• 13 years ago

At that level, the experiments have little value beyond getting kids interested in science, which ultimately provides massive value. So let them field their massively flawed experiments by all means...

Zigurd• 13 years ago

The articles don't say if the experimenters knew which router was powered, for one thing. There is way too much scope for bogusness here.

antirez• 13 years ago

Any suggestion about relatively cheap equipment to measure the RF field with some degree of accuracy? I found many companies selling this stuff but can't judge easily what's good and what not. I'm interested in the 900mhz - 3Ghz range.

X45• 13 years ago

There was some research in Visualizing WiFi with Light. Here are the results: http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/visualizing_wifi_signals_...

varjag• 13 years ago

A friend of mine did his duty service at an old radar site. When they were bored they'd send a pulse through antenna and the birds sitting on it would flip dead.

Granted the energies involved are not comparable, but a router is active much of the time. Also remember you deal with inverse square law here, the effect likely fades out quickly with distance.

bborud• 13 years ago

It could be as simple as the plastics in the router enclosure giving off fumes :-)

(No reason to get your panties in a bunch before the results can be reproduced and a cause has been isolated)

X45• 13 years ago

I accidentally developed a new kind of polymer when I was in the 7th class. It becomes thin as skin when wet and hard as hard-plastic when dry plus it smelled like menthol.

The interesting part was that I didn't use oil or something else, but only minerals available in a cheap chemistry-kit. My chemistry teacher was excited to find that out, showed it to my class, but didn't understand how it worked.

icoder• 13 years ago

"two routers emitting roughly the same type of radiation as an ordinary mobile phone." Wait, what?

School experiment finds cress won’t germinate near router (Danish)

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