Study Hints Ambient Radio Waves May Affect Plant Growth 298
dwguenther writes "A Lyons (Colorado) area woman with no academic pedigree has published a scientific paper in the International Journal of Forestry Research about the adverse effects of radio waves on aspen seedlings. Katie Haggerty, who lives north of Steamboat Mountain, found in a preliminary experiment done near her house that aspens shielded from electromagnetic radiation were healthier than those that were not. 'I found that the shielded seedlings produced more growth, longer shoots, bigger leaves, and more total leaf area. The shielded group produced 60 percent more leaf area and 74 percent more shoot length than a mock-shielded group,' she said." This was not a definitive study, as its author readily admits — it's hard to see how a double-blind study could even be designed in this area — but it was refereed.
Not mine. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Not mine. (Score:5, Funny)
I modulated a 1 kilowatt microwave HERF gun with a microwave stirring device rotated using motor controlled by a PWM signal to vary the speed using an audio source playing White Metal at some plants and the all died. RADIO WAVES ARE EVIL!
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Did you try to play it backwards?
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I'm scared to. It might sound like Hello Kitty.
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Re:Not mine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoosh!
Meta-woosh! Nobody could be that dumb. It must have been ironic. Maybe he was trolling for wooshes?
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Did you know that you can die from too much oxygen? Too much water?
Wait you can die from too much O2???? I mean I know you can die from too much water... It's called drowning.... But your telling me that people on those O2 tanks at old folks homes are going to die?
How does this work? Well other then exploding.
I just have a hard time believing an oxygen bar is worse for you then a hookah bar.
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Everything is balance. We ride the fragile zone of a magnetically and gravitationally protective mass where energy is flowing in and near it in prodigious quantities from an incandescent fusion inferno. It is a dangerous place where a steady state is disallowed and change is everything. To unbalance this is to court oblivion but to think it will last forever is folly. It is a seed pod and it will be burst from within or without. Nothing lasts forever ... even change.
Re:Not mine. (Score:4, Funny)
Nonsense. Either change lasts forever, or the universe will enter a steady state in which everything lasts forever.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bull. That is just making up a statement with absolutely no evidence or proof. Where-as much of the previous assertion does indeed have scientific evidence to back it up.
1. There is a prodigious amount of energy flowing around our planet produced by the Sun.
2. If this radiation was not diverted it would indeed be more than enough to kill off most if not all life on Earth.
3. The make up of the atmosphere plays a large role in radiation absorption and deflection.
4. The make up of the atmosphere changes over
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The more you know. [wikipedia.org] Evidently too much oxygen can cause cell death, burst alveoli in your lungs, and retinal detachment.
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BAN DIMONOXIDE!
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Where's the "-1 Didn't get it"?
Somehow I always knew... (Score:5, Funny)
... that one day AM radio would be the death of us all.
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Good point, maybe if they took Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck off the air, the plants would get better. She should try shielding them from just their programs.
--
Toro
i don't know about radio, but i find (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:i don't know about radio, but i find (Score:5, Funny)
Sure you do, we all grow our "peppers" in a closet lined with tinfoil.
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fscking amateurs. foil absorbs light and causes hotspots on your "pepper" plants. You are better off with flat white paint or reflective mylar.
Of course if you weren't really growing peppers but something like medical marijuana then you'd want to know that experimentation shows that grow is no better under targeted spectrum LED than it is under select HID lighting. In fact, it takes just as many watts of LED to get the same effect so you don't save electricity there.
The only real benefit to LED is less heat
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If it uses the same wattage how is there less heat? All light eventually becomes heat.
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Not light that is expended/converted to sugars via photosynthesis.
The LEDs only emit wavelengths that are used by the plants. Using the right HID lights for the stage of growth does well but nothing like the efficiency of LED.
600w of LED should be bright but when it is targeted at the plants almost everything is absorbed so you only see a very faint purple (red+blue if you are colorwheel illiterate).
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Foil absorbs light? I think you've been "smoking" too many "peppers".
nebulo
Re:i don't know about radio, but i find (Score:5, Informative)
"fscking amateurs. foil absorbs light and causes hotspots on your "pepper" plants."
