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HOWTO, Cook an Egg With Your Cell Phone
xPosiMattx writes "Suzzanna Decantworthy published an article in her Wymsey Weekend column that described how to cook an egg with two cell phones. From the article: "Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza.""
1. Preheat oven to 350deg.
2. Oil and flour a 8" pan (or use nonstick).
3. Dial your ex.
4. Place phone in pan.
5. Crack an egg on the phone.
6. Season to taste.
7. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.
OK, obviously #3 is a problem...
Sigs cause cancer.
...but the little foot icon looks astonishingly like an old rotary telephone today.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
6. Phone A will now be talking to Phone B whilst Phone B will be talking to Phone A.
I love urban legend as much as the next guy, but this isn't exactly true. These are cell phones not two-way radios. Phone A will be talking to a cell phone tower, whilst phone B is talking to a cell phone tower, whilst each cell phone tower is talking to the two phones respectively. There is no reason to think that you are forming some sort of ultra powerful death beam between the two phones by placing them in close proximity to one another. Having said that, if I was being attacked by a giant stay puff marshmallow man, I might give this a shot as a last resort.
I feel foolish for asking but...
What's the radio for??
fp
Ha! Like they expect us to believe th -- OOOH! Shiny!
For posting an obvious Hoax.
can't cook an egg with two cell phones. Each phone communicates with a tower, not each other. I even knew that before I read it on boingboing. amazing.
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
...don't talk on two cell phones simultaneously.
Boring logic aside, it will be very amusing to think of a boiling egg next time I see someone with 2 cellphones - one on each ear
Man, you really need that seminar!
Sigh.... Anyone actually like to find the article. I found this which shows it's a year old. PS. Woot. My first dupe whine. http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/07/boil-an-egg-ins tead-of-your-brain-with-your-cellphones/
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Plus, the phones try really hard to minimize the amount of energy they use. 2 Watts is peak power consumption. I wouldn't recommend trying this experiment unless you want egg on your face.
I wonder if we would be able to cook larger things with more cell phones? Like if we had 12 phones could we cook a pizza? Or with 20, a plate of cookies? As well, this shows the amout of power that goes out form these phones, and most of the time, they are next to our heads! Hey, can they make enough heat to keep us warm, like if were stuck in a snowbank?
Well if it isn't the leader of the wiener patrol, boning up on his nerd lesson...
...does this work with Poodles?
Thats funky. I wonder how many eggs I cook every day while im chatting with my GF...
Hahaha, I feel sorry for cell-phone using Eggheads. Hahaha.
Ya, that was bad. Shoot me.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Next, an article about how to troubleshoot your phone by putting it in a bucket of water.
If two cell phones generate enough energy to cook one egg, imagine how scrambled your brains would be from holding a phone next to your head.
Then again, that just might explain the 405 in LA...
Bzzt. Brainiac (an alternative to Mythbusters) tried this with 100 phones, and the phones were literally covering the egg, and they left the egg under there for a while. It definitely didn't cook, and they reported it didn't even get remotely warm either.
This is your brain.
This is your brain on CDMA.
questions??
Next up we learn how to get a heated pizza with two cellphones. Simply call pizza places until you find one willing to trade a pizza for one of your cellphones and baddbingbaddaboom, you get your hot pizza.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Placing large metal objects round the phones until their signal strength meters read 1 bar would be an easy way to max out the power consumption.
However this is obviously BS. Especially as phones all talk to the tower, so using two of them serves no other purpose than halfing the cook time.
This is your brain on CDMA
Come on! It's not like it's hard to realise that this is a hoax. It's already appeared on Boingboing, where people noted that it was a load of crap. Will Slashdot editors please do a little research?
At least, I dunno, learn about the laws of physics? Specifically, THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY.
That is all.
No it isn't, you karma-whoring liar.
Is it April Fool's Day already?
Problem #1. Handheld cellphones do not emit 2W. The old analog handhelds were capped at 700mW and I suspect the digitals emit much less based on the power available to them and the talktime.
Problem #2. Even if you scrounged up some old bagphones with their 3W output power, they still only gives you six watts of power. I don't think that is going to cook an egg in the time claimed.
Democrat delenda est
http://web.archive.org/web/20010429231038/http://w ww.wymsey.co.uk/wymchron/cooking.htm
The experiment might have worked with some kind of Ni-Cad powered analogue bricks in 2000-2001. Maybe.
And pardon my lack of physics knowledge... but wouldn't the radiation have to be ionising for this to work?
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
what it does to our brain when we talk on the cell phone.
Fried brain coming right up!
Don't ever put two cell phones in your front pant pockets. You might cook your eggs but no one will ever know. And if you have two cell phones in your back pant pockets, your ass will catch on fire and everyone will laugh at you. Life is a cruel master.
This is your brain on a cell phone.
Any questions?
For so many reasons:
1) Cell phones are the wrong frequency. They are 800, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz depending on the service. To make water heat up, you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.
2) Cell phones are too low power. A microwave that will cook an egg in a couple of minutes is going to have power expressed in at least the hundreds of watts, and probably will be 1000 watt. Cellphones have output power expressed in the miliwatts, that 1/1000th of a watt. We are literally talking over 5 orders of magnitude difference.
3) Microwaves function because they build standing waves. You find that if you take the frequency of a microwave (printed on the back usually), measure the size of the cavity and run the numbers, it works out that it's of a size such that standing waves build up. Taking a magnetron out of the case makes it work very poorly, despite the power output.
4) Cellphones operate in bursts. They do a burst when they have something to transmit, then fall silent. Saves on batteries. That's not going to cut it for heating, you need continous output.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or what, but you'll never get something like this to work. To even have a chance, you'd need to use a cordless 2.4GHz phone. It's at least in the right frequency ballpark, never mind all the other problems.
