Popcorn and cell phones

Ahh, marketing. Such an honest profession. :nono:

 

So the second video won't play for me - can someone summarize it?

 

The second explains how the first was faked. Popcorn was dropped from above, and the kernels were edited out.

 

Cool - thanks Hyo.

 

That's pretty funny though, if dishonest... I loved the small shot of people piling a dozen phones on some kernels to try to get them to pop!

 

So i couldn't help but think about this from an engineering perspective...

A microwave usually takes 3 minutes to cook a bag of popcorn - the first kernels don't start popping until at least a minute in. So for the equivalent, you could need to subject the kernels to a steady stream from your cell phone for at least a minute.

Further, a microwave uses directed energy - you put the kernels into a faraday cage and blast energy at them on a wavelength around 2.5 GHz - the correct size to excite water and fat molecules.

Conversely, a cell phone doesn't direct its energy in the same way a microwave does - it just spits it out in every direction because the tower could be anywhere. It also uses a different frequency - depending on your carrier, anywhere from 800-1900 in the US (although this does vary and is always changing as new technologies, like 4g, are introduced). Simply put, those frequencies aren't absorbed by water or fat, so they would have no affect on the kernels. Plus, your cell phone puts out a lot less power than a microwave does - that's why it doesn't need a faraday cage to protect you and all the other electronics in the room.

So that's a rough (and i stress rough, as i'm certainly not a chemist) engineering analysis of it...

 

lol...very funny... but a disclaimer should be posted. some people will actually think there is a real danger from cellphone use


obtw... your cellphone puts out about 1500% more power while its ringing. so what is the danger here??? holding your cellphone up to your ear while its ringing and NOT ANSWERING it?? or....

FYI; the amount of power your cellphone needs to operate is approximately 20-30% the level you receive from Earth's magnetic field 24/7

 

I've heard that cell phones can cause uncommanded acceleration in the Prius.

You heard it here first.

Tom

 

This is a bit closer to reality that many people think.

For a real world example, look back a quarter century to the Army Blackhawk helicopters performing uncommanded power nosedives as they passed over pirate CB or Ham stations illegally running 1kW amplifiers. I seem to recall about two dozen fatalities before this was acknowledged and fixed. Unlike the Navy version of this bird, the Army version was not properly protected against EMI (electromagnetic interference).

I need to dig up an IEEE Spectrum article from that era that contained a laundry list of fatalities traced to uncommanded actions triggered by EMI.

Cell phone powers should be too low to trigger these problems, but other types of mobile radio could. Does anyone else remember the old signs requiring mobile radios be turned off when driving through construction zones involving blasting? Same problem.

 

You would be surprised what cellphones could do... here at work, our conference rooms all have the same conference phone setup. You always know when someone in the room is getting an e-mail on their iPhone or Blackberry, because of the interference you can hear on the speaker - even when the conference system isn't in use.

That being said, working in the medical device industry, we're probably more aware of the potentially lethal affects of EMI than most people - otherwise pacemakers would be going crazy on people all the time.