Hoaxes and Urban Legends: You can cook an egg by placing it between two cellphones

The following piece of information has been passed around by email after appearing on several websites. Apparently it's based on a hoax published in a Russian magazine (Komsomolskaya Pravda, April 23, 2006). A blog site published an article about the supposed experiment, followed by this explanation:

Ha, ha, ha, ... just received an e-mail from Victoria Boutenko. She says the Pravda article was a hoax. An all in fun thing. Ha. See what happens when you "borrow" a posting from another person. Can't say I won't do it again. It was kinda fun. Like getting punked.

A cell phone battery doesn't actually carry enough charge to heat an egg to the required temperature.

Skip the following figures if you don't care for physics:
A fairly average 3.6V mobile phone battery stores 730 mAh, which is 2,6 Wh (Watt hours) of electric energy. This is 1.7 kcal or enough to warm a 60g egg by 28 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit). In other words, if all the energy used by the cell phone was converted into microwave energy (a lot of the electricity warms the silicon in the electronics and the display and thus just warms the handset) and all that energy were to radiate *only* at the egg and in no other direction, the egg would barely reach body temperature before the battery goes dead. In practice only a fraction of the energy would turn into microwave radiation that warms the egg. The numbers simply don't add up. Given the known specification of mobile phone batteries and the laws of physics it's doubtful if even dozends of mobile phones piled around it were capable of boiling an egg.

Please review:

Herbinator: Cell Phone Cooking

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Cooking an egg with cell phones
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Example email:

Need a cooker? Use your cell phone

Many organizations including the cell phone industry often downplay the risk of cell phone radiation to the brain. Results from short-term studies were used to convince consumers that use of a cell phone is not associated with brain tumors or cancer, which only develop decades after exposure.

To be fair, no one knows exactly how much harm a cell phone can do to a person. However, one thing for sure is that the radiation from a cell phone is harmful. It is only a matter of how much. There is no denying that.

Recently, new media has reported a study showing the radiation from cell phones is so full of energy they can be used to cook eggs.

In the experiment, researchers placed one egg in a porcelain cup (because it is easy to conduct heat), and put one cell phone on one side and another cell phone on the other. The researchers then called from one cell phone to another and kept the cell phones on after connecting.

During the first 15 minutes, nothing changed. After 25 minutes, however, the egg shell started to become hot and at 40 minutes, the surface of the egg became hard and bristled. Researchers found the protein in the egg had become solid although the egg yolk was still in liquid form. After 65 minutes, the whole egg was well cooked.

The study shows how scary cell phone radiation is. People should try to avoid use of cell phones. Although so far no one has proved the radiation from cell phones can cause something clinically significant. By the same token, there has been no one who can disprove the existence of such a risk.

Children should be forbidden from cell phone use because they still grow their brains and are particularly vulnerable to radiation.

© 2004-2005 by foodconsumer.org unless otherwise specified.

Original story can be found here:
http://www.foodconsumer.org/777/8/Need_a_cooker_Use_your_cell_phone.shtml

Please review:

Herbinator: Cell Phone Cooking

Known email hoaxes:
The AOL/Microsoft money giveaway hoax
The "809" area code hoax
The burned baby hoax
Amy Bruce / Make A Wish hoax
The "Invitation" virus hoax
The "Life is beautiful" virus hoax
The Oliver North / Osama bin Ladin / Al Gore hoax
Send spam to the South African police to save children
Exxon/Mobile gas boycott
Bush IQ report / Lovenstein Institute hoax
Monkeyman935 warning hoax
Kidney Theft urban legend
Ashley Flores, 13 (missing child hoax)
How to detect a two-way mirror
$50 call-back spam
Cooking an egg with cell phones

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