So how bout someone explaining why you wouldn't burn your face when making a cell call?
my fucking microwave takes 3 minutes to cook an egg . Why would a handset operating for days on a 3 volt battery cook something that fast, while not cooking the face of anyone using it?
I hope no one believes this stupid pile of garbage. You get bombarded with much more radio waves just by being out side than any normal cell phone emmites while on a call.
All this is paranoya about cells phones is really anoying.
Assuming an egg has the heat capacity of 60g of water, and a 1000mAh * 3.7V cell phone battery, it looks like a fully charged cell phone battery could actually raise the temperature of an egg by 55 degrees C. That is, if you could somehow expend your entire battery into heat, and have it all go into the egg, you could cook one.
The article is still a joke, of course - the egg won't even come close to warming by any measurable amount.
I am so sending this to them to check out.
That's probably the stupidest fucking thing I've read on Slashdot in a while. You can't nuke an egg with 2 cell phones and a hifi.
Jeezuz. Do you guys read and/or apply a 4 seconds of thought to these things before you post them?
this is nonceklse - ive;benen using my cebll phone for yearsnow and theresno obsevvable effecsts.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
This is completely false. Yes, the phones radiate energy in a fixed pattern around them regardless of what they are communicating with (in this case the tower, which requires significant energy to reach). However, cell phone transmissions do not occur on the microwave band which can excite water molecules (and hence increase their motion, i.e. heat). If this were true, your head should get unbearably warm after a long phone conversation. Sounds like the "cell phones cause cancer" myth taken to a new level.
Don't believe it.
For one thing most cell phines put out less then 2 watts average power.
For another it takes over well over 60-80 watts of power at 2 meters to begin to, say cook a hotdog (don't ask)
And lastly, the frequency range is a gigahertz or more below what it takes (about 2 GHz) to achieve heat water through RF....
Fun... but silly...
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Let's see, most cell phones come with 500mAh (or smaller) 3.6V batteries. That's 1.8W over 1 hour. Let's assume 1000W microwaves can cook their eggs for 10 seconds before they explode (It's been a long time since I've tried it and I have better things to do nowadays). Let's further assume we can peak the power of cell phone radio to 1000W without frying it. That comes out to about 6.5 seconds before the juice runs out. Not quite long enough to cook. Now the article says you need TWO cell phones, then you may have a case. May be something for the mythbusters to look into.
EVER.
It has none of the charm or actual science of Mythbusters and yet the people who make it think they're the coolest, funniest, sexiest people in the world. What they don't realise is that they're actually English.
Read Pynchon.
Interesting this should come up. One of my professors today went into depth about cell phones. From what he said, Microwave ovens heat up food by sending waves with a very specific frequency. This frequency which supposedly has to be right around 2.43GHz excites the hydrogen particles in a water molecule, creating heat, and warming up the food. He went on to say that modern day phones, and cell phones just so happen to use the same frequency of 2.4GHz to trasmit. So one would question the use of cell phones, since the frequency is the same. Cell phones, according to this professor use around 25 milli(?)-amps of current on average, so the effects are not really seen. However, this current can fluxuate. I was told atop a ski-lift , or near a cell phone tower the current can drastically increase, to around 700 mA. What I am getting at, is that from what I've been told, cell-phones can produce the same affect as microwaves, and really mess with the water in your brain, and supposedly cause cancer. People thus far have said, they don't buy the article and the sort, because the two cell phones aren't talking to eachother directly. It seems to me elevation is of more importance than whether or not the two cell phones are communicating directly. My guess is that the second cell phone is just to up the total amount of waves emitted per an area. Yeah, ramblings, quas-organized thought. Just ideas relayed from a teacher.
This really works! I've done it!
And, for the first time since yesterday, I am offering for sale a revolutionary new product that will protect your precious head from the same egg-cooking x-rays that make you breakfast.
For three small payments of $19.95, you can block the radiation emitting from your cell phone by adding this small device to the back of your phone. The unique lattice-like orientation of the pantented gold-copper-lead electrical conduits create an electrical "net" around your phone, forcing the dangerous radiation to be emitted directly up into the sky instead of into your brain! Simply peel the backing off the product and affix it to the back of your phone, between the phone and the battery. Be sure to read the manual for proper placement, because if you are even a fraction of an inch off, you won't get the proper protection you deserve. If you are feeling nervous about doing it yourself, I also offer a service to install this device on your phone for you, for only two additional payments of $19.95 each, plus postage. Just send me your phone and rest easy!
But wait! Call now, and I will throw in, completely free of charge, a cell phone privacy guard. This handy device fits over the mouthpiece of the phone and prevents malicious hackers from listening in on your calls by scrambling your signal. Don't miss out on this opportunity!
First one hundred callers receive a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge as a FREE GIFT!
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
I'm assuming it should say 4/1/06, but it says today is 2/6/06.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
If you believe in creationism (or in the flying spaghetti monster for that sake), you might just as well believe in mobile cooking. But then, your brain is fried anyway.
--- Eat my sig.
But, I figured I'd take a stab at doing the math to see if it's plausible. It's been quite a while since I've taken Physics, so someone else can (and I'm sure will) check my work:
An average egg weighs 58g, and is 90% edible
So let's figure 50g for the egg after I pick out the pieces of broken eggshell.
I'll start at room temperature 70 degF (21 degC), and I want to raise to 145 degF (62 degC), so let's say I want to raise the temp of the egg by 40 degC.
This is where I make a bit of a leap, these calculations will assume that the egg is 100% water, obviously that's not the case, but it's probably a reasonable approximation.
50 g of water raised 40 degC takes 50 * 40 = 2000 calories (scientific calories, not dietary).
