Microwave Test – an eye opener

[Maine-ah]

http://usahitman.com/microwave-test/

Below is a Science fair project presented by a girl in a secondary school in Sussex. In it she took filtered water and divided it into two parts.

The first part she heated to boiling in a pan on the stove, and the second part she heated to boiling in a microwave.

Then after cooling she used the water to water two identical plants to see if there would be any difference in the growth between the normal boiled water and the water boiled in a microwave.

She was thinking that the structure or energy of the water may be compromised by microwave.

[sofa king]

1. Interesting.

The obvious potential problem I can see is that if the temperature of the two water samples is not allowed to reach the same ambient temperature, then there will certainly be a difference. Hot water, even water that heats up in the length of a garden hose over the course of a day, can be enough to kill some plants as I have learned the hard way.

The article says merely "after cooling," which does not provide enough information for one to know if the temperatures of the two samples were the same.

The samples almost certainly will not cool at the same rate, one sample being in a microwave-safe container, and the other being in a pot. So if that simple disparity is not controlled by allowing the two samples to completely cool down to ambient over at least an hour, then the test will show differences according to the temperature of the water, rather than its composition.

[sofa king]

13. Yeah, I'm definitely no scientist....

But I know a thing or two about killing plants.

[RC]

2. The best way to disprove is to try this yourself.

All microwaves do, is excite the water molecules (i.e., add energy) in the food. That is it.
Something else is going on here.

Use distilled water to eliminate chances of harmful substances in the water.

Water is water, period. Microwaves cannot change water into anything else, except steam. And even then, they are still H₂O
This site is trying to tell you otherwise.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

3. good god. found more info here..

http://www.health-science.com/microwave_hazards.html

If this is true, then I gain 2sq ft of counter space

90% of our micro use is heating up water or coffee. looks like I'll be going shopping for a proper tea kettle.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. on the other side, this link shows Microwave blanching preserves more vitamins

http://nchfp.uga.edu/papers/2003/03iftturnipgreensposter.html

and wiki says

Several studies have shown that if properly used, microwave cooking does not change the nutrient content of foods to a larger extent than conventional heating, and that there is a tendency towards greater retention of many micronutrients with microwaving, probably due to the shorter preparation time.[21] Microwaving human milk at high temperatures is contraindicated, due to a marked decrease in activity of antiinfective factors.[22]

Any form of cooking will destroy some nutrients in food, but the key variables are how much water is used in the cooking, how long the food is cooked, and at what temperature.[23] Nutrients are primarily lost by leaching into cooking water, which tends to make microwave cooking healthier, given the shorter cooking times it required.[24] Microwave ovens do convert vitamin B12 from the active to inactive form, making approximately 30-40% of the B12 contained in foods unusable by mammals.[25] A single study indicated that microwaving broccoli loses 74% or more of phenolic compounds (97% of flavonoids), while boiling loses 66% of flavonoids, and high-pressure boiling loses 47%,[26] though the study has been contradicted by other studies.[27] To minimize phenolic losses in potatoes, microwaving should be done at 500W.[28]

Spinach retains nearly all its folate when cooked in a microwave; in comparison, it loses about 77% when cooked on a stove, because food on a stove is typically boiled, leaching out nutrients. Bacon cooked by microwave has significantly lower levels of carcinogenic nitrosamines than conventionally cooked bacon.[23] Steamed vegetables tend to maintain more nutrients when microwaved than when cooked on a stovetop.[23] Microwave blanching is 3-4 times more effective than boiled water blanching in the retaining of the water-soluble vitamins folic acid, thiamin and riboflavin, with the exception of ascorbic acid, of which 28.8% is lost (vs. 16% with boiled water blanching).[29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Effects_on_food_and_nutrients

[dipsydoodle]

6. Good news about the bacon

[RC]

21. The link is to scare mongering.

It has a lot of "information" on things that do not really apply to microwave ovens and the stuff we put in them. For instance the first statement in the excerpt is totally false.
There are two kinds of radiation and they do not have much to do with each other. Light is radiation, as are heat and radio waves. These are examples of electromagnetic radiation. The other kind is nuclear radiation which are the particles that make up atoms when decaying.

Also neither type of radiation necessarily causes ionization.
The underlined sentence is describing cooking. The same thing occurs when you use a pot on the stove or bake something regular oven.
The last sentence is just plain stupid. That is called marketing. Like calling distilled water Di-hydrogen oxide and expounding on the fact it not only kill many thousands people every year, but is the best known solvent. More things will dissolve in Di-hydrogen oxide (water) than any other known substance. Maybe we should treat is more as the hazardous substance it is and require a federal license and a hazmat suit to handle it? Huh, ya think?

Radiation, as defined by physics terminology, is "the electromagnetic waves emitted by the atoms and molecules of a radioactive substance as a result of nuclear decay." Radiation causes ionization, which is what occurs when a neutral atom gains or loses electrons. In simpler terms, a microwave oven decays and changes the molecular structure of the food by the process of radiation. Had the manufacturers accurately called them "radiation ovens", it's doubtful they would have ever sold one, but that's exactly what a microwave oven is.

