How Two Russian Journalists Cooked an Egg with their Mobile Phones
Vladimir Lagovski and Andrei Moiseynko from Komsomolskaya Pravda Newspaper in Moscow decided to learn first-hand how harmful cell phones are. There is no magic in cooking with your cell phone. The secret is in the radio waves that the cell phone radiates.
The journalists created a simple microwave structure as shown in the picture. They called from one cell phone to the other and left both phones on talking mode. They placed a tape recorder next to phones to imitate sounds of speaking so the phones would stay on.
After, 15 minutes: The egg became slightly warm.
25 minutes: The egg became very warm.
40 minutes: The egg became very hot.
65 minutes: The egg was cooked. (As you can see.)
Comments: The "news" that radio frequency emissions from a pair of cell phones can be harnessed for cooking caused quite a stir in the blogosphere when it broke last February. Skeptics insisted it was impossible -- that the slight wattage emitted by mobile phones isn't strong or consistent enough to heat an object to cooking temperature. Some tried to replicate the experiment, without success. Others investigated the original source of the information, the Wymsey Village Web, and questioned its authenticity. Mightn't the name "Wymsey" be a clue?
Sure enough, the site's Webmaster, one Charles Ivermee of Southampton, U.K., stepped forward to acknowledge authorship of the article and confirm that its content was purely satirical, not factual. "It was 6 years ago," Ivermee told Gelf Magazine, "but I seem to recall that there was a lot of concern about people's brains getting fried and being from a radio/electronics background I found it all rather silly. So I thought I'd add to the silliness." He expressed bewilderment at how seriously people seemed to be taking it. One British exam study site, he said, had republished the information without even attempting to verify it.