LOL. I have *NO* problems with any of my foil-lined boxes. ANY improperly-done reflective job will create a hot spot, INCLUDING MYLAR, which is the stuff we use for an EMERGENCY BLANKET.
"Of course if you weren't really growing peppers but something like medical marijuana then you'd want to know that experimentation shows that grow is no better under targeted spectrum LED than it is under select HID lighting. In fact, it takes just as many watts of LED to get the same effect so you don't save electricity there."
Dead wrong, sir. I am a licensed medical patient, as well as a breeder for the Dutch (I preserve landrace genetics found in the wild across the globe,) AND I do indoor NFT hydroponics sheds across the globe which are illuminated by LED, and your statement is factually incorrect. From wheat, to tomatoes, to medical cannabis, I've regularly achieved higher yield per kilowatt-hour with LED versus HID. Also, with LED, the resulting product is more potent, as there is no green or yellow light, which plays an inhibitory and regulatory role in most non-marine flora.
In fact, I replaced 832w of *VERY SELECT* HPS and T5HO lighting with 350w of my specially-designed LED lighting and get the same results.
I know why LED panels fail to yield. That research went into my own panels. Also, most panel manufacturers use the CHEAP 1w diodes. Those bottom-bin pieces of garbage aren't worth the sapphire substrate they're laid upon. That's also incidentally why the garbage LED panels are so cheap.
Re:i don't know about radio, but i find (Score:4, Interesting)
"Dead wrong, sir."
I'm sorry but I fail to see how your complaints about your custom HID lights and custom LED panels relates to the common commercial solutions to which I referred.
As for aluminum foil, it absorbs 20% of the light you shine at it and converts it to heat. Mylar of proper thickness absorbs only 5%. Nothing used outside a specially crafted lab mirror reflects anywhere close to all the light and even then the mirrors are generally (must be?) made for specific spectrum.
There is nothing to say you couldn't make a diffuse reflector out of aluminum in fact I have seen them (not for walls but as light reflectors). Regular, out of the box, aluminum foil WILL cause hotspots. I've never been foolish enough to use it but I've seen it.
Growing for the dutch, or growing for a dispensary in Cali doesn't impress me. I've been hired as a consultant for Dutch and Cali commerical and private growers.
That said there are a number of other factors that could account for the discrepancy between the results we see. I would be far more interested in hearing more detail about the panels you are using the results you are seeing.
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I don't know anyone who's used LEDs, but a friend was growing some high grade bud using banks of CFLs. More light than halogen, with FAR less heat and electrical consumption, and the plants grew faster and bigger than with halogen.
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Halogen? Halogen generally isn't a useful spectrum for growing bud.
What you want is Metal Halide for veg and High Pressure Sodium for flowering.
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Incandescent lamps... Lawls
a 250 HPS goes a long way and it's cheaper then thousands of LEDs.
Re:i don't know about radio, but i find (Score:4, Interesting)
"But Led's just don't give the PAR you need."
Excuse me? LEDs can be 100% PAR. Do you even know which wavelengths are peaked in PAR? PAR matters when you're using a white diode of a specified color temperature. When you go monochromatic on each diode, PAR is a given to be 100% as long as you use the proper wavelengths.
"Also... hold the Train, Are you saying a 400 Watts used for HPS is uses more power then 400 Watts of LED's? I hope you know what a watt is."
Did you even read the beginning of the statement where 'removing all that excess heat' is mentioned *BEFORE* any of that? Have you done the research, for that matter? A 400w LED panel will put off far, far less heat than a 400w HPS, thus you will use far less power by not having to cool nearly as much. This is simple thermodynamics, one does not even need to know what a watt is when one knows the glass casing on the HPS is hot enough to light a cigarette but the LED is cool enough to set right on top of the plant without causing significant damage.
"To address your note on cooling, Plants in a closed space need air flow anyway. Also since the light is at the top of the room, And O2 rises; you can get rid of the heat and oxygen at the same time. Therefore cooling costs only come into play at about over 400watts."
