On Microwaves and Water

 

I recently saw a blog that "proves" that microwaves have a negative impact on water with an experiment performed by some school children where one plant was given microwaved water, and the other boiled water from a stove, and the plant given microwaved water died.

However, that article was so full of egregious scientific errors that I felt compelled to correct them. I will first explain why some of the author's statements are incorrect, and then I will offer more plausible explanations for the results she describes, and legitimate reasons why microwaving your food may not be healthy.

I have an undergraduate degreen in Physics, which means that I know enough about how a microwave works to see the fallacies in this article, but I am not an expert on health or biology.  Also, my intention is not to attack the author, but to educate anyone who comes across this blog.

Scientific Mistakes and Explanations

1. " Microwaves don’t work different ways on different substances." -- This is entirely wrong, by the very nature of how a microwave works. A microwave works by emitting, well, microwaves, which are tuned to a specific frequency which excites a vibrational mode in water molecules. Everything else is heated up by absorbing kinetic energy from their neighboring water particles. And besides that, different substances are affected differently by heat. 
2. "the problem with microwaved anything is ...how it corrupts the DNA in the food so the body can not recognize it" -- This actually has multiple problems with it. First of all, microwaves are very low energy, less energy than visible light. Due to the quantization of light, no matter how much microwave radiation you poor onto a strand of DNA, it will never mutate. To do that you need ionizing radiation, i.e. high-energy UV, X-Rays, or Gamma rays. And even if the DNA did change, your body wouldn't care, it just tears everything apart anyway.
3. "Microwaves agitate the molecules to move faster and faster. This movement causes friction which denatures the original make-up of the substance." -- First of all, friction doesn't really mean anything at a molecular level. At that scale the only thing that really matters is electromagnetic forces. Secondly, "agitating molecules to move faster and faster" is just another way of saying "heating something up". That happens whether you heat it up on the stove, in the oven, or over a fire. So unless the author is suggesting not cooking at all, this isn't an argument against microwaves.
4. "So the body wraps it in fat cells to protect itself from the dead food or it eliminates it fast." -- I'm not entirely sure what the antecedent of "it" is in this sentence, but as far as I know the human body does not wrap any kind of food in fat cells. It does however store some toxic chemicals in fat cells, which may have been what the author was really thinking of. I'll get to that later. Also, most food is dead. And if it isn't when you ingest it, it will be by the time your digestive system has torn it all apart.
5. "What about the nurse in Canada that warmed up blood for a transfusion patient and accidentally killed him when the blood went in dead" -- This is a red herring. Microwaving blood would certainly kill the blood cells, which should be alive during a transfusion. But boiling the blood would also kill the cells. This has no relevence to ingesting microwaved food.
6. If microwaved water is bad for plants, microwaved food is bad for us -- This is a non-sequiter. The biology of plants is very different from ours, and food is very different from water. Even if the experiment is valid, there is no reason why it implies that microwaving food is intrinsically bad for humans.
7. The author ends with a list of supposed negative effects of eating microwaved food. None of them have any explanation or citations. 

Plausible Explanations

So why did the plants given microwaved water die? Here are some reasonable explanations:

