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The introduction of many a new technology has been accompanied by claims that its use results in unforeseen, deleterious health effects — claims that have at times ranged from the completely loopy to the not entirely unfounded. This phenomenon has been particularly prevalent in recent years, as new, invisible technologies (e.g., microwave ovens that cook food without flames or heating elements, cell phones and computer networks that transmit and receive data without connecting wires) have replaced older and more familiar forms. Example: Back in 2008, Cardo Systems (a vendor of Bluetooth communication devices) crafted a stealth advertising video that appeared to show some curious experimenters successfully getting popcorn to pop simply by placing four cell phones in a ring around the kernels and activating them. As Cardo Systems' CEO later revealed, however, the video had been created through the use of editing tricks: popped popcorn was dropped onto the table from above the camera frame, and the kernels on the table were removed via digital editing: In 2000, the web site Wymsey Village Web published a spoof article (Weekend Eating: Mobile Cooking) about using two mobile phones to cook an egg. The implications of this information were ominously obvious: If cell phones could cook an egg inside its shell, imagine what they might be doing to your brain while you're holding them against your head! Charlie Ivermee, the founder of the site (which is presented as the online home of a fictional English village), explained that he penned the piece to poke fun at precisely those kinds of technological fears: Although the names of the article's putative authors (Suzzanna Decantworthy and Sean McCleanaugh) should have been enough by itself to give away (even to those unfamiliar with the nature of the Wymsey Village web site) that the item was spoof, Ivermee noted that more than a few readers took his humor piece on the level: In April 2006, the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda sent the same hoax winging on another trip around the Internet by publishing an article, complete with pictures, in which journalists Vladimir Lagovski and Andrei Moiseynko claimed to have produced a hard-boiled egg in a little over an hour by placing the egg between two activated cell phones. (Click here for an approximate English translation of that article.) Photographs from the Pravda piece, along with some brief explanatory text (as replicated in the Example block above), were widely forwarded via e-mail, including the dire conclusion that If the microwave radiation emitted by the mobiles is capable of modifying the proteins in the egg, imagine what it can do with the proteins in our brains when we talk through the mobiles. For those who remain skeptical that even though these articles may have been spoofs, their underlying principle isn't necessarily false, we note that every instance we could find of someone's attempting to replicate this experiment resulted in dismal failure. For example, in March 2006 food writer Paul Adams penned a New York Times column about his efforts to cook an egg with two cell phones: The Three Wise Men web site purportedly chronicled a similar experiment — this one using three cell phones, two video monitors, and two laptop computers — that ended with similar results: In October 2005 the television program Brainiac, a UK-based science show, aired an episode in which they tried cooking an egg by placing it under a pile of 100 cell phones. All they ended up with was an unwarmed, uncooked egg: So prevalent was this hoax that the Mobile Manufacturers Forum, an international association of radio communications equipment manufacturers, put up a brief article on their web site explaining why the cook an egg with two cell phones rumor wasn't technically feasible:
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