I can see you've never done this sort of work before. Plants in a closed space at *MINIMUM* need air circulation, not air flow, to prevent air stratification and subsequent burning. With HPS, I needed to vent my closet. with LED, no venting required, just airflow and the occasional dose of CO2. The oxygen from the top gets pumped back into the hydroponics nutrient reservoir, as the root zone requires oxygen. Cooling costs come into play even at 100w HPS, as that bulb is MUCH hotter than a 100w incandescent (you forget ballast inefficiencies as well as another source of heat generation.)
"From personal experience a 100 watt led is about the same as 100 watts of HPS, But the LED was 4 times the cost. Granted this was about 2 years back when they were still pretty new"
You got a "NASA-Spec" LED panel, didn't you? You got bit by the marketing, that light ratio is a bunch of nonsense. LED has been used for almost a decade with success, but NOT by following the BS NASA published back in the 80s. My 90w panel performs like a 400w HPS in vegetative phase, and like a 150-200w HPS in fruiting/flowering. Also, most panels use those low-bin diodes, so the one that probably caught your eye by price was of extremely-inferior quality. Hell people are still buying the 'lite-brite' LED panels and complaining that it doesn't work. That's what happens when you don't do the research to determine if a product is garbage or not. To make things even funnier, even the 'experts' over at CandlePower can't grasp the idea that lumens means nothing to plants at all, which automatically disqualifies them as being able to judge a horticultural LED light.
"Maybe if you were planning a growroom to be in operation 10 years you might make you money back on bulbs and ballasts, But PAR Freq Optimized LED's haven't exactly been around that long."
You'll make the money back in power costs alone in the first year, and this was proven even in a multi-million dollar NFT shed setup. In fact, I have pictures of multiple shed setups, at least the beginning - http://imgur.com/xpkCI.jpg [imgur.com] - there you go, that was the initial setup for multi-stack NFT, and http://imgur.com/ryQrh.jpg [imgur.com] that's of a single-tier NFT under some spots and a prototype panel.
We can even grow animal fodder WITH NO LIGHT AT ALL.
Our technology is an easy decade ahead of anybody else in the game even though we've only been around for about a year. Why? Real new research instead of copying something done AGES ago.
Even NASA/Dynamac has my personal cell number.
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No newsletter, sadly. I had a blog related to horticulture, but that's currently off-line thanks to hosting issues (namely the guy running my site didn't pay his hosting.)
I do answer e-mails related to horticultural questions. Just shoot of an e-mail to techkitsune at gmail dot com and I'll try to respond ASAP.
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Don't even need an enclosed room. We use LEDs in greenhouses all the time to extend photoperiods.
Works really well.
...not all EM radiation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:...not all EM radiation (Score:5, Funny)
and us too! Great study, but it comes too late I'm afraid. I've already spotted at least 8 wild trees in urban areas that have sprouted what appear to be cell phone tower transmitters in them! We're boned!
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That would have been a much better scenario than whatever the hell was supposed to be happening in... erm, The Happening [wikipedia.org].
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We're boned!
It's like Day of the Triffids with a porno soundtrack =]
Double blind should not be hard (Score:4, Insightful)
Have the plants taken care of by one person and judged/reviewed by another who only sees them when they are moved to the review area. Since this is just seedlings using large plant pots should be fine.
Re:Double blind should not be hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Have the plants taken care of by one person and judged/reviewed by another who only sees them when they are moved to the review area. Since this is just seedlings using large plant pots should be fine.
Now probably isn't the best time to tell them the Sun is a giant radio, amongst other things.
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Indeed. I just wanted to point out that the "researcher" kept an unnecessary bias in the experiment that basically makes this entire study worthless. Confirmation bias is real.
Re:Double blind should not be hard (Score:5, Funny)
Confirmation bias is real.
No it isn't, and nothing you say can change that!
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golf clap
Re:Double blind should not be hard (Score:5, Funny)
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What difference does it make? I doubt her shielding discriminated against sun radio.
not all radiation is equal, there are different types and they have different effects. The sun emits light, many wavelengths of which are good for plants many are not. UV for example is notably bad for plants.
