Your wireless router could be murdering your houseplants
Are you slowly killing your houseplants? Probably! But there
might be a reason (other than neglect) why they’re all yellow and wilty: your
Wi-Fi router.
An experiment by a handful of high school students in
Denmark has sparked some serious international interest in the scientific
community.
Five ninth-grade girls at Hjallerup School in North Jutland,
Denmark, noticed they had trouble concentrating after sleeping with their
mobile phones at their bedsides. They tried to figure out why. The school
obviously doesn’t have the equipment to test human brain waves, so the girls
decided to do a more rudimentary experiment.
They placed six trays of garden cress seeds next to Wi-Fi
routers that emitted roughly the same microwave radiation as a mobile phone.
Then they placed six more trays of seeds in a separate room without routers.
The girls controlled both environments for room temperature, sunlight and
water.
After 12 days, they found the garden cress seeds in the
routerless room had exploded into bushy greenery, while the seeds next to the
Wi-Fi routers were brown, shriveled, and even mutated. See for yourself:
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Teacher Kim Horsevad told the Daily Dot that her students
did the test twice with the same results. She was quick to point out that while
the students did the experiment to test only one variable to the best of their
ability, it is a high school experiment and this isn’t a professional study.
“Some of the local debate has been whether the effects were
due the cress seeds drying up because of heat from the computers or Access
Points used in the experiment, which is a suggestion I can thoroughly refute,”
Horsevad said. “The pupils were painstakingly careful in keeping the conditions
for both groups similar. The cress seeds in both groups were kept sufficiently
moist during the whole experiment, and the temperature were controlled
thermostatically. The computers were placed so that the heat would not affect
the seeds, which was verified by temperature measurements. Still, there may be
confounders which neither the pupils or I have been aware of, but I cannot
imagine what they would be.”
She said the results are clearly dramatic and could trigger
additional research. Two scientists, neuroscience professor Olle Johanssen at
the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Dr. Andrew Goldsworthy at the Imperial
College in London, have both expressed an interest in the experiment and may
repeat it in a professional lab environment.
Source: The Daily Dot
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