Slashdot Mirror
Mobile Phones and Lightning a Lethal Mix
An anonymous reader writes "In a letter to the British Medical Journal, doctors wrote that people should not use mobile phones outdoors during thunderstorms because of the risk of being struck by lightning. Usually 'when someone is struck by lightning, the high resistance of the skin conducts the flash over the body in what is known as a flashover, but if a metal object, such as a phone, is in contact with the skin it disrupts the flashover and increases the odds of internal injuries and death.'"
And this information is useful because we are always using our mobile phones out in thunderstorms.
Odd, my cellphone practically has no metal surfaces
...I no longer need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electrical power I need?
Damn rivets! Catching my doo hoo willy on fire!
You can then say "at least I was not using my mobile phone" ... duh!
I am no expert, but I would say:
1 - the risk of being hit is quite small if you behave with common sense (for one, stay inside!)
2 - if you are hit, the consequences are quite severe anyway (die or very bad injury) so wether you carry a mobile or not should be a minor difference in the whole picture...
It would be one thing if they said it is more LIKELY to be hit if you used the mobile, but that I cannot deduct from the statement, or?
The plastic cover doesn't have any significant insulating properties. This is /. and I can't draw a diagram, but the insulation probably can't withstand more than about 10kV. For an analogy in relative terms, would you feel safe if the mains wiring in your house was insulated with nothing but a fine layer of dust?
Pining for the fjords
What does the BMJ have to say about body piercings, such as multiple earrings/studs?
This is another of those disgusting Slashdot pseudo-science articles. Slashdot editors apparently spent their entire childhoods playing video games, and didn't learn anything about the real world.
Edited paragraph, without the nonsense: "The Australian Lightning Protection Standard recommends that metallic objects... should not be used (or carried) outdoors during a thunderstorm..."
The warning about metal and lightning has nothing particularly to do with cell phones. A tiny cell phone is not the biggest hazard. Don't use metal umbrellas during lightning storms.
Don't fly kites with metal string. (Or any kite. Lightning travels on non-metallic paths sometimes.)
The decrease in liklihood of a fatal injury not using you phone causes is insignificant compared to the decrease you get from removing metal jewelery?
The only metal-bodied phones I've seen are the boutique ones like a Motorola V3. Everything else is firmly plastic, although most seem to have some kind of metal shielding inside when you open them up.
Does it have to be metal in contact with the skin?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Don't hold up umbrellas, large metal spikes or TV antennae. Jury is still out on iPods and tin foil hats maybe OK.
I saw a Mythbusters show where they disproved the piercing thing.. they got some model heads (made of some kind of weird Jelly) one of which had its tongue pierced and they then caused a lightning strike to see which dummy got hit - they filmed it with high speed cameras which was cool - however - it was totally random which head got struck by the lightning- until they filled one of the heads with a load of nuts and bolts, at which point that got struck the most.
Doctors find that prolonged submersion under oceans can cause suffocation, and that walking into an active volcano can result in extensive burn damage.
It is suspected that some natural forces can be injurious to human health. MORE FUNDING is needed to study these phenomena.
Seriously, every slash-dotter must be aware that conductive objects on or near the body - jewelery is the obvious and most likely candidate - will act as a focus for energy transmission during a lightning strike. Belt buckles and shoe nails used to be the problem in earlier times.
This can turn a survivable accident into a fatal accident. But should we all buy plastic-mounted diamond studs? Do we want to live forever? Or do we want to welcome our new insulated overlords.....?
You mean "tale". Unless the women around your bit of the world are really weird..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I'm in a thunderstorm!
No, its crap!
*ZAP*
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The best way to insulate oneself from lightning is to be _inside_ a metal object, such as an automobile.
Anyone who has seen the Electricity Show at the increasingly unchanging Boston Museum of Science knows that.
Lightning Safety tips, for the uniniated:
1. Do try to not be the highest thing around.
2. Don't stand under the highest thing around.
3. Don't lay flat on the ground if you are at a golf course or open field. Crouch.
3a. Some country clubs splurge and buy lightning detectors. Pay attention to the warning.