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I see your point, but it's also true that all life on Earth evolved with the solar emissions, none evolved with microwave QAM emissions (for example).
It's not time to order radio silence by any means, but followup studies are warranted.
Won't matter to the anti-radio/radiation nuts (Score:4, Insightful)
This shit has been going on forever. They keep changing their target, but it is always the same tune: Radiation is bad, X is radiation, so X is bad.
When I was a kid the target was high voltage distribution lines. They said those were bad for kids, caused cancer. They had a data point, kinda, in terms of one community. Of course upon further study there was actual radioactive shit there (Radon IIRC). At any rate because of the serious nature of this, it was looked in to. Long term studies were done, looking at kids who grew up near these lines. I am probably a data point in one of those studies as our house was under some large lines when I was young (that's why I know about this shit, Mom was worried).
Well, now there's many decades of results compiled and guess what? There's no difference at all. They don't do shit.
Now any scientist could have told you that, the radiation is non-ionizing, hell the waves are millions of meters long from 60Hz power. The nuts weren't doing science, they were just being nuts.
So this is more of the same shit, same as the "cellphones kill honeybees" and so on. They do not consider it logically, they are just reactionary.
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The nuts weren't doing science, they were just being nuts.
So this is more of the same shit, same as the "cellphones kill honeybees" and so on. They do not consider it logically, they are just reactionary.
I have some problems your "the same shit": to me is a valid "data point", worth investigating further. TFA:
The paper was later accepted for presentation at the North American Forest Ecology Workshop at Utah State University in Logan last June. As a result of that presentation, her paper was accepted to be published in a special edition from the workshop of the peer-reviewed online International Journal of Forestry Research.
Does the peer-reviewing automatically make the preliminary findings true? No. But it certainly does make the paper worth more to my eyes than the correlation between toxo infestation and World Cup results [slashdot.org].
Re:Won't matter to the anti-radio/radiation nuts (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily. Its nothing personal regarding this work, I actually didn't even look at it yet. I'm just pointing out the limitations of peer review. That doctor from India who studies the guy who claims to have not eaten or drank anything for the last 70 years publishes in a peer reviewed journal and everyone I've talked to from India about him called him a quack.
For example, as a scientist unfamiliar with this field, and thus not qualified to judge the particular details of the experiment I would instead focus on the general methods used and the apparent quality of the journal. This journal, found at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijfr/ [hindawi.com], has only been around for 2 years and unless there are some strange politics going on in the forestry field that likely means it does not attract top notch editors/peer-reviewers. It will also likely have a lower barrier to publication relative to other journals as it will not be receiving as many papers.
They also may be more likely to publish something with a questionable premise (although this should have been more an issue for whoever funded the project) and bad controls, etc if it seems like it will hit upon some kind of hot button issue and thus get the journal exposure. Not to say that doesn't ever happen in the case of Nature or Science, but there will be less pressure to do so.
Also its possible that this researcher simply wasnt allowed to publish elsewhere because people automatically rejected her premise as wacky, and so was forced to publish in a lesser known journal and rely on popular media exposure. Or as is more likely the case here, she simply had no credentials and so found it hard to get published.
All I'm saying is that these are things that should pop into your head when you see "peer reviewed" not necessarily images of reliability. Still its a better system than most. Maybe reviewers should have to have their names attached to each article they accept somehow, so some kind of meta-peer-review could go on.
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The vast majority of the Sun's EM radiation is in the visible and ultraviolet range. The worst of the UV is intercepted by the ozone layer and life on Earth is well adapted to the visible light range. It would be interesting to compare the relative strength at ground level of the Sun's radio frequency emissions to those from terrestrial sources.
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Actually, the Sun isn't all that bright in the radio. The brightest source in the radio sky is Sag. A*, the center of our galaxy.
(Or so I was taught the summer I did research at the VLA.)
Double blind study (Score:5, Informative)
it's hard to see how a double-blind study could even be designed in this area
In the medical field, it means that both the patient and the doctor evaluating the symptoms don't know who received a placebo.
