Ninth-graders design science experiment to test the effect of cellphone
radiation on plants. The results may surprise you.
Five ninth-grade young women from Denmark recently created a
science experiment that is causing a stir in the scientific community.
It started with an observation and a question. The girls noticed
that if they slept with their mobile phones near their heads at night,
they often had difficulty concentrating at school the next day. They
wanted to test the effect of a cellphone's radiation on humans,
but their school, Hjallerup School in Denmark, did not have the
equipment to handle such an experiment. So the girls designed an
experiment that would test the effect of cellphone radiation on a plant
instead.
The students placed six trays filled with Lepidium sativum,
a type of garden cress into a room without radiation, and six trays of
the seeds into another room next to two routers that according to the
girls calculations, emitted about the same type of radiation as an
ordinary cellphone.
Over the next 12 days, the girls observed, measured, weighed and
photographed their results. Although by the end of the experiment the
results were blatantly obvious — the cress seeds placed near the router
had not grown. Many of them were completely dead. While the cress seeds
planted in the other room, away from the routers, thrived.
The experiment earned the girls (pictured right) top honors in a
regional science competition and the interest of scientists around the
world.
According to Kim Horsevad, a teacher at Hjallerup Skole in Denmark
were the cress experiment took place, a neuroscience professor at the
Karolinska Institute in Sweden, is interested in repeating the
experiment in controlled professional scientific environments.
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