A calorie is 4.19 Joules, so that's 8380 J.
The article says it takes 3 minutes to cook an egg. A Watt is one J/sec, so 8380 J / 180 seconds = 46 Watts.
So, it would take 46 watts over 3 minutes to fully cook an egg to 145 degF. And that's assuming that the power is 100% absorbed by the egg. Since the article suggests placing the phones near (but not touching) the egg cup, most of the radiated energy will not be absorbed by the egg (if it were, the phones would drop the call and be unable to find a signal)
I think (but am not certain) that a typical handheld cell phone will put out around 600mW of power max, so if you immersed your 2 phones in the egg to get maximum RF absorption, you'd be ready to eat your egg after only 114 minutes. Better charge your battery first.
Cell phones are the wrong frequency. [...] you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.
Exactly. And this is why I always cook my eggs between my notebok and my wireless AP while transferring large files, instead of falling for this urban legend spread by mobile phone companies trying to boost their revenues.
Uh. Huh. Let's see ... an egg is, oh, say 50 grams. So it takes 50 calories to raise the temp of the egg by 1C. and a hard-boiled egg is more or less at equilibrium with boiling water, so the minimum would be something like 70×50 calories, and 4.2 joules/calorie, so its going to take MINIMUM 14,700 joules.
60 joules to the watt-minute. 720 joules in 12 watt-minutes. 720 joules < 14,700 joules.
Check: it takes about 1 minute for my 700 watt microwave to cook 1 egg. 700 watt-minutes is 42,000 joules. 720 joules < 42,000 joules.
I call bullshit.
> that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse
> square of the output power for a given distance from
> egg to phone.
Even if everything else about TFA were true, I wouldn't buy this part. It's sort of like saying that 30 minutes at 350 degrees is the same as 15 minutes at 700 degrees. Tell that to a chef.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Yeah, this is kind of a ridiculous concept. The power level on a most modern cellphones will never go above 2 watts. In addition, the peak output is typically only used when the phone first connects to the network. So we're talking well under 2 watts most of the time.
On top of that it's an omnidirectional signal. As some others pointed out, you're talking to the tower, not directly to the other phone, but even that suggests that it's somehow directional. So in the end, the amount of power were talking about hitting the egg is miniscule.
If two phones were putting out enough wattage to cook an egg in 3 minutes. I should think after a 10 minute phone call with one phone, you're head would start to feel warm.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
It is EXTREMELY irresponsible to post such stupid stuff here - don't you realise that soon this will be duped several times on Digg and then other Diggers will post it to their blogs, while others look for someone (or a cell phone company) to blame, and will start wrapping their phones or heads in tinfoil - heck, some Diggers will probably TRY and cook an egg and may get salmonella from the eggs on their fingers, which they will transfer to their mouths when they suck their thumbs and so will end up needing antibiotics.
For the sake of humanity (Diggmanity?) *** --No Digg ***.
I better go warn them before it's too late.....
AT&ROFLMAO
I'm thinking a cellphone with a two-watt output would sap a standard cell battery dry in just about that ... three minutes.
I thought most cell devices were on the order of 1/3 watt rf output.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
...because if my X has caller ID and finds my #, this will *not* be a cheaper way (as the subject suggested)
yup, here clipped from Wikipedia, under "Laser"
It should be understood that the word light in the acronym LASER is meant in the expansive sense, as photons of any energy; and is not limited to photons in the visible spectrum. Hence there are X-ray lasers, infrared lasers, ultraviolet lasers, etc. Because the microwave equivalent of the laser, the maser, was developed first, devices that emit microwave and radio frequencies are usually called masers. In early literature, particularly from researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories, the laser was often called the optical maser. This usage has since become uncommon, and as of 1998 even Bell Labs uses the term laser[1].
----
but I dont think you can have an omnidirectional light, I'm fairly sure that by definition a laser concentrates light to go in phase, and in generally the same direction.
-=>
The moral of this story is: never let a pregnant chicken use a cell phone.
Some time ago, klorg.org had a piece about trying to cook an egg in the Arizona heat... apparently, cooking on sidewalks and car hoods won't work either... though the spot between speakers behind the back seat seems good enough to keep you from having to clean up runny eggs...
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This has been widely discussed online and it is a pure hoax. The wymsey site also has such highly factual articles as hunting the wily tofu. Obligatory dig at slashdot editors elided for space.
How does anyone get out of high school without the ability to call bullshit on stuff like this?
It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree C. To a first approximation, an egg weighs about 50 grams, and is full of stuff whose specific heat is probably not too different from that of water. Let's say cooking an egg at room temperature requires you to raise its temperature by 50 degrees C for one minute. You will need something on the order of 2500 calories to do this, or about 10,000 joules. This energy will have to be transferred to the egg over a one-minute interval, assuming 100% efficiency.
A joule is one watt-second, so this cooking process is going to require exposing the egg to about 166 watts for one minute. At 100% efficiency.
A cell phone puts out about one watt, and good luck funnelling all of its output into an egg. (For extra credit, calculate the impedance of a chicken egg in free space, and design a suitable matching network).
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my public-safety campaign, warning gullible Americans about dangerous levels of radiation in voting booths.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
If this were true, a naked magentron would be a great cellphone jammer. Even if not, it still might be!
Would this work with 2-Way radios or ham radios?