For this experiment - setup two antennae in front of some seedlings, have a different dude turn one of them on. The person measuring the seedling growth doesn't know which were exposed to radio waves. That's all you need to make sure the study doesn't have some bias in it.
Re:Double blind study (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see why you'd need a double-blinded study in this? The double-blinded study is to account for patient reporting bias ("I feel a little better today - I think those new Addrexo pills are really working") and patient-selection bias by the doctors.
In this case the plants aren't reporting anything, it is a simple measurement, or series of measurements. And is anybody really calling into question the biases of biology RAs? Once again, take the measurements, report the results, draw conclusions, suggest reasons, conclude: "more research needed".
Re:Double blind study (Score:5, Informative)
The study surely needs to be blind from the researchers point of view, this sort of this is just begging for confirmation bias.
Re:Double blind study (Score:4, Funny)
If any of the researchers are used to talk to their plants while gardening, they shouldn't mention the experiment to the seedlings, though. You know, just to be sure.
Re:Double blind study (Score:4, Informative)
Scientists can have bias as well, this is why researchers use the double blind method to eliminate their personal bias from the results.
Personally, I think the shielding worked more as a cozy for the plant and gave it a more stable immediate environment upon which to grow. Perhaps even the faraday cage was diminishing the light around the geraniums, so they spent more energy growing their leaves bigger to compensate. Given my personal bias, I wouldn't of published yet since I know there couldn't be a correlation. There are any number of reasons why a bias of opinion might be involved and there is any number of reasons why plants in a cage could grow better than plants not. I doubt she had the soil, in which the roots were, wrapped with a faraday cage either.
Re:Double blind study (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I think the shielding worked more as a cozy for the plant and gave it a more stable immediate environment upon which to grow.
Read the paper. Haggerty had two cages, one of which was RF-transparent fiberglass which was close to the same air and light blockage as the aluminum faraday cage.
I still think it will come out that something else was the cause.
But as far as personal bias, a good scientist is aware of their own biases and tries to do things that are somewhat antagonistic to their own point of view. This isn't perfect, but that's why you use objective measures and report all your methods. Someone else can try to reproduce the experiment, improve upon it, control for more things, etc.
It is possible that subconcious/unconcious biases in plant care play a role here, but anyone can repeat the experiment, and it's very likely that those repeating it next will be VERY skeptical to the idea that RF is at fault and will be very careful not to baby the RF caged plants.. and if biased they'll be biased the other way. That's a good outcome of such a publication.
Many repeated experiments by people who are skeptical of each other average over personal biases.
Re:Double blind study (Score:4, Insightful)
yea the thing is its kind a waste of time and money for people to repeatedly perform the same badly controlled experiment over and over.
Sure, I agree with that. The next experiment should control for more variables. It's straightforward to improve upon the methods to leave less doubt. You can also do an experiment to show that some OTHER effect was likely responsible. Formulate another hypothesis that would explain Haggerty's data and test those ideas directly.
But if the people with the resources don't care about this particular issue, no one will do the experiment.
You can find out the same thing faster and cheaper if you just design it well to begin with.
I think if Haggerty had managed to get "no difference" among the three cages, no one would be calling for a better experiment, even though it would have been equally uncontrolled. We need to think about this.
Even if we ultimately prove that Haggerty's hypothesis is incorrect, she took a stab at addressing what she perceives as a gap or mistake in knowledge in the RIGHT way. There is no bad experiment as long as you are trying your best within your resources and acting ethically. There are unfortunate consequences of the media and concerned groups trumpeting EVERY paper as "the truth," but if that happens it is not really Haggerty's fault (IMO, after reading the paper.)
Haggerty did the right thing with her concerned skepticism. When was the last time you saw someone concerned about RF do something other than blog endlessly about RF sensitivity or spout mumbo-jumbo about the balances of life force?
Haggerty designed an experiment that controlled for a number of significant variables while changing the RF applied to the plants in a measured way. That's doing it right. Nothing is perfect. You can never control for ALL variables and there is always a need to minimize the impact of that. But you have to start somewhere, and if you have a fringe idea, that will probably be YOU in your own backyard.
