ED Noor: No surprises here but it took schoolgirls to draw attention to this health hazard?
Ninth-graders design science experiment to test the
effect of cellphone radiation on plants. The results may surprise you.
By MATHIAS
BOHN
July 25,
2013
Five
ninth-grade young women from Denmark recently created a science experiment that
is causing a stir in the scientific community.
It started
with an observation and a question. The girls noticed that if they slept with
their mobile phones near their heads at night, they often had difficulty
concentrating at school the next day. They wanted to test the effect of a cellphone’s
radiation on humans, but their school, Hjallerup School in Denmark, did not
have the equipment to handle such an experiment. So the girls designed an
experiment that would test the effect of cellphone radiation on a plant
instead.
The students
placed six trays filled with Lepidium sativum, a type of garden cress, into a
room without radiation, and six trays of the seeds into another room next to
two routers that according to the girls’ calculations, emitted about the same
type of radiation as an ordinary cellphone.
Over the
next 12 days, the girls observed, measured, weighed and photographed their
results. By the end of the experiment the results were blatantly obvious ~ the
cress seeds placed near the router had not grown. Many of them were completely
dead. Meanwhile, the cress seeds planted in the other room, away from the
routers, thrived.
The
experiment earned the girls (pictured below) top honors in a regional science
competition and the interest of scientists around the world.
According to
Kim Horsevad, a teacher at Hjallerup Skole in Denmark where the cress
experiment took place, a neuroscience professor at the Karolinska Institute in
Sweden, is interested in repeating the experiment in a controlled professional
scientific environment.
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