BILLED as a non-invasive and harmless way to peer into tissue, MRI scanners are everyone’s idea of what high-tech medicine should be like. But if the strength of the magnetic fields used in them continues to grow, getting scanned could become a distinctly unpleasant experience.
Physicists and physiologists have long reassured people that static magnetic fields are safe at any strength because there is no known way for them to have any significant effect on living tissues. Now a team in Florida has reported intriguing new evidence that ultra-powerful magnetic fields can alter animal behaviour.
Mice placed in very strong…