Honestly, this takes the wind out of a lot of science **deniers'** sails. It's strong evidence against scientific conspiracy; evidence against "burying" of "weird" ideas. This person with no formal scientific credentials got a paper published that's based around a pretty deeply fringe idea. She deserved that publication on the basis of actually applying decent, if low budget science and getting a result.
I suspect that it won't be very long before there's a flurry of other careful experiments that explain Haggerty's results with a different interpretation of the causes. There will probably be theory papers on the spectral limits of the response of plants (as she cites some papers on outside-of-the-visible-light effects on plants).
It's not going to take that much time or that much money to refute this result, and in the meantime, Haggerty's publication suggests that properly executed scientific inquiry stands on its own, independent of preconcieved notions or weirdness of the result.
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Radio waves don't penetrate the soil much. Unless the Faraday cage was tapered down to barely big enough to go around the trunk as it comes out of the ground I imagine it would shield the root area reasonably well anyway.
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Thanks for illuminating the difference with your post, since you know it all and aren't willing to share.
Now, I was pretty sure that "blind" eliminated the bias of the subjects of the study (Pepsi challenge style), while double blind eliminates the scientist's bias as well as the subjects (drug trials). The GP may be talking about the medical studies like they use blind studies when they really use double blind (technically a form of blind study), but other than that, I see no reason he's wrong in saying th
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Whoeever came up with this "study" is a moron.
Whoever calls a researcher a moron without bothering to read a short, easily accessible article about the research ... is a moron.
In this case, that would be you.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_(paranormal)#Skepticism [wikipedia.org]
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"Anyone advocating blinded studies in this case is actually suggesting plants are affected by their subjective interpretation of the situation."
You say that as if we shouldn't consider the possibility. Go watch avatar n00b
No double-blind? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, better yet (Score:2)
Build a large Faraday cage in a greenhouse. So you've got a nice area for plants with no stray radio waves. Then, put in antennas that will transmit the radio waves you want at the frequencies and power you want. Build several such greenhouses and fill them with the plants you'd like to test. Have them so that they are all controlled in terms of humidity and so on to be the same, but have the radio settings assigned by a computer randomly. At the end of the experiment, go around, have a look at the plants,
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Make one ferrous metallic (steel), one non-ferrous metallic (aluminium), one non-metallic (plastic) and one gaseous (just to see the confused look on your face).
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Make two real Faraday cages.
Put a real radio broadcast antenna in each.
Only turn on one of the antenna.
This also eliminates other possible causes for variation, like "plants grow better in a metal cage" or "A faraday cage gives a plant better shade"
Re:No double-blind? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, that's pretty much what she did. Wasn't double blind, but she used real Faraday cages and placebo cages in fiberglass, along with another non-caged control. Should be easy enough to replicate, only with uninformed interns watering the plants.
Hints? Might? (Score:2, Insightful)
Come back and talk to me when you have a more definitive study. Something statistically significant that doesn't focus on one species in one location. Oh, and let's see the methodology used to make sure it is actually a sound experiment because an American amateur scientist is did this one and I really don't trust most of my fellow Americans to do amateur science correctly.
Re:Hints? Might? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a deep concern about over-stating the dangers of RF radiation... honestly, though, I don't see anything wrong with the PAPER and would say that Haggerty
approached the experiment in an appropriate scientific manner.
Come back and talk to me when you have a more definitive study.
This is not a perfect experiment... no experiment is. But the methodology is laid out. The experiment is reproducible, and that's what matters. I think it may spark interest in study... very likely from people who are VERY skeptical that RF could be the cause, and that's perfect.
I think that it's probably the case that something else is the cause, not RF. There are things that aren't controlled for. But you or anyone else can do a better experiment. You're right to be skeptical of a single one, but that doesn't mean Haggerty's work wasn't valuable.
Double-blind (Score:2)
Well, half of the double-blind part is trivial: the seedlings aren't going to know whether they are in the experimental group or the control group.
