Answer 2:
I once judged a school science fair, and the other
judges wanted to give a prize to an exhibit that
said seeds sprouted better on one side of the
magnet than the other. I was shocked, because I
don't think that's true. So I argued with the
judges and asked, 'Did the students count the
number of sprouts on the north vs the south pole
of the magnet? How many times did the students do
the experiment?' Just because something seems to
be true when you try it once, that doesn't mean it
is true! That exhibit didn't win a prize.
There are scientific articles, though, that say
electromagnetic fields affect the growth of
plants. I don't know how good the research is,
because there is a lot of research that other
scientists are not able to repeat or reproduce.
I searched through a lot of scientific articles,
and finally I found one group of articles that I
think is true: If you microwave soil, you kill the
plants and microbes in it! You can easily believe
that's true if you have a microwave oven.
Research is especially difficult if there
are only
small changes in what you are measuring. People
worry about electromagnetic fields from their cell
phones but we use our cell phones all the time,
and we still seem to be healthy. In fact, the
National Institutes of Health says the only thing
those electromagnetic fields do is to produce a
bit of heat, which is not a problem. Here's where
you can read [a lot!] about this:
read here
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