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I think this is probably down to the containers that the water was heated in. As for microwaved breast milk, since the main things heated by a microwave are water molecules, by rotating them, this could easily mess up the shape of proteins, who's effects depend on their precise shape.

Alright Alex, I'll be the first to suggest- "On top of that she was wanting the microwaved ones to do poorly, and although most scientists would dismiss the idea, it is possible that her thoughts toward each plant had an effect as well."

With that in mind, perhaps the next time you try to grow something, you'd do well to think in a positive manner towards the success of the LIFE of the plant, rather than it's presupposed imminent death...

As for the milk, it's not 'mysterious' at all.Food is pasturized by heating it to deactivate biologically active compounds.

Here's a link to an abstract of the 1992 Stanford study. And here's the text of the abstract:

In intensive care nurseries it has become common practice to use microwave thawing of frozen human milk for more rapid accessibility. Twenty-two freshly frozen human milk samples were tested for lysozyme activity, total IgA, and specific secretory IgA to Escherichia coli serotypes 01, 04, and 06. The samples were heated by microwave for 30 seconds at a low- or high-power setting and then reanalyzed. One-mL aliquots of 10 additional human milk samples were microwaved at low (20 degrees C to 25 degrees C), medium (60 degrees C to 70 degrees C), and high (greater than or equal to 98 degrees C) setting before the addition to each of 1 mL of diluted E coli suspension. E coli growth was determined after 3 1/2 hours of incubation at 37 degrees C. Microwaving at high temperatures (72 degrees C to 98 degrees C) caused a marked decrease in activity of all the tested antiinfective factors. E coli growth at greater than or equal to 98 degrees C was 18 times that of control human milk. Microwaving at low temperatures (20 degrees C to 53 degrees C) had no significant effect on total IgA, specific IgA to E coli serotypes 01 and 04, but did significantly decrease lysozyme and specific IgA to E coli serotype 06. Even at 20 degrees C to 25 degrees C, E coli growth was five times that of control human milk. Microwaving appears to be contraindicated at high temperatures, and questions regarding its safety exist even at low temperatures.

As a regular reader of your site, I'm very surprised you dignified a this "science project" by even mentioning it.

While there seems a possibility that something other than convective heating due to molecular motion and the impact on bonds, anything more is just pseudoscience.

You'd have been better off not posting at all.

Well, DCL, that's the benefit of this being my site. I get to post any crap I like.

But seriously, if this little experiment is real, I do find that pretty interesting. Of course, I find it hard to believe that microwaved water would kill plants. But given the many odd, little understood properties of both microwaves and water, I'm not willing to dismiss the possibility altogether.

I'm glad you posted it Alex. It's a good way to discuss experimental design. Here's how the test should be run to see if this isn't a case of irreproducible results.

First, the sample size should be much greater than 1 for each group. I'd like to see an experimental group (microwaved water) of 30 plants, a group of 30 that gets boiled water, and another "control" that gets tap water.

Come on--the death of one plant could've been due to any number of reasons.

Both the boiled water and the microwaved water should be done in the same container (pyrex would work).

I predict in this design you'd get no significant difference among the plants. (By the way, was her plan to measure the health of the plants strictly "lived" or "died"? What about measure stem length or number of leaves or something?)

yes, obviouly the sample size is a major problem in this 'experiment'....

"Expecting the plant to die" can result in a lot of more obvious problems than "bad thoughts." Someone could handle the plant more roughly, could under- or over-water it, could give it slightly less good light, and so on.

That's why a double-blind study would be great, with a lot more samples. The person doing the watering wouldn't know which group was getting which water until the study was over.

Water is not the same as "food". It's a simple compound H2O and heating it by microwave doesn't change that one bit.

Hi,

On several websites I found that microwave ovens were banned in Russia. What do you think Alex, is this a hoax or true? I think with your experience you should be able to find out.

Has anyone here ever tasted anything out of a microwave oven? I think it's a miracle how that machine can turn decent food into a tasteless rubery substance I wouldn't even consider feeding a pet.