The other half isn't entirely impractical. Plant seeds in a number of sites with similar background RF levels, and mount visually-identical "transmitter devices" at each site. The people collecting growth data at the sites will not be informed which transmitter devices are actually trans
Double blind not needed (Score:2)
double-blind method (Score:3, Insightful)
Double blind (Score:2)
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A double blind study is to prevent placebo effect as well as experimenter bias. I guess they are worried that the trees might feel compelled to grow more if they were told that there are no radio waves...
Inescapable proof that the iPhone 4 causes cancer! (Score:2)
Not from the emitted RF, that doesn't have enough energy to break chemical bonds or really have much of any effect on a cell, but standing in line for seven hours unprotected in the sun waiting to pick one up on the day or release will almost certainly increase your risk of skin cancer.
G.
The Effects (Score:5, Funny)
Once it's shown that radio waves are detrimental to aspen seedlings, there will be:
1. Signs posted around transmitter towers saying "WARNING -- Radio waves can be detrimental to your leaf area development". In both English as Aspenic.
B. Pictograph version of the same for Aspens that read yet.
Three. Non-animal subjects committees at arboreal research centers defining then testing for proper and ethical treatment of seedlings, such informed consent.
IV. Radical vegans, rejected Greenpeace applicants and overly sensitive hippie hangers-on 'rescuing' seedlings from Torture Hothouses because they're being tested 24 hours a day and not allowed to sleep.
Cinco. Smarmy, crooning, sexy but aloof modern folk singers moaning out a somewhat relevant lyric while you see pictures of abused seedlings, then their eyes tearing up as they beg you "Won't you please help? Think of the seedlings."
=== 100 years pass ===
99. Members of the Poplar* Peoples' Front forming a picket line around the Deciduous Students Union, carrying signs made of rock (no living material was harmed in the making of these signs) in their branches, demanding representation of their own kind among elected officials (Vote Yeast, Not Beast) and protesting the deplorable treatment of some of the more 'culturally mature due to greater experience evolving' and 'third forest' species (Smile Mold Is People Too) while Jefferson Floodplain sings "Up against the wall... Up against the wall, Carbonizers" from their hit album 'Nothing Can Stop The Shape of Leaves To Come and then giggle when you start to turn blue and gasp because you have cyclic respiration and can't read sentences this long without stopping for air whereas their constant bidirectional respiration means they can talk for hours straight without stopping once.
* Not misspelled, you meat chauvinist pig.
Got to protect seedlings from E-M radiation ... (Score:5, Funny)
... particularly that with wavelengths between around 350 and 700nm.
I think that the journal publishing and the amateur scientist published should attempt to grow their seedlings in complete absence of electro-magnetic radiation between 350 and 700nm. That'll teach them something that every troglobite population on the planet learned millennia ago.
What did she shield them with? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, I'm serious. My suspicion is that she shielded the successful plants with something that contains trace nutrients that are lacking in her local soil.
For example, if her shielding was composed of steel chicken wire, then rainwater will pick up iron and zinc from the wire before it falls on the ground, both of these are essential trace nutrients for plant growth. In particular the rich red colour of the leaves in the experimental group speaks of a good supply of iron.
Alas, I've not seen the paper. If she's doing it properly her control plants should be growing through a layer of what she's using for shielding, instead of inside it. I suspect this is not the case.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Sun. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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Since she knew which was which, confirmation bias seems rather likely.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just how unbiased was this person? If they were hoping for a specific result, there are a lot of things they could do in an "experiment" like this, even without thinking that they are doing such things.
Do the experiment yourself and find out. You're skeptical so if anything, you'll have the opposite bias. That's how this works.
No human being is 100% free of subconcious bias. A good scientist will do everything they can to perform objectively identical actions on all members of their various experimental organisms. IN that way, they will minimize the effect of their own biases. And others can reproduce the same objectively identical actions to gather more data.
Haggerty's paper suggests that she attemp
Re:Right (Score:5, Insightful)
In spring 2007, she planted the aspen seedlings -- one group in a shielded Faraday cage, another group in a cage wrapped in fiberglass that did not block radio waves and a third set was unprotected altogether. By the end of July, there were measureable differences in growth, and at the beginning of October, she noticed differences in coloration.