4. Seek freakin' shelter
5. 4 may conflict with 2.
6. Cell phones are the least of your worries.
7. Geeks should be more concerned whether the insurance covers the electronics.
8. The rubber soles of your shoes won't protect you.
9. If you are talking on your cell phone in the middle of a field during a lightning storm, Saint Darwin will announce "You! Out of the gene pool!" and take your soul.
and lastly...
10. **"The Australian Lightning Protection Standard recommends that >>metallic objects, including cordless or mobile phones, should not be used (or carried) outdoors during a thunderstorm," Esprit added.** So drop your pants and toss your belt buckle when the storm hits.
--
BMO
Lighting information week...
http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/week.htm
Safety.
http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/outdoors.htm
Check out the line of dead cows near the metal fence.... I didn't see a single cow with a mobile phone in it's non-opposable-thumb hoof.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
shocking
I think this point was dispproved also - but to be fair they were using a Jelly head and not a real one! - the tongue stud sustained no damage at all when the lightning struck it (it actually hit the top of the had most of the time I belive)
Are you kidding? Some people seem to not even have a life that doesn't involve screaming into a mobile phone. Yay for sitting next to the guy who's just got to tell everyone in his phone book that he's on a train, across from the codependent chick wanting to do everything together with her boyfriend and god forbid that they're not in contact at every hour (actually, she sounded so obsessed, she sounded more like "stalker" than just "codependent"), and a few other such specimens which can't just shut up for at least 5 minutes of a 5 hour train trip.
Frankly, when I saw this Penny Arcade comic strip, I thought I had actually been around people like that.
What makes you think that that kinda people would stop talking in a thunderstorm? I can just see the same specimens under some crude picnic/fishing/bus/whatever shelter, screaming into the phone, "YES, I'M IN THE WOODS! CAN YOU HEAR ME? IN THE WOODS! WHAT WAS THAT? THERE'S A THUNDERSTORM HERE! CAN YOU HEAR ME? THUNDERSTORM!" Or I can just see the girl mentioned above shivering under some tree in the rain, but unwilling to stop being in contact with her boyfriend even then.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...I know, I know, I really shouldn't be doing this. But hey...
Is it just me that finds the 'flashover' principle slightly improbable? Now, I'm not a physics PhD (but then again neither were the *doctors* who wrote the letter to the BMJ, presumably!) but this was a notion first suggested by Nikolai Tesla. He hypothesised that he was able to pass the enormous voltages of his Tesla Coil across himself without feeling pain because it was so fast it 'crawled across his skin'. It has since been shown by far greater physicists than I that this was little more than a theory; it has no basis in Physical fact.
In actual fact, the reason he felt no pain was that the potential difference across his body and the floor (voltage to thee and me) was so high, and of such high frequency, that the AC current was oscillating faster than the nerves can respond - in much the same way as we like our CRTs to refresh at a faster rate than our eyes can, we just don't see it happening. As a result, his nerves never responded to the high frequency arc of electricity. If it was sustained, he would certainly feel his skin burn, and death would ensue (as continued high current has a nasty nasty tendency to do!)
In case it wasn't obvious...the arcs of electricity produced by a Tesla Coil are almost identical to lightning, in that they require a high enough potential difference to ionise the air to arc. He essentially shot (small) bolts of lightning across himself in the process of demonstrating his new-fangled AC.
So what am I saying? Well, I don't really feel the 'flashover' idea holds its own weight. Finally, who wouldn't expect a lightning strike to demobilise a person? If you ask me, she's frightfully lucky to be alive at all...
...and tin foil hats maybe OK.
Wearing a tin foil hat in a lightning storm is a win/win situation. If it works you are protected from lightning, if it dosen't work the lightning will melt the tinfoil and fuse it with your skull creating a permanent mindsheild to protect you from those cosmic mind rays plus the lightning will probably also fry all those alien implants.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
God doesnt want people to marry... Why else would a metal object such as a wedding ring increase the chance of internal injuries and death in case of a lightning strike?