1. Bias: The experement was done by school children who had an obvious bias going into it, and the children could have easily unintenianally or otherwise allowed the microwave plant to die. There is also the possibility that the whole experiment was exaggerated or fabricated, but I hope that was not the case.
2. Unknowns: Plants are pretty complicated things, and there are a lot of things we don't know about the experiment. Was the water distilled, purefied, or tap water? What chemicals if any were present in the water? Did both plants get the same amount of sunlight, was the water the same temperature when it was given to the plants? Did the plants always get the water at the same time? Did they get the same amount of water? Was the water measured before or after it was boiled? Any of these could invalidate the experiment, and ther are probably others.
3. Temperature/Energy: Plants are better at obsorbing cooler water. As mentioned in 2, if the microwaved water was hotter when put in, that could have caused the result. It is also possible, that the microwaved water stored more energy in vibrational modes, rather than translational kinetic energy. As a result the water given to the microwaved plants would have stayed hot longer, and therefore more would have evaporated or drained to the bottom before the plant could absorve it. The additional heat may also have damed the roots of the plant. I think these possibilites are somewhat unlikely, and if they are true, have little bearing on the safety of microwave food for humans, other than that humans may not absorb as much water from microwaved food.
4. Container: This is the only explanation that is relevent to human consumption. Water will absorb the material of its container, especially when it is hot. It is probably that the stovetop water was boiled in a metal pot, and the microwave water was boiled in a plastic or ceramic container (probably plastic). Thus the stovetop plant was at least one mineral it needed from the water, while the microwave plant was getting chemicals from the plastic or ceramic, which may have been harmful. Plastic also has a low melting point, which makes it particularly susceptible to being absorbed by hot water. This doesn't mean that microwaves are unhealthy per se, but it could mean that you should be careful what you microwave your food in.

The real reasons microwaves aren't healthy

As mentioned above, cooking food in a plastic container may have negative health effect, because the water and/or food may absorb some of those nasty polymers. Maybe. I don't actually know for sure. The biggest threat of microwaves, however, isn't the microwave itself, but what you cook with it. Microwaves are generally used to cook food that isn't fresh, such as leftover or microwave dinners. These foods frequently have less nutritional value. Even leftovers often have less vitamins and  may have toxins deposited by bacteria growing in it.

I am not an expert, and if I made any mistakes, please let me know.

If you would like to read the original blog, it can be found at  http://usahitman.com/microwave-test/

Text Editors

In my years as a programmer, I have used many, many different text editors.

At first I used editors with the normal GUI interface with a lot of mouse interaction, a regular file menu, and normal key bindings. But then, I started playing with gvim and emacs. I was impressed by the power and customizability of both of these amazing editors, and really like the fact that there was no need to use the mouse at all. In the end I chose vim/gvim as my editor of choice. The learning curve was a little steep, and even steeper than for emacs. However, it has the convenience of not constantly having to press the ctrl key. (I have recently remapped my caps-lock as a ctrl key, which alleviates that somewhat, but I didn't know that was possible at the time). I also worked as a software developer for a year on a team that primarily used gvim, and so I got used to using vim there. I wouldn't say that vim is intrinsically better than emacs, but it is what I am used to now, and I really like it.

HTML By Hand

So, here is the HTML I wrote by hand for the Webcraft school. I have worked with html before, so It only took me one try.

Badges and Webcraft

So, Mozilla (and probably others) are making this new "Badges" system, where you can demonstrate your skills by earning online badges. The idea is that a college degree doesn't give employer's an accurate specific idea of what you do and do not know. The same degree from different universities may include entirely different sets of skills, and knowledge sets. Badges provide way to demonstrate more granular knowledge.

This badges system is very exciting to me, because over the years I have taught myself a lot informally. However demonstrating these skills to employers and/or universities/grad schools, is a challenge.

And so, while these badges are new and in development I am going to try and earn some, both to show off the skills I have already acquired, maybe pick up some new skills, and hopefully help progress this new method of education.

This post is actually part of Web 101 on the P2PU Webcraft school. I am already fairly proficient with HTML, but I have no formal training, and this give me an opportunity to get some form of exterior validation, and possibly pick up something new.

