Pharma firm admits it goofed on āE-Wavesā phone chip
SLEEVES rolled up, Feedback reaches into the piling system where we meticulously store the emails you send us ā and we pull out a message from Stephen Freeman about the āE-Waves Phone Chipā.
Readers with an advanced interest in pseudoscience will already be thinking of the claims that might be made for a āchipā that aims to suppress ādangerous radiationā from cellphones. According to Stephen, āa quantum physical information waveā is said to be involved. But we canāt enlighten you in detail. Visiting we find instead a message that we translate as: āOmega Pharma has decided to suspend sale of the E-Waves Phone Chipā¦ After the launchā¦ a storm of protest broke out, casting doubt on the scientific proofs by doctors and professors that we gave.ā They even offer a refund. Respect!
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Feedback looks forward to more reports of absurd products being repudiated. But not with too much hope, since so few of them come from companies with reputations to protect: Omega was in its announcement of the productās launch as selling ānon-prescription products such as wart treatments, pregnancy tests and sun tan lotions to pharmacistsā. Weād very much like to see the correspondence between Omega and its supplier.
āMicrosoftās Internet Explorer refused to show Theo McCaie a web page, complaining that āāundefinedā is undefinedā: the meaning of which is now, erā¦ā
Itās just like swallowing your mobile
STILL they come: a spam arrives addressed to letters@newscientist.com from , promoting the benefits of āthe safest, anti-radiation mobile phone hands-free available today!ā And why might this be needed? Because, apparently, ā70-80 per cent of the energy emitted from the antenna of your cellphone is absorbed in your headā.
Feedback cannot claim to be an antenna engineer, but weād have thought that youād have to half-swallow your phone to achieve that level of signal attenuation.
The offer is based, of course, on the supposition that ārecent clinical and laboratory studies have shown that the EMFās emitted from your cellphone can cause dangerous health conditionsā. Leaving aside the question āthe EMFās what?ā, more startling is the claim that by buying this product ā an old-fashioned stethoscope-style earpiece that they call the āRF3 AirTube Technologyā ā you āmay save your life and your loved onesā.
Surely moving the phone away from your head puts it closer to your loved ones, and indeed to your precious gonads.
WHAT really puzzles Feedback is the quantity of chutzpah exhibited by those who, albeit perhaps thoughtlessly, send such pseudoscience-babble spam direct to Ā鶹“«Ć½. (The standard exemplar of āchutzpahā is the apocryphal son who, on being convicted for murdering his parents, pleads in mitigation that he is an orphan.)
Indeed, looking through our junk archive we find more spam from promoting the āDe-Tox Foot Spaā. This looks suspiciously like the Aqua Detox device about which we were slightly sceptical (19 June 2004) and which was tested and debunked by a reader (10 July 2004, p 28). Except now itās less than a quarter of the price, at $250, and says itās āapproved as a medical device under the European Medical Device Directive 93/42EEā ().
Is it a double-bluff, on the basis that no publicity is bad publicity and even a write-up as sceptical as the one you are now reading is better than none? Feedback hopes that pointing this out neutralises the publicity we give here, and calls the bluff called.
Wrong kind of carbon emissions
IN WHAT he describes as āa romantic momentā, Graham Nash recently bought a hand-held Dyson vacuum cleaner as a wedding anniversary present. He got his comeuppance when he read the box blurb ā also available at ā which proudly says of its ādigital motorā that āno carbon brushes means no carbon emissionsā.
Thatās not, as Graham says, what we usually mean by carbon emissions these days. It is true that in some other motors āas the carbon brushes wear down, they emit carbon particlesā, as the site says, but exactly how bad for the environment could this be? Feedback would have thought that, if anything, such vacuum-cleaner emissions would have a slight ā probably very, very slight ā cooling effect on the worldās climate.
The bigger effect will be sooting up houses. Does that suggest a threat from runaway vacuum cleaner use? Do we mind?
Iron that shrinks water molecules
FINALLY, Philips has made a radical breakthrough in designing a new super-duper steam iron ā the GC4630 ā which produces ā50 per cent smaller steam particlesā, according to . Steve Cassidy observes that since the particles of steam are molecules of H2O, this implies a noteworthy advance with implications far beyond the ironing board. Will some sort of fission be occurring inside this iron?