HOAX, people. On brainiac (british show. mythbusters but zanier) they tried this by burying an egg under 60+ phones and repeatedly dailing them all (which mythbusters has already proven generates the largest wattage spikes). Nothing happend to the egg.
guys, before you all get too excited, take a look at the wymsey.co.uk homepage - the site is a self declared parody of local newspapers in england. (Wymsey is a fictional village - a coincidence that it rhymes with Whimsy?). Therefore, i think it can be assumed that TFA is an affectionate parody of local news journalism. This should be obvious, despite the fact that this clearly will NOT work.
tim
First off, as stated in an earlier port, 2.45GHz is NOT the resonant frequency of water molecules, otherwise only the surface of food in microwaves would be heated.
http://rabi.phys.virginia.edu/HTW/microwave_ovens. html
Cell phones work at 850MHz or 1850MHz, so it's not looking good right from the off.
Second off, as stated by the article, "For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg."
Four watts. Four joules per second.
Lets look at this. I'll use some glaring assumptions just to get an estimate of the time taken to cook an egg with 4W (with is a factor of ten greater than you'd really expect from two mobile phone).
First off, lets assume that you want to heat the egg (70g - it's a large egg) from 20C to 100C. I'm not sure if that constitutes cooking, but it'll do for now.
Lets also assume that the energy required to heat the egg is similar to that of water (4186 J/kg).
So energy required is 4186 * 0.07 * 80 = 23kJ.
At 4W, we're talking 5860 seconds, or 98 minutes. And that's assuming 100% efficiency, which definitely won't be the case in this situation. (Not forgetting the already incorrect factor of ten for the phone output power, frequency of operation and burst nature of phone comms).
By the by, I discovered this page on egg boiling science as I finished writing this post:
http://newton.ex.ac.uk/teaching/CDHW/egg/
Perhaps someone with more patience than me can more accurately calculate the energy required to boil a 70g egg?
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Slashdot is falling behind with outdated, uninteresting stories. However, Digg seems to be picking up where /. left off...
What a dork NitroWolf is.
...clueless about anything as to believe this? I'm not talking about physics cluelessness here. If you could heat an egg with a pair of cellphones then everyone's brains would be brain stew by now. Do people not put two and two together? Oh right...I get it...you've already used your skull as a brain stew pressure cooker.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
But from TFA:
I think we've found the problem...
Next week we'll show you how to make a cell phone call with two frying pans and a piece of tin foil.
Bizzarely enough, someone drew my attention to this site last week, and I communicated with the guy who wrote it. Here is his response:
"Peet,
The whole thing is just a joke - see the surrounding articles and
the rest of the web site. It was never meant to be taken seriously.
What was really scary was that a couple of years ago the
'information' on that page was included in a school science site!
I thoroughly understand how mobile phones operate - I spend 25 years
in radio communications & electronics.
Cheers!
Charlie."
On top of that, a handheld cell phone does not put out 2 watts. It puts out a maximum of 0.6 watts, less if it can get a stable signal so that it can conserve battery power.
Is this a new low for slashdot ? Don't get me wrong, folks, I *LOVE* slashdot, been reading for freakin' ever, but Hemos... please... you can do better, and your readers deserve better, huh? Don't you think? Or maybe you just hate us, your loyal readers who generate dozens and dozens of pageviews for you every day? Say it ain't so.
Awesome... now, to see if we can cook brains the same way...
/ 28/0319239
Seriously, guys, this ranks right up there with the magical battery sticker http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01
Perhaps I thought "slashdot" but my fingers typed "onion"...
This is slashdot right? Where's the obligatory pentium 4 joke? I want to know if I can cook an egg on my laptop.
How many honey bees does it take to cook an egg?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Everyone's so caught up with saying why something like this would obviously not work, and noone's asking the more important question: What is this article doing here? This is news? Is it April fool's?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
. . . many technogeeks lack any.
Come on guys! The story was on wymsey.co.uk. That alone caused me to file it as a bit of WHIMSEY. It is like citing an article on theonion.com or saying you read it in Mad Magazine.
Yeah, I posted the same comment (and then some) to the Radio Whymsey24trwe;t (however you spell it) forums. Then, to really compound the fact that no one will care about what I wrote, I wrote something about the article in my blog.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg
OK, let's do the math. How much energy does it take to boil an egg? Let's say a "large free range egg" weighs 100g. The egg proteins start coagulating at around 65 degrees celsius, i.e., about 40 degrees above room temperature. Heating up the egg by this much would take 100g*40deg = 4000 calories, by definition of calorie, assuming an egg has specific heat close to that of water (actually it's slightly lower). Converting to joule, that's 4000*4.185 = 16739 joule. Since Watt is joule per second, two 2W transmitters will take 16739/(2*2) seconds, i.e., 69 minutes, to output that amount of energy.
So even under ideal conditions and perfect efficiency, it will take the described setup over an hour (rather than "three minutes") to output sufficient energy. Of course, during that time the egg would give up heat to its environment; and anyway, only a tiny portion of the radiation will be absorbed by the egg (most energy won't even radiate in the egg's direction). Realistically, the egg will never heat up by more than a few degrees.
1. Place cell phone next to egg
2. Set phone on fire
3. ??????
4. Profit-- Er I mean-- Dinner!
I read TFA, it's either a hoax, a joke, or something similar.
But if you did have to cook an egg with two cell phones... something along these lines might work:
1. crack egg into pan
2. strip phones into pieces and gather plastic bits
3. liberally douse plastic bits with lighter fluid
4. ignight ligher fluid by using a bit of metal to short one of the cell phone batteries to cause a spark
5. hold pan over burning plastic
5. admire the cooked egg, then discard it and the rest of the toxic mess.
Disclaimer: Do NOT do this at home, or anywhere else. While death or injury from following moronic instructions posted by some yahoo like me onto a site like slashdot may be well deserved, you take full responsibility for it!
Me - I'm young and trendy - I cook my eggs with an Apple laptop.
...a Beowulf cluster of these,/i>!
/hungry for scrambled egg and sausages.
I, for one, worship our egg-cooking cell phone overlords.