Feeding a plant water that has been heated in a microwave oven is a bit sadistic. But it's not half as gross as actually trying to eat microwaved-food. I tried it a couple times, with different ovens, yuck. Anyone who believes more in his own experiences than scientists who keep changing their theories every couple of years knows microwaves do a lot more than just heating things up.

Imagine, like 50 years ago, some weirdo tried to tell you that one day their would be small boxes, with no wires. If you pushed a couple buttons, you could speak to someone else with a similar box, hundred of miles away from you. And it would be possible that millions of people would have a device like that... Who would have believed that? We would have called it science fiction from people with overactive imagination.

Cellular phones. And what do they use to transmit information? Microwaves... It's about the same frequency range as used by the ovens.

We don't need to look far to see proof that microwaves can do a lot more than heating things up. Who wants to wait until scientists agree on what causes the headache after a couple minutes of microwaving our brains with our mobile phones? Maybe they'll believe it's the heat. Maybe they'll give an explanation we totally don't understand. Maybe they'll just ignore it, because who wants to pay for such research?

What's the use of researching things any sane person can experience anyway?

I eat food that has been warmed up in a microwave oven regularly, and I have been since sometime long long ago. I can't remember when my parents first bought a microwave, but it was very early on, I'm thinking mid '70s. So far I haven't noticed any abnormalities that can't be attributed to normal wear and tear. I don't actually COOK food in the microwave, because it does tend to have texture issues, but for reheating, or warming things it works just fine. I also don't boil water (or any other liquid) simply because it's faster to heat it up on the stove.

Okay, let's consider the nature of water. Everybody learns in school that water is H2O, but unfortunately schools have a tendency to leave people with an oversimplified view of things. When you turn on the tap in your kitchen sink, you are not getting a stream of pure H2O. What you're really getting is a solution, with all sorts of salts and gases and biological things all mixed into the water. So it's not just H2O that is being microwaved, but all this stuff as well.

Now, despite what some people might think, there is no abnormal nuclear fusion or fission going on in your food when you microwave it (there will be the odd atom of some radioactive isotope in there breaking down, but that would happen even without the microwave). Things get heated up and molecules will recombine, but the atoms themselves stay the same. Oxygen is not going to break down into boron and lithium, and carbons and nitrogens are not going to combine into plutonium. Any changes are going to be on the molecular level, not the nuclear.

So, what happens to all those molecules of all the various solutes when the water is microwaved? As far as specifics go, I don't really know. But on a general level, they will be gaining energy. This may cause some of the molecules to break apart, or other atoms to combine into different molecules. These changes, though, would be dependent on all that added energy, and once the energy is taken away (by the microwave turning off and the water cooling down), many of them will likely change back to whatever they were before. Whatever such changes may be permanent wouldn't be all that much, because otherwise we would have noticed by now that microwaved water is suddenly full of high levels of cyanide or whatever. And since every organism on Earth has to deal with unwanted compounds in its environment every day, plants' and peoples' bodies all have means of handling small amounts of unpleasant molecules.

Another change that would happen to the water would be that some of the dissolved solutes would come out of solution and float away as gases. Carbon and nitrogen compounds from the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, are usually found in some amount in water. Microwaving the water would reduce the amount of these. However, the same thing would happen when you heat water any other way.

Water from your sink is also full of bacteria, fungi, algae, dinoflagellates, diatoms, and all manner of other little critters. Most of these don't have any effect on people or plants in the first place, and microwaving them would kill many of them. So for your health from the standpoint of the loss of these biological things, microwaving your water is beneficial at best and neutral at worst.

There is at least one other aspect of water that must be looked at. Even if you did manage to filter out all of the bacteria and salts and gases that have been mixed into the water, you still wouldn't have pure H2O. Water molecules are constantly swapping atoms around, so in any measure of water you'll have a small amount of other compounds such as H3O+ and OH- forming and disappearing in a certain balance. This is one of the basic properties of water. What microwaving the water might do to the amounts of each of these compounds I don't know, but it might increase or decrease the levels of each, or it might shift the balance more towards one or the other. If the latter, this could cause the water to take on a charge, or to become slightly more acidic or basic. Again, though, any such changes would likely only occur while the water had a constant source of energy, and when you take the water out of the microwave and let it cool the water will probably go back to its earlier state.