... that if you're in an area prone to lightning, you should make sure you have a 1-iron in your bag.
When it gets dicey hold it up in the air - because as every golfer knows, even God can't hit a 1-iron.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Remember when Lee Trevino would stroll casually with a 1-iron over his shoulder during thunderstorms? Oh wait, this is Slashdot...nevermind.
For some people I've been around, I'd say the two probabilities are almost equal.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
80% of people who get hit by lightning recover and "lightning often flashes over the outside of a victim, sometimes blowing off the clothes but leaving few external signs of injury and few, if any, burns."
Now, I won't presume to try to explain exactly why that is because, not knowing much about biology, I don't understand the composition of the human body enough to even make an educated guess. However, considering it is observed to happen you can't argue that flashover doesn't exist.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
You're arguing that tales of mobiles interfering with devices etc is an old wives tale. You counter with...wait for it...another old wives tale.
Way to go.
I'm sitting here next to a commercial ECG telemetry system. By taking a call with my cell phone and walking around near the telemetry transmitters, I can *see* the interference on the monitor screen. I can also *see* the interference as I walk near clinical trials subjects with holter ECG recorders on. I'm doing it now: the disturbances are also present in the electronic data captured from those ECG machines.
If I were to go to our sister site and make a call within earshot of the coronary care unit, I'd get punched for using one because it *visibly and demonstrably* fucks up the readings and traces which are used for live, safety-critical monitoring.
Sure, there are areas of hospitals where it won't affect anything, but there are areas where it will, and it's safer and easier to ban the use over a wider area rather than trying to enforce a policy of allowing it in one room but not the one next to it.
Banning mobile phones in certain areas is just common sense - it's all about whether you can prove, beyond all doubt, that it *doesn't* interfere. If there's any doubt, or you just can't prove it, don't do it.
This whole story is based on a letter (not a peer-reviewed article) describing essentially anecdotal evidence that using a mobile phone increases your risk of injury given that you have been struck by lightning. The letter does not say that using a mobile phone increases your (negligible) chances of being struck by lightning.
This story says a lot about the inability of people (including doctors, it would seem) to evaluate risks. I'm surprised the British Medical Journal decided to publish the letter.
They have done several "lighining related" tests.. going by some of the tests they have done.. a cell phone is NOT going to increase your chances of being struck my lightning.
In fact.. to get the lighning to always strike a head with a piercing on it they had to have about 5lbs worth of metal on or in the head target, and rarely did it actually HIT the metal in the head (untill they added the 5lbs or so.. the big metal door knob in the head finally did it).
Statisticly.. the metal you wear or a phone is not going to make you more of a lightning magnet than no metal / cell phone.
It is still wise though to bend over and grab your toes if you are out in the middle of a lightning storm, they say the ass is the safest place to get hit....
Sometimes I'd love to be able to hurl a bolt of lightning at some cell phone users.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
at a billion volts everything is a conductor. You could hold a glass or rubber rod high in a thunderstorm and get much the same thing you would with a metal pole. and let's not hear anymore nonsense about electricity "taking the path of least resistance". it does not, MOST of a given current flow will do that, but parallel paths with more resistance will also be taken, but by less current. Even if you short your car battery holding a bus bar with two hands, there's a small amount of current going through your body too.
I think it is a good assumption that Lightning + Almost Anything Else = Lethal Mix. I saw a CNN article with video yesterday where a guy was hit by lightning on a motorcycle. Being the "Almost Anything Else" part of the equation did prove lethal to him. They showed gouges in the asphalt where the lightning had hit it!
Seriously the real danger is driving in thunderstorm while talking on your phone while simultaneously logging on to MySpace as illegal immigrants are slaughtering avian flu infected Pit Bulls to buy crack to fund their gang activities in the kiddie porn and terrorism industry.
If you're going to beat a perfectly good joke into the ground, could you at least bother to spell your words correctlY?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.