A simple FFT

So, following my PDE's class, I decided to try my hand at writing an FFT algorithm. I ended up doing it in both c and Fortran. Surprisingly, I found it easier to write in Fortran (accounting for the fact that I am more familiar with c, and had to look up the syntax for just about everything in fortran). So, without further ado, here is my code:

FORTRAN:

 module FFT  
   implicit none  
   save  
   public  
   REAL, parameter :: PI = 4*atan(1.0)  
   contains  
   recursive function fft1(f) result(r)  
     !assumes that f is of length n where n is a power of 2  
     !output is zero indexed  
     COMPLEX, intent(in) :: f(:)   
     integer :: N, first, last, k   
     COMPLEX :: r(0:size(f)-1)  
     COMPLEX, dimension(0:size(f)/2-1) :: even, odd  
     N = size(f)  
     first = lbound(f,1)  
     last=ubound(f,1)  
     if( N == 1) then  
       r = f  
       return  
     end if  
     even = fft1(f(first:last-1:2))  
     odd = fft1(f(first+1:last:2))  
     do k=0,N/2-1  
      odd(k) = exp((0,-2)*PI*k/N)*odd(k)  
     end do  
     r(0:N/2-1) = even+odd  
     r(N/2:N-1) = even-odd  
   end function  
   recursive function ifft1(f) result(r)  
     !assumes that f is of length n where n is a power of 2  
     !output is zero indexed  
     COMPLEX, intent(in) :: f(:)   
     integer :: N, first, last, k   
     COMPLEX :: r(0:size(f)-1)  
     COMPLEX, dimension(0:size(f)/2-1) :: even, odd  
     N = size(f)  
     first = lbound(f,1)  
     last=ubound(f,1)  
     if( N == 1) then  
       r = f  
       return  
     end if  
     even = ifft1(f(first:last-1:2))  
     odd = ifft1(f(first+1:last:2))  
     do k=0,N/2-1  
       odd(k) = exp((0,2)*PI*k/N)*odd(k)  
     end do  
     r(0:N/2-1) = even+odd  
     r(N/2:N-1) = even-odd  
     r=r/2  
   end function  
 end module  

C:

 #include <complex.h>  
 #include <math.h>  
 #include <stdlib.h>  
 #include "fft.h"  
 double complex* _fft1( double complex*, size_t, unsigned int);  
 double complex* _ifft1(double complex*, size_t, unsigned int);  
 /** use the Cooley-Tukey method to take the fast fourier transform of an  
  * Array of lenth 2^n   
  *  
  * input and output are both complex arrays of length N, which must be a  
  * power of 2. Returns 0 if succusfull, nonzero if failed.  
  **/  
 double complex* fft1( double complex *input, size_t N) {  
   return _fft1(input,N,1);  
 }  
 double complex* _fft1( double complex *data, size_t N, unsigned int step) {  
   double complex *result;  
   double complex *even;  
   double complex *odd;  
   size_t k;  
   if ( (N > 2) && ( N % 2 != 0 )) return NULL;  
   result = (double complex*) malloc( sizeof(double complex) * N);  
   if ( N ==1 ) {  
     result[0]=data[0];  
     return result;  
   }  
   even = _fft1(data, N/2, 2*step);  
   odd = _fft1(data+step, N/2, 2*step);  
   //multiply the odds by the twiddle factor e^(-i*2*pi*k/N)  
   for( k=0; k < N/2; k++) {  
     odd[k] = cexp(-2.0*I*M_PI*k/N)*odd[k];  
   }  
   //generate result  
   for( k =0; k < N/2; k++) {  
     result[k] = even[k] + odd[k]; //first N/2 results  
     result[k+N/2] = even[k]-odd[k]; // last N/2 results  
   }  
   free(even);  
   free(odd);  
   return result;  
 }  
 double complex* ifft1( double complex* data, size_t N) {  
   return _ifft1(data, N, 1);  
 }  
 double complex* _ifft1( double complex *data, size_t N, unsigned int step) {  
   double complex *result;  
   double complex *even;  
   double complex *odd;  
   size_t k;  
   if ( N % 2 != 0 ) return NULL;  
   result = (double complex*) malloc( sizeof(double complex) * N);  
   if ( N ==1 ) {  
     result[0]==data[0];  
     return result;  
   }  
   even = _ifft1(data, N/2, 2*step);  
   odd = _ifft1(data+1, N/2, 2*step);  
   //multiply the odds by the twiddle factor e^(i*2*pi*k/N)  
   for( k=0; k < N/2; k++) {  
     odd[k] = cexp(I*2*M_PI*k/N)*odd[k];  
   }  
   //generate result  
   for( k =0; k < N/2; k++) {  
     result[k] = (even[k] + odd[k])/2; //first N/2 results  
     result[k+N/2] = (even[k]-odd[k])/2; // last N/2 results  
   }  
   free(even);  
   free(odd);  
   return result;  
 }  

What is a miracle

The first definition of miracle on Dictionary.com is "an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause." I don't really like this definition, and this post will explain why.