Yes, there are aspects of microwaves and what effects they have that we're not familiar with, but that doesn't mean that we don't know anything about them.

The pictures were photoshopped and misdated.
The original pictures are posted on the site. There are no photos of the microwaved plant looking healthy. The supposed day one and day three pictures of the microwaved water plant have cut-and-paste leaves on top of them from the other plant.

One possibility that I am surprised nobody brought up is that the granddaughter is lying, or that she cheated to get a predetermined result. I know that little girls generally are made of sugar, spice, everything nice, etc., but we do live in an age of academic dishonesty. Also, the purpose of the experiment was to show that we have been lied to all these years about the harmful effects of microwave water. I bet she, or someone close to her (perhaps someone made of snakes, snails, puppy dog tails, etc.) abused/killed the plant on purpose.

In addition, if you look at the pictures there are clear indications of sabotage, and the first picture even tacitly acknowledges this by including in the caption "pruned back to record new growth". My bet is that the "pruning" each day was a little more vigorous on the plant that was doomed from the start.

Of course all of this is probably overthinking as the most likely scenario is that the granddaughter is nonexistant, and the "experiment" is a hoax manufactured by someone with a grudge against health nuts and other OCD types.

"another person" has got it 100% right, as can clearly be seen from the pictures on the site.
I wonder if this was just created in hope of making an internet meme, or if there is some anti-microwaving mentality behind it.

In the pictures of days 1, 3 and 5 the microwave dirt sure looks wetter than the other dirt. By day 7, the healthy looking shoot from the microwave pot has been removed, and on day 9, it appears that only the purified pot is getting water...

According to Dr. Mercola's hugely popular website, the dangers of microwave ovens are proven. His article at http://www.mercola.com/article/microwave/hazards2.htm points out the tactics that have been used to squelch information that should be more thoroughly disseminated. He states:

Today's established science and technology argues forcefully that microwaved food and irradiated foods do not have any significantly higher "radiolytic compounds" than do broiled, baked or other conventionally cooked foods-but microwaving does produce more of these critters. Curiously, neither established science nor our ever-protective government has conducted tests-on the blood of the eaters-of the effects of eating various kinds of cooked foods. Hertel and his group did test it, and the indication is clear that something is amiss and that larger studies should be funded.

For a deeper discussion of what occurs, see his article, but this is noteworthy:

Cooking by microwaves begins within the cells and molecules where water is present and where the energy is transformed into frictional heat."
In addition to violent frictional heat effects (called thermic effects), there are also athermic effects which have hardly ever been taken into account, Hertel added. "These athermic effects are not presently measurable, but they can also deform the structures of molecules and have qualitative consequences.

The natural repair mechanisms are suppressed, and cells are forced to adapt to a state of energy emergency: they switch from aerobic to anaerobic respiration. Instead of water and carbon dioxide, hydrogen peroxide and carbon monoxide are produced." It has long been pointed out in the literature that any reversal of healthy cell processes may occur because of a number of reasons, and our cells then revert from a "robust oxidation" to an unhealthy "fermentation".

The same violent friction and athermic deformations that can occur in our bodies when we are subjected to radar or microwaves, happens to the molecules in the food cooked in a microwave oven. In fact, when anyone microwaves food, the oven exerts a power input of about 1,000 watts or more. This radiation results in destruction and deformation of molecules of food, and in the formation of new compounds (called radiolytic compounds) unknown to man and nature."

Why are we so quick to denounce efforts to reveal the truth when those truths may affect capitalistic enterprise or our modern conveniences? What is wrong with admitting that we may be making assumptions of safety that are based on flawed, incomplete, or tainted information? Why can't we accept that there are things happening in our world that are making people sick...sicker than we have ever been before, and maybe, just MAYBE the answer lies in what we are putting in our mouths that are not natural?????