...a Beowulf cluster of these,!
/hungry for scrambled egg and sausages.
//oops, previously used submit, not preview :-P
I, for one, worship our egg-cooking cell phone overlords.
SO we have given up the whole NEWS for NERDS theme here ???
Why is this presented as real ?!?
My 9-year-old niece could tell you that isnt gonna work, especially in a few minutes.
Not sure why i hang out here anyway, 3/4 of this is in my paper usually the same day. Is that better than most locals?
Lets assume all the power of 2 phones is absorbed by this 60 g egg. That would be 4W. This corresponds to 4W*3*60s = 720 J. To warm up 1 g of water 1K about 4.2 J (Cp, specific heat) is needed. That gives temperature increase of about 720J/(60g*4.2(J/(g*K))) = 2.86K. Even 3 Kelvin temperature increase would not be enough to cook an egg taken from the fridge (I hope everyone will just believe it because proving it scientifically from first principles could be quite hard job).
This could (in theory) work. I know I always get headaches from my cellphone if I talk on it for over 10 mins at a time. It also gets extremely hot. And I know for a fact that some cellphone antennas are directional. It's to minimize the amount of radiation that's actually being directed toward your head. It's usually a little electronic component on the side of the cell phone opposite the ear piece. That way the phone will be pointed away from your head whenever you're talking on it, and just about any other time as well (whenever you're looking at the screen).
And as for the people who keep saying, "OMG thys lyke wont werk u guyz r stoopid!!!111oneoneone", why don't you actually try it before commenting on whether or not it will work. The scientific method is your friend.
Check out their "retro kitchen"... http://www.wymsey.co.uk/wymchron/retro.htm. I mean, who uses Windows 98 these days anyway?
it's a "power absorbed" issue. interference nodes might influence (except, as we're not dealing with monochromatic radiation, the won't) where the power is absorbed, but the issue is total amount of power absorbed by the egg.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Take, for instance, your average microwave which can cook an egg in about two minutes. It has a magnetron that operates at roughly 2.5 GHz, at 700+ watts inside of a reflective faraday cage. While the egg is inside of the microwave, the radio waves emitted by the magnetron cause the water molecules inside to change orientation in sync with the polarity of the wave passing through them. This vibration results in friction, which creates heat, and in turn cooks the egg (or whatever other food is inside of the microwave). This affect is amplified by the fact that the microwaves are contained inside of a metal chamber which prevents them from escaping and helps to redirect them into the food.
Though some cell phones operate within the same frequency range of microwave ovens, they have a maximum (regulated by law) output of 6 Watts. This wattage, combined with the fact that the output is not contained within a localized area, means that the microwaves emitted by the cell phones would have a hard time even penetrating the shell of the egg, let alone cooking anything.
Furthermore, it is important to note that cell phones do not communicate directly with one another. When a call is made, the caller's phone signals the tower which contacts the second phone. All communication between the two phones is done through the tower. The two phones communicating between one another is made irrelevant by this.
Lastly, the if one explores the source site (Wymsey Village Web) for this page has the motto of "on the nick of the cutting edge of rural parody" and bills itself as a humor site. Taking stories from a site such as this would be just as foolish those things written on sites such as Something Awful, the onion, or Pointless Waste of Time. This only shows that one must always question the validity of ones sources, no matter how enticing or appealing their content may be.
It is somewhat disheartening to me that this would be covered on slashdot as factual information. I am bothered even more, however, by the fact that so many of my peers have readily accepted this as a fact even though it has an obvious air of incredulity.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
...I felt like a fool, it obviously didn't work...and I left the things sitting there for about 10 minutes.
...talk to someone near me with a cell-phone. I don't need my brain to start frying like this egg; my brain cells are precious.
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
;-)
The real question is, if you short the battery, could you cook an egg. If you can't do it with a piece of copper, there's no way in hell you're going to do it with "mysterious radio waves"
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The person that wrote that "article" is either a complete idiot who believes everything they read or they're trying and failing to be funny with absolutely no idea of how to make a decent looking webpage. Somebody has told the slashdot editors that today isn't April 1st and that they don't need to allow retarded stories through yes?
Who would shell out for a second phone? We're not talking poultry amounts of scratch here.
I shouldn't lay my karma on the line like this.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
My calender doesn't say April 1st...
This doesn't work. I just tried it. Don't worry, I wasn't gonna use the egg anyway.
So if these cell phones are *that close* to your brain, don't you think your brain might be taking some damage?
I did read a recent scientific article mentioning a 40% decrease in gray matter in mice after a 3 hour exposure to cell phone radiation every day for a week. I can't remember the place though (I think it was Scientific American).
I had a friend who conducted a related experiment...
I cannot believe nobody is calling in this BULLCRAP.
:(
A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation gives 4 hours!!! And that's assuming 100% energy-to-heat, and no heat loss.
Needed: 60kJ to heat 1 oz egg by 80 'C. Each cell phone: 7.2 kJ each hour, at 2 W max. One/six of that goes through egg (roughly, for the given geometry). 100% of what goes through, gets absorbed. x2 phones
Total time: 4 hours!!!
And given that the egg is going to be nearly transparent to 0.9 GHz freq. waves.... (as opposed to 2.5 GHz microwave oven waves)... this will give you DAYS of cooking time. And now you will have to factor in the heat loss (diff. equation system, not quite back-of-envelope for me)... But roughly, the equillibrium temp of such egg is going to just a few degrees above room temp, and that's NOT COOKED
Now I know why those on cell phones tend to drive slower and do stupid thing....their brain is being cooked...
you can do it much faster with the following setup: 1) Laptop with Wifi card. 2) launch paris hilton.torrent 3) put the egg near the wifi antena... in seconds there will be blue rays of tcp/ip flying from your wifi setup and they will cook the egg and also put salt.