First of all, what does it mean for something to be caused by a supernatural cause? It would be something that does not obey the laws of the universe, correct? But the universe, and its laws were created by God. And why would God ever have need to break his own laws? God certainly influences things in the universe, and performs miracles on scales from affecting the entire universe to a single individual. But I have no reason to believe that he does so outside of the laws of the universe that he established at his creation. As an Example look at Moses parting the Red Sea. It is entirely conceivable that some natural phenomenon caused the water to stop flowing at some point, and then start again. But why should that preclude the involvement of God. It would be a remarkable coincidence for the phenomenon to occur at precisely the right time for the Israelites to cross on dry land. If it is the case, as I speculate that it is, that God performed the miracle by utilizing natural forces, then Moses' miracle was the result of a natural cause, but it was also a miracle of God.

Now let me talk about my own life. There have been a vast many occurances in my life that are entirerly explainable by human and/or natural forces, which nonetheless I would consider miracles. Often they take the form of something like me, or someone else, being in the right place at the right time, or someone saying something I really needed to hear, or a pathway opening to me that had previously been shut. I believe that these sorts of things happen to everyone. Some may say that they are just coincidences or random occurances. But the frequency with which they have occured in my life is too statistically significant to reasonably accept that as an explanation. I see the work of God in my life, and the lives of others, even when they do not see it. That is what I call a miracle.

You can do incredible things with science and technology. Today's technology would look like magic to the ancients. And our current understanding of the laws of the universe is limited at best. Just look at quantum mechanics. We can make remarkable predictions in that realm, but we have only half-baked philosophical musings about what is really going on. There are many things in this world that cannot be explained by the science we currently have, but they are not considered miracles by most, because eventually when our knowledge progresses we can explain them as natural phenomina. And there is nothing wrong with that. But just because something is natural doesn't mean it doesn't come from God.

One of God's greatest miracles is the miracle of creation. It is a miracle that we can see just by looking around us, and on deeper study the miracle only becomes more profound. If the physical constants that show up in our laws of physics differed by even a small amount, the universe would be the way it is, there might have been no stars, no matter, and certaiinly no life as we know it. And there is a beuaty and symmetry in the way the world works, down from the most complex organisms on Earth (i.e. humans) to the most basic laws of physics.

In order to miss the works of God in the Universe you must actively be trying not to see them.

Thoughts on Unity

This is just a short post. I have finally had a chance to try out Ubuntu's Unity Desktop. In short, it appears to be an attempt to mimac macs. There is a dock along the side which functions pretty well with basic drag and drop functionality. Although I would like a little bit more customizability, such as controlling when it is visible and maybe put special applets on it. Also, the if a program is maximized its menu bar combines with the task-bar. Which is kind of cool, but is inconstant with non-maximized windows, and isn't obvious since the menus are hidden unless the mouse is hovering over them.

As for the Ubuntu symbol in the left top corner, clickin on it gives you something akin to Kickoff in KDE4, where you have an entry box where you can type the name of an application or folder and it will show results which you can select to run. It also lists favorites, and shortcuts to menus for other apps. The downside is that if browsing through you applications is a bit tedious with the mouse, however it gives you hints about uninstalled programs you might like, which I think is pretty cool.

Overall, I am pretty impresssed by Unity, but I still like KDE 4 better. And Enlightenment for when I want something a little simpler.