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

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.<p>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 <i>directly</i> cause harm, it's not quite 'harmless' either.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Edit: Footnote [1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Barton" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Barton</a>

When I was in 8th grade I did an experiment that found that mold grew <i>better</i> 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".

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

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.

Adverse Influence of Radio Frequency Background on Trembling Aspen Seedlings: Preliminary Observations<p><a href="http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijfr/2010/836278/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijfr/2010/836278/</a>

Google translate:<p><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&#38;tl=en&#38;js=n&#38;prev=_t&#38;hl=en&#38;ie=UTF-8&#38;eotf=1&#38;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dr.dk%2FNyheder%2FIndland%2F2013%2F05%2F16%2F131324.htm" rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&#38;tl=en&#38;js...</a>

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.<p>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.

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

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

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.<p>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.

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

It could be as simple as the plastics in the router enclosure giving off fumes :-)<p>(No reason to get your panties in a bunch before the results can be reproduced and a cause has been isolated)

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.

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

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.

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

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.