It's one thing to criticize a study, but at least try to READ it first.......
A word on simple experiments... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, Louis Pasteur only finally disproved the theory of spontaneous generation with a simple experiment involving meat broth and a long necked decanter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation [wikipedia.org]
There's no reason to doubt that the certain frequencies we consider harmless are in fact slowly destroying delicate parts of our biosphere. We're the same scientists who didn't think lead paint or asbestos were a problem, and discovered germ theory only a short time ago. The article itself is not sensational, and even the DIY scientist is modest in her conclusions.
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There's no reason to doubt that the certain frequencies we consider harmless are in fact slowly destroying delicate parts of our biosphere
Sure there is. 1. nothing noticed so far 2. the sun dumps all kinds of EM on everything.
Lead paint is not an issue if you do not eat it. Asbestos is a great insulator and fine to use as such if it is properly sealed.
Re:A word on simple experiments... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. the sun dumps all kinds of EM on everything.
This is where critical thinking comes in handy. I don't think any serious scientist will suggest that plants are not well adjusted to EM radiation from the sun.
As far as "nothing noticed so far," I imagine that was the same phrase they used when they were handling raw mercury without protection in science labs not too long ago. Ignorance is no substitute for reality.
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> I imagine that was the same phrase they used when they were handling raw
> mercury without protection in science labs not too long ago.
For the very good reason that doing so is not particularly dangerous as long as you don't heat it.
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Elemental mercury is pretty safe assuming STP. Ignorance seems to be your specialty.
MSDS (Score:3, Informative)
https://fscimage.fishersci.com/msds/96252.htm [fishersci.com]
Danger! Corrosive. Harmful if inhaled. May be absorbed through intact skin. Causes eye and skin irritation and possible burns. May cause severe respiratory tract irritation with possible burns. May cause severe digestive tract irritation with possible burns. May cause liver and kidney damage. May cause central nervous system effects. This substance has caused adverse reproductive and fetal effects in animals. Inhalation of fumes may cause metal-fume fever. Possib
Re:A word on simple experiments... (Score:4, Informative)
"1. nothing noticed so far"
Sure there is. There is a steady increase in C02 Levels in the atmosphere. This should result in a corresponding increase in plant growth since plants are largely bottlenecked by the relatively low C02 levels in the modern vs the 1500ppm that existed when they evolved. Plants should be able to balance any increase in C02 emissions and yet they aren't.
"2. the sun dumps all kinds of EM on everything."
The sun also dumps UV radiation which is known to be harmful to both plants and animals on everything.
Just because it is a natural process doesn't make it good or balanced. The whole natural good, artificial bad myth is just some nonsense spouted by hippies. Nature is just as good at screwing it up as we are (even if you don't consider us a byproduct of nature) it just tends to do it on a larger and more difficult to counteract scale.
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UV is EM. I never said anything about nature being safe, in fact I meant that to indicate that the plants were being exposed to something quite unsafe already.
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That isn't the only type of plant growth. There should be massive algae blooms eating up that C02.
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Algae relies on large quantities of other nutrients as well, not just CO2.
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There's no reason to doubt that the certain frequencies we consider harmless are in fact slowly destroying delicate parts of our biosphere. We're the same scientists who didn't think lead paint or asbestos were a problem, and discovered germ theory only a short time ago. The article itself is not sensational, and even the DIY scientist is modest in her conclusions.
There is always reason to doubt. Seriously, learn to science.
Re:If it's not a definitive study... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If it's not a definitive study... (Score:5, Insightful)
For someone outside of academia to get reviewed and published is news enough.
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I dunno if your results will, but your lynching might.
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Light was controlled for within 5% of that received by the un-shielded plants. There were three groups, and it was simple... fiberglass screen shaded the "mock shielded" group from the sun the same way the aluminum screen did.
I personally think further experiments will discover some other cause besides RF, but Haggerty controlled for and measured a lot of other things... light, air circulation, etc. That doesn't mean her results will turn out to be correct, but she did present everything anyone would need