-- Por mais que eu ande no vale das trevas e da morte, meu PowerMac G4 Não Travará!!!
The Slashdot article is more about the evils of not listening in Physics class than the evils of cell phones.
The idea is preposterous. Note that the radio does nothing. Note that cellular phone antennas are not directional, and the energy goes equally in all directions.
Maybe Slashdot editors did too much gaming when they were young, maybe they haven't taken the time to learn how the world works, because they often fall for hoaxes.
take a florcent light bulb and put it up against the antenni and key the mic.... light up the bulb/tube.
I'd imagine there should be something like this that works for cel phones for a better demo...
More notes to go with those above:
Note that cellular phones don't communicate with each other. They communicate with a local transmitter/receiver, one of the "cells". Putting an egg between them implies that the power going back and forth heats the egg; it doesn't, because there is no cell-phone-to-cell-phone direct communication, in spite of what the cell phone ads imply.
Cellular phones, and the cells, transmit only the power necessary to make them communicate. That's to prevent interference in heavily populated areas.
Urban legend? You're seriously insinuating that *more* than a miniscule percentage of /.ers *don't* understand the very basics of cellular telephony?
What does everyone who believes in this "urban legend" think is actually the case, then? That cell networks are completely peer-to-peer and all those towers are just high-amplitude repeaters?
I mean, even if that were the case, the phones would automatically decrease tx/rx power when they came within close proximity of each other, just as your phone uses less power when closer to a tower.
They seem good at letting me sit on the phone for hours on end.
There may still be some evidence for long term damage to the brain if you talk on the cell phone all day long for a hundred years or so, but I really doubt this egg myth is anything more than a bad yoke...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
That right. Cell phones frying your brain is an urban legend. I use a cell fone a lot. In fact I'm using won rite now wile I rite this. If cel fons casd y damge I ld no. If i wen't so pattic wod b lahble. Ia gine a cll pone kausng ayon ha...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
If microwaves from a mobile phone can cause cancer, how is it that we can immerse ourselves in kilowatts of infrared radiation (at a much higher energy) and at the worst get simple burning (oxidation) of our skin?
Open fires should be much more dangerous than practically any source of microwaves.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
you're talking about 4 watts from each phone max, and the egg could only absorb at most 25% (90 degrees) from each, giving you, at most, 2 watts from 2 phones. The purpose of the radio, I will bet, is to provide maximum inteference so as to force the phone's wattage output to the max. Both phones will communicate to the tower, and there shouldn't be any magical phone interference effect bc cell phones operate on hundreds of channels, and two channels per call, so that what my phone output channel is your phone input channel, and vice versa. i dont think that 2 watts will cook an egg in, er, "three minutes", Emiril.
Not to mention that all (USA) handheld phones at MOST output 6/10 (.6) watts of power. Now, if you were to use one of the "original" handheld phones, the motorola brick, its output was 3 watts, but, as with the above post, the phones are not talking "to" each other but to the cell tower.
An egg has a mass of about 50 g; assume that's all water, that it's at room temperature, and that we want to raise it to boiling.
So we have (50 g)*(80 degrees C)*(4.2 J/(g * degree C))
=16800 J
Assume that our phone is putting out 2 W=2J/s, and that it's all going into the egg, it'll take 8400 s, or more than 2 hours. That's assuming the egg cup insulates perfectly.
What you fail to understand is that they are working with exceptionally large values of 720.
The thing is, they have a very legit point. Slop style coding (which is the norm now, not the exception) combined with planned obsolesence and corporations who can't even maintain a level as good enough, they have to always show "more" profits this quarter than last quarter = a pretty wasteful and dodgy symbiosis between the primary OS vendor and the hardware vendors. I mean, how hard is it to grok that forced software upgrades necessitate forced hardware upgrades. The Macroslop hogs feed off of Hell's computers, and vice versa. Freeking obvious to see. For basic computing and web surfing, there's absolutely no need for anything brand new on the shelf today, EXCEPT they really want you to upgrade,they want your cash, so they make it impossible to keep using your older non broken equipment.
With toasters, vacuums, blenders, cars, you name it, people can upgrade once the older gadget is worn out and really is broken, but now with computers and software and the conman aspects of the business around them, computers become "worn out" by being forced because of security issues and application so called "upgrades" into newer OSes that require newer hardware. It's not that their computer is broken or worn out, it's been FORCED out on purpose so that already billionaires can become trillionaires or something.
I know this has been debunked already, but anyways. Phone A talks to cell mast A and phone B talks to cell mast B.
Cell mast A may or may not equal cell mast B.
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...what about the radio. How does it interact with this? I get the part about the phones being able to cook the egg with their radiated power (makes you wonder what it does to brains) but the radio mentioned seems to serve no purpose other than to play background music. Why would you need that for this to work? Anyone care to clue me in?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Sure, the phones don't communicate directly. They still affect each other.
The transmit power from one phone will be overpowering the receiver of the other. This makes for crap reception and probably messes up the transmit circuits as well, which causes the phones to go to max transmit power in an attempt to make the connection work better.
You certainly don't need one phone to dial the other. You could dial both from elsewhere.
I'd go with a dozen phones to be sure, and maybe toss a bit of foil over it. (not too much foil though, or the connections will be lost)
Your math is off:
1. Heat capacity for egg white is less than for water or 3.1 J/g*K
2. Eggwhite coagulates at 62C
Assuming the egg achieved room temperature before experiment, dT=40K. So 50g requires:
(1) E=50g*40K*3.1J/g*K=6.2kJ
So 4 watts of power will require at least
(2) t=6.2kJ/4W=1550s=25 min, 50s
but, the acutal power may actually higher. Both phones communicate with the tower. The base station emits power directed at the phones as well. A total of 34W would be reqired to coagulate the egg in 3 minutes. If close to the base station, this is certanly possible. I have seen birds plunge to their death immediately after perching on the feed horn on a radar at an airport,
see http://newton.ex.ac.uk/teaching/CDHW/egg/#formula for details
It's 2.4 Ghz, which is the resonating frequency of water, and it's a direct link.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I did this just last week, when I was home from work with a bad cold.
