Pop popcorn with your cell phone...NOT!

Watch this first 'tutorial'.FauxTo! Hoax! Con! May 28, 2008, this video was uploaded to YouTube illustrating the popcorn popping power of a circle of ringing mobile phones. Radiation. Amazing. Viral. Millions viewed.

Back in 2006, BoingBoing, Diggers, and others had fallen for a similar hoax, except that one involved two phones and a fried egg. Turns out, Cardo Systems launched this viral marketing campaign to help sell their Bluetooth headsets. Preying on fear-mongering YouTubers, Cardo hoped to sell headsets by bringing attention to the (putative) dangers of cellphone radiation. (Despite more than 11 million views, sales have been disappointing.)University of Virginia physicist Louis Bloomfield debunked the hoax, sternly declaring four cell phones the energy equivalent of "gathering opera singers together to sing, and trying to make the corn pop...that's never gonna happen." Wired Magazine explained, "In a microwave oven, energy excites the water inside popcorn kernels until it turns into highly pressurized gas, causing the kernels to pop".The FCC requires mobile phones to "comply with a safety limit of 1.6 watts per kilogram". Four cellular phones ringing in unison doesn't come close to the radioactive output of the average 1100W microwave's 700W surge. How to pop corn with your cell phone. FauxTo Revealed! Video #2.The second video explains how the FauxTo was likely executed. Deconstruct your microwave. Jury-rig the magnetron to lie underneath the table pointing up towards the popcorn. Turn on the magnetron beast. Then, prank your audience by orchestrating the "cell phone radiation". Ok. This is a possible way to produce the FauxTo. But is it really worth exposing your precious walnuts to this level of radiation? This method of pranking seems way too dangerous to be worth the kernel pop.External Link

Cooking an Egg Between Two Cell Phones http://www.snopes.com/science/cookegg.asp