x
Type in what your trying to find.
Type in what your trying to find.
Can watering plants with water that’s been microwave-boiled, then cooled, kill them? I was recently alerted to this silly myth doing the rounds on the internet when explaining to a young acquaintance why I prefer to microwave-cook my vegies. So it seems it’s still duping people with its apparent ‘scientific’ evidence, so here’s a bit of my own debunking.
The alleged ‘science fair experiment’ by ‘Arielle Reynolds’ (variously from Knoxville TN, or Sussex UK) in 2006:
“Below is a science fair project that my granddaughter did for 2006. In it she took filered water and divided it into two parts.. The first part she heated to boiling in a pan on the stove, and the second part she heated to boiling in a microwave. Then after cooling she used the water to water two identical plants to see if there would be any difference in the growth between the normal boiled water and the water boiled in a microwave. She was thinking that the structure or energy of the water may be compromised by microwave. As it turned out, even she was amazed at the difference.”
Snopes**, that great internet myth debunking site, has had a good look at the photo of the microwave-boiled watered plant on the left from Day 1 to Day 5 of watering, and showed how the photo has been manipulated (and the leaves probably removed with scissors). See the Snopes mock-up here.
BUT what nobody else seems to