And that's how I made Eggs Benedict with a cell phone.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
the nuts. Just leave it on, in search/roam mode, draining itself, in your pocket. Soon, you'll have roasted nuts.
The way my cheap-assed phone is designed, when it goes searching due to a weak or lost signal, it STAYS in that mode, wiping out my battery in 8 HOURS even if I don't talk on it. Somebody ought to WHACK such engineers. I DO have a spare battery, but it should be able to go a whole work day without "Searching" mode killing my battery in zero-talk-time. The damn phone should go into an intermittent pause, say, every 15 minutes, or just go to sleep automatically and if it senses a cell burst, then wake back up.
Until then, I leave the nuts roaster OUTSIDE of my pocket to keep IT sizzling without whacking my wattage..
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Check: it takes about 1 minute for my 700 watt microwave to cook 1 egg. 700 watt-minutes is 42,000 joules. 720 joules
Admit it! You ran away into the basement and your mother cleaned up the kitchen.
Let's see ... an egg is, oh, say 50 grams. So it takes 50 calories to raise the temp of the egg by 1C.
Not necessarily. 1 calorie is defined to be the amount of energy it takes to raise 1 gram of WATER 1C, not an egg. Sorry, but it's true. I agree with your point nonetheless. The bloody article is 100% pure BS.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my public-safety campaign, warning gullible Americans about dangerous levels of radiation in voting booths.
That's an excellent idea. Certainly should improve the quality of leaders in this country.
I mean, hell, it can't hurt.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I didn't just call bullshit. I emailed it directly to the website.
(Note: they screwed up the form as well; who knows where it sent the email, really...)
Sigh.... Anyone actually like to find the article. I found this which shows it's a year old. PS. Woot. My first dupe whine. http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/07/boil-an-egg-ins tead-of-your-brain-with-your-cellphones/
Umm, sorry Technoextreme, but we call it a dupe when it is on slashdot twice. Otherwise, you could say that you already saw this in the dictionary, and you just rearranged the words. This is not your first dupe when, it is your first whine as a dope.
Something I remembered reading...
"A commonly held myth is that water "resonates" at 2.4GHz, which is why that frequency is
used in microwave ovens. Actually, water doesn t appear to have any particular "resonant" fre-
quency. Water spins and jostles around near radio, and will heat when in the presence of high
power radio waves at just about any frequency. 2.4GHz is an unlicensed ISM frequency, and so
was a good political choice for use in microwave ovens."
Excerpt from "A Practical Introduction to Radio Physics"
Correction: I now understand the purpose of the radio; cell phones don't transmit much when there is no sound.
I like this quote from an earlier comment:
"As to believers of the original article, eggs average around 50 grams in weight. It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. One calorie = 4.184 Joules (let's say 4.2 because this is a rough approximation anyway). Room temperature is 20 Celsius, so the difference to boiling is 80 degrees C. You need 4000 calories to bring an egg up to boiling (50 gms * 80 degrees C), or about 17000 Joules. Since a joule is equal to a watt-second, that means your average phone with 1 watt output would need about 4.5 hours to raise the egg to boiling temperature, assuming NO other losses."
Then someone said that an egg is not all water, and it is easier to raise the temperature of an egg than water, which is true.
But, that is not enough difference to change the fact that this is a hoax.
I like this, too:
"It takes 3 minutes to hard boil an egg in water. There's no way your cell phone (or even a few of them) could put enough heat into an egg to make its temperature go up even a couple degrees. You need to be able to put more heat into the object than the air around it can dissipate."
One reason for that is the radiation is going in ALL directions, not just into the egg.
http://home.comcast.net/~solidsnake1298/egg_cellph one_1.mpg
Roommates dontated their phones. Called each other and set the phones next to the egg. We left if for about 22mins. The result is in the video
I tried it and it works!
The only thing the article fails to mention is that the phones must be inside a 400 degree oven for the entire process. But other than that...
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Eggs "cook"* at much less than 100C. Just because you boil them to cook them, doesn't mean they require boiling to cook.
/
I'm currently looking for answers on what actual minimum energy is needed to cause the egg to harden.
An article I can't access (not going to pay) is
"How long does it take to boil an egg? Revisited" D Buay
European Journal of Physics
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0143-0807/27/1/013
* Cook is defined as an irreversable chemical reaction pervading the entire material, the nature of which is dependent on the material but substantially equivalent to that obtained by heating in boiling water, and *not* necessarily "hot enough to serve with toast for breakfast".
http://www.friendster.com/useropen.php?uid=43679
In the next week's column we'll learn how to phone with you frying pan...
is get a journalist to read this and watch the fun develop....!
I don't know, but my understanding is that you tell Nextel where you want "Push to Talk" to go in advance, and they connect you when you press the button.
Cellular phones have a very limited range, so if "Push to Talk" works when the other person is many miles away, that is evidence that the transmission is going through Nextel's equipment.
Ok, first of all; if I could cook an egg in say five minutes using two phone, I could cook it in 10 minutes using one phone. I talk longer than that on the phone sometimes - how would the right side of my brain look if the phone actually emitted enough energy to boil an egg in that time? Right - you would faint after talking just a few seconds (heating the brain is *really* not a good-for-you thing to do). After 10 minutes of talking you wouldn't be able to guess your own name, should you wake up...