[geckosfeet]

4. If the 'structure' of water changes it's not water anymore.

If it's water then the atomic structure and energy levels (is it the Bohr model being referenced) are that of 'un-microwaved' water.

My guess is that the containers that the water was treated in (boiled/microwaved) provided growth enhancers or inhibitors. Soil condition is also very important. Not to mention temperatures as mentioned in previous post.

[unblock]

7. this is the sort of experiment where other factors are highly likely to dominate

i'm not even sure what the difference between boiled and cooled water is supposed to be based solely on the method of boiling.

but whatever it is, the effects of that difference are likely to be dwarfed by other factors that would be very difficult to control at the level of precision necessary. for instance, the plants need the to have the same lighting, the same quality soil with the same nutrient content and the same ecosystem, the same fertilizer, the same number of the same kind of seeds, the same watering schedule, the same watering content, the water pitchers need to be decontaminated with the same cleaning products, and so on.

nevermind that the experiment should be repeated across a wide variety of plant and soil types and conditions and so on. also, the microwave has at least two differences with stovetop boiling -- one is the obvious heat source; the other is the fact that microwaves are small enclosed spaces, allowing a greater chance of boiled-off contaminants returning to the container. an idea experiment would control with such effects


this is a fine experiment for a science fair, but it's not anything to draw any grand conclusions from.

[Historic NY]

8. Sheesh your suppose to let the microwaved water cool off...first

http://microwavetest.blogspot.com/

[Maine-ah]

23. according to her experiment

she let both cool down before watering.

A lot of great info in this thread.

[Historic NY]

26. call me a skeptic....but its been test successfully multiple times

http://microwavetest.blogspot.com/

[WingDinger]

9. Microwave boiled water, is oxygen deficient.

The same technology is/was used to make McDonalds coffee superhot. Thus burning the genitals off that poor old lady.

Standard boiled water roils up the liquid, thus more oxygen.

As every med mar patient/grower knows, you must oxygenate the water. And yes, temp has a lot to do with oxygen carrying capacity.

[earthshine]

10. As other people have said ...

Microwave ovens excite only water molecules.

The wave, which is precisely tuned to the resonant frequency of water, pings an H20 molecule thereby increases its kinetic energy. In turn, vibrating water molecules bounce into the other molecules around them, increasing their kin en.

Temp is a measure of the "avg kinetic energy of a system." -- Basic science class

Water does not retain any weirdness from this process.

Things cooked in a microwave oven are "super heated" one tiny space at a time. Because of this, organic (that means Carbon based) molecules can be ripped apart. Microwave ovens can easily destroy the nutritional content of any type of food.

But, they work great for heating water.

[n2doc]

16. I have no idea what she was really testing, but the idea is stupid

Water has an ever changing nanoscale structure, on the order of femtoseconds. Bonds form and break on that timescale. No heating method is going to change that. The only thing that changes that is temperature (water gains structure (but still ephemeral) as T approaches 0) and salts. And the idea that different heating methods cause different amounts of oxygen is also false- the solubility of a gas in water is dependent on the water temperature, and the degree to which water loses gas (or gains it back) depends on time + mixing. So active boiling on a stovetop is more effective at degassing water than microwaving (because of the bubbles), but by the time the water cools it will have gained back most of the gasses it lost.

She probably is picking up some sort of micro nutrient from the pan she is using (maybe iron?). But it sure isn't "because the structure of water was changed"

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. The 'microwaved' plant appears to have been cut up

There are many stems, which end suddenly. That's not what it looks like when a plant dies, in nine days. There aren't any dead leaves lying around. I'd want a proper writeup (eg from the girl herself, on a school site, so that we know it actually was a science experiment - not what her grandfather claimed happened - which is, as far as I can tell, the source of this: http://www.execonn.com/sf/ ) .

[GeorgeGist]

19. Browsing around usahitman.com ...

led me to conclude that this is junk science.

[GoCubsGo]

20. A sample size of one per treatment?

These results don't mean shit. Anything could have killed that plant. This "experiment" was done under non-controlled conditions, which did not control for variations in light, temperature, soil composition, the initial condition of the plants, or a myriad of other factors. Unless both treatments are conducted under identical conditions, with multiple plants per treatment, there is no way to draw any legitimate conclusions here.

[Mr. Sparkle]

22. Snopes.com has called this false

They went so far as to redo the experiment under stringent conditions.

http://www.snopes.com/science/microwave/plants.asp

btw , thats the last time i will ever trust usahitman.com as a news source again!

[Maine-ah]

24. the reason I post stuff like this on the DU

many great minds willing to share info

[magical thyme]

25. need more plants tested

Any time I buy plants, I find that some number of them just don't do so well, even with apparently the same treatment.

Same with seeds. Less than 100% germination rate. Last spring, I set out a bunch of seedlings to start hardening them off. Lost track of time and stuff. By the time I remembered them, they'd been discovered by snails. Some were intact and fine. Others, from the same packet of seeds, were eaten down to just a little stem to let me know they really had existed at some point. Over time, some get eaten by bugs. Others are stronger, healthier and more bug resistant.

Did she water the plants identically? Did they have equal drainage? Any number of things could have killed the microwave water plant.