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FEMA To Use Cell Phone Signals To Find Survivors
twistah writes: "CNN had an interview with a representative of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency helping with the New York WTC rescue effort, who said that Lucent has given them technology to trace the signal of cell phones. The idea is that people will give them phone numbers of cell phones and pagers of people missing due to the WTC collapse, which FEMA will call and attempt to trace the signal to find the missing people. FEMA has now put this information on their web site, and are dubbing it the 'Wireless Emergency Response Team.'"
While you're almost certainly correct about phones, my two-way pager's battery lasts for at least a month, so there's at least that.
They're trying to clear the subway tunnel under the building to see if anyone actually on the platform under the towers survived. The problem is that water mains have burst, flooding the tunnels and filling them with debris. At present I think they're a third of the way there.
Well, the microwave oven certainly does shield users from the microwave emissions. But it's not terribly effective outside a certain frequency range.
The actual cooking area is tuned to the microwave frequency in use - around 2.45GHz. If you operate a microwave with the door open, it won't do you a lot of good, but the radiation *away from the direct "beam" of microwaves* is incredibly weak.
Now, mobile phones (UK GSM, but others are similar) tend to work around 900MHz for low band, and 1800MHz for high band. It's not really near the resonant frequency of the cooking chamber, so doesn't get absorbed (can you say "Helmholz bottle"?)
Finally, this is also why mobile phone cell towers are *not* dangerous - a microwave oven uses a very specific frequency, at very high power, from a distance of *inches* to cook food. A cell tower uses a lower frequency, with very low power (often as little as 10w), from much further away...