So, obviously this is BS.
Now. A big egg, let's say that's about 80 grams of mass, and that the specific heat of the combined egg contents is similar to water (shouldn't be too much of a long shot). So, we have 80 grams of something that has a specific heat close to 4 joules/(gram*kelvin).
To boil that, we need to heat it about 80 kelvin (room temperature around 293 kelvin, water boiling at 373 kelvin). That's 4 [joules/(gram*kelvin)] * 80 [kelvin] = 320 [joules/gram].
We had 80 grams of egg. This gives us 80 [grams] * 320 [joules/gram] = 25600 [joules].
We had five minutes to do this - that's 5*60=300 seconds. A joule being one watt in one second, we get: 25600 [watt*second] / 300 [seconds] = 85 [watts]. So, using 85 watts for five minutes should get an egg from room temperature to the boiling point of water. Approximately.
Each phone would then have to emit around 42 watts (could this be a coincidence? Oh, nevermind..).
Let's say you get around one third of the energy into the egg (I'm really being generous here - the egg would have to cover 1/3 of the output of the antenna and completely absorb the energy) - you would need two phones each with a 126 watt transmitter.
Mobile phones with 100+ watt transmitters? I know there are rural areas in the US of A, but I sincerely doubt that it's common to carry phones that pack that much punch.
Besides, the article talked about 2 watt output phones... Again, BS.
Ahhh.... Have a nice day.
Please forgive my lack of physics or other high end science classes, but what was the radio for? He mentiones turning it on, being able to put it anywhere in the room, and that you might as well put it on the table. Is it just to listen to while your waiting for the egg, or does it serve some purpose (something to transmit over the phones, or something to do with the radio waves, maybe?)?
Oh yes, please spare me the jokes, I prefer to deep fry my food.
Scott Swezey
Two things: first, as another person already noted, this is a hoax.
But second, the people who simply divide the applied wattage by the required energy to cook an egg in order to obtain a cooking duration miss the point that the egg radiates more energy as it heats. You need to use something like the Stefan-Boltzmann law (the T-to-the-fourth law) (consider the egg a blackbody):
Power = (5.7*10^-12 W/cm^2/T^4)*(Area)*T^4
A 15cm diameter egg (I measured one from the 'fridge) at equilibrium at room temperature is constantly absorbing and emitting about 3.3W. Increasing this by 2W gives a final temperature of about 66 C. The egg will never never get hotter than this.
According to the indespensible "On Food and Cooking" by McGee, egg protien begins to coagulate at 63C, sets at 66C, and is really done at 71C. So depending on your definition of 'cooking' the egg, it's not that it will take a very long time, but that it will never happen, ever. Which is good, since as was pointed out, this is a hoax anyway.
Cheers!
You're correct, heating happens at any frequency. But water does have a very strong resonance. Microwave ovens are deliberately dentuned. Otherwise the uwaves would be absorbed at the surface of your potato, and the centre would never heat up. Neat huh?
" ...don't talk on two cell phones simultaneously with a metallic eggcup in your mouth"
Set the table on fire.
1. Place egg between cell phones 2. Call phone B from phone A 3. ???? 4. Profit!
I have to wonder if cell phones don't wind up cooking your brain, too, or at least your inner ear. Maybe that's why so many people drive while talking on them. They've sustained brain damage and don't know any better.
%subj% is just uploading some data using GPRS.
1. No radio is required.
2. Since GPRS uses several time slots simultaneously, the radiation power increases several times.
I think that Push-to-talk (PTT) more or less turns a cellphone into a walkie-talkie. You have to keep a button pushed as you speak.
What I don't know is if PTT uses local network equipment or if only the cellphones suffice (which would be useful where there is no network). I have seen people use PTT in ski resorts -- it would help them get together down the slopes.
Read "Current Use in Mobile Telephony" on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_to_talk
This is your brain on drugs...
This is your brain on drugs with affordable long distance from Cingular Wireless..
Sounds like a job for a future Mythbusters episode. After all, why should we do it when they can do it and inject some humor. Get Adam to hold the two cell phones on both sides of his head. Tell him it is a stereo myth.
The higher the Frequency, the higher the amount of "RF Burn"
Maybe the article could be re-written with the use of two WI-FI access points with 15dbi directional antennas, their transistors maxed out AND "talking to eachother" I think this would work.
Mythbusters is not bad as entertainment - certainly better than that 70s show - but science?
It is to laugh!
My favorite was when they proved that hitting a wooden dowel with an arrow always resulted in a split down the grain, regardless of speed, point of impact, or any other factor they managed to notice. From that, they concluded that Robin Hood could not possibly split one arrow with another. Amount of time spent doing historical/archeological research to determine whether 14 century archers preferred end-to-end straight-grained wood for their arrows? Zero. Zip. Nada.
The one where they "prove" Archimedes' mirror couldn't work is almost as funny, though. They actually used a previously sunken ship for a target without considering the effect that total saturation might have on the flammability of wood!
I love watching those guys with actual scientists in the room. It's just like MST3K!
Could anyone let the Adam and Jamie know about this at Mythbusters and see what happens?
My solution is different.
1. Get a HDD that is old enough to be used for that and new enough for S.M.A.R.T.
2. Install S.M.A.R.T.
3. write a script that uses the drive with proper intensity to get the right temparatur
4. cook the egg..
OK, so we tried http://threewisemen.ca/egg/
I think TFA suggests that something unique about two phones makes this work. When in practise, two phones will merely make it work twice as quickly (if it works at all).
Right, but it takes some minutes at a lower temp. Equilibrium seems like a good back of envelope estimate.
Seems way unlikely that it would be two orders of magnitude less, anyway.