Can Strong Magnets Effect your health?

Apart from the obvious crush between effect of such strongly closed 'castranets' the efects of strong magnetic fields are little known or inverstigated. And electroc fields for that matter (except for shocking lightning breakdown arcs).

Things that should be of importance, include such ideas as ion exchange channels, and Na, K potentials. Certain people may have better imunity to such field affectors, maybe by som undiscovered magnetase protiens.

I'm sure i remember a tommorrows world where blood extenal to the body had malaria parasites magnatized out due to heam chemistry.

The whole mobile tower (power density at or close to harmonics of

2.4GHz water absorb/heat/cook frequency) effects are to a large extent less of a problem than expose to the big solar cooker know as sol. But people can suffer from all kinds of poor-fearia, including maybe some strains as yet under twiddled by the environmental effects of new technology.

This is an honest and open opinion of an electrical and electronic engineer, who has no current profit motive.

cheers jacko

Unless, of course, you have a metal splinter in your eye from back when protective glasses were for sissies.

--
RoRo

In message , Jacko writes

Just to clarify: water does not have a resonance at or anywhere near 2.4 GHz. It's not a magic frequency, just one for which cavity magnetrons are a convenient size.

Then you'll know that for obvious reasons mobile phones don't share a frequency with microwave ovens.

--
Richard Herring

There is (was?) an eye protection safety film that indirectly causes casualties in the audience. It shows one old non-contact treatment for extracting a mild steel splinter from the eye. A powerful electromagnet with a large current pulse. The eye jumps out quite a long way. Big tough guys have been known to keel over watching it.

There are no brass magnets so it doesn't work for all metals.

People walking too close to NMR systems with ferromagnetic tools can have problems. I know of one incident with an NMR magnet snatching a scaffold pole. The NMR survived and is still working years later with an interesting dint in the outer casing. The scaffolder was a bit shaken up

- he was erecting scaffold on the outside of the building. No one imagined there was a potential magnetic hazard.

Regards, Martin Brown

I find it hard to believe as well, but not because the cell phones were in "answer mode". That is a poor characterization of cell phone operation. Cell phones are not passive devices like walkie talkies when not pressing the TX button. They are in transmit or receive mode depending on the immediate status of the protocol and are in constant communications with the cell phone towers. In particular, I can tell when I am about to receive a phone call if the phone is laying next to my computer speakers. I hear a distinctive pattern of sounds that is clearly the transmission from the cell phone getting into the speaker amp and being detected by some diode in the circuit. In fact, I heard the same sound on one of the scenes in the video.

That alone shows that the phones are at least transmitting. Whether they are popping the corn or not remains to be proven. In fact, I can see where the phones would be transmitting at maximum power. The cell tower controls the power level of the phone based on what the tower sees and what the cell phone reports. With four phones all transmitting at the same time, the noise level would be boosted significantly. The tower would try to deal with it by raising the level of each phone until they are all transmitting at their maximum power level. Still, that is around 500 mW per phone IIRC. I can't see how that would pop corn even at a distance of a couple of cm. Maybe if you could couple all the transmitted power into the corn it would heat rather quickly. But I don't see how that could be happening in the video.

Rick

And I suppose the wide band of the organic carboxylic IR spectrum absorbtion peak has nothing to do with it. especially with cavity tuning pulling via loading absorbtion, eh?

cheers jacko

Quote me a nm.

The transmit duty cycle of an idle phone is very, very low. Since an idle phone isn't generating any revenue or providing any service the protocols keep the maintenance overhead to a bare minimum. And since the antenna is omnidirectional the amount of rf power hitting the corn kernel(s) is miniscule, even if you have a hundred cell phones stacked on top of each other.

See the video that Howard linked to see how this was done.

BTW, I wouldn't recommend doing that trick with the bare magnetron, as that much power spraying around people without any shielding is pretty irresponsible, IMHO.

Eric Jacobsen Minister of Algorithms Abineau Communications

Blog:

Yes, and the industrial microwave ovens that cook pre-packaged food are typically around 900MHz. There are chunks of unlicensed ISM spectrum at 900MHz and at 2.4GHz, so they use those. The frequencies are set to match spectrum set aside for high-power industrial radiators and don't have much to do with water absorption properties.

Eric Jacobsen Minister of Algorithms Abineau Communications

Blog:

I wondered about that as I wrote.

And then there's the matter of frequency. Microwave ovens are tuned about midway between water and fat absorption bands. I doubt that cell phones operate at microwave-oven frequencies.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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I think my statement was that "nobody knows for sure", which means that there is no definitive evidence one way or the other. As for decent references, I think it's a question better posed to medical or biology newsgroups. I would only point to the smattering I've seen at the hobbyist level, referring to transcranial magnetic stimulation and more recent stuff having to do with improved blood flow and healing rate in the presence of magnetic fields.

Appropo that, here are a few links to some tidbits in the hobbyist press:

I already debunked this movie some time ago in this group. A magnetron is connected with THREE wires: two for the filament, one for the anode (which is connected through the metal chassis of the magnetron). The movie clearly only shows TWO (the filament wiring). Also, the current normally flowing though the filament would burn out those flimsy wires.

Myth busted.

Arie de Muynck

According to:

some cell phone systems operate around the 2450MHz typically used by microwave ovens.

Contrary to popular belief, the 2450MHz frequency isn't related to the physical properties of food. The choice was dictated by the need for an unallocated band, preferably a large one to allow some frequency tolerance. The final choice was related to magnetron size; many commercial microwave ovens (with larger magnetrons) operate at 915MHz.

Who gets a steel splinter in their eye and _LEAVES_ it there????????

Thanks, Rich

I once had to crawl under my mobile home to fix burst pipes. My hands got stiff, but it was about 30 below out, so I don't blame the copper. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

It could well be an allergy to one of the metals

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

Google "Persinger"

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

I saw years ago someone who got a grass seed in their eye and it remained there until it germinated.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

No-one. That's one of the uses of magnets - to extract such material from the eye. The funniest and most useless application of magnets is those fridge magnets struck onto blankets as a cureall.

The microwave properties of water are described in:

The molecular bending modes are in the IR region. The rotational and hydrogen bond modes are in the microwave region, (that is, interactions between molecules). They are pretty sensitive to other ions, such as salts, and also temperature. (The peak is about 10GHz at 0C, increasing with increasing temperaturs. At 2.45GHz, the absorption decreases with temperaturs, such that cold parts of the food will cook faster.)

In addition, you wouldn't want to be on the resonance, which would mean that the microwaves would be absorbed over a very short distance. You want the microwaves to be absorbed over centimeters such that the inside gets cooked, too.

It seems, then, that 2450MHz is about right for the size of food commonly cooked in home microwave ovens. The lower frequencies, such as 915MHz mentioned above, would be better for larger pieces of food, in addition to the physical size of the magnetron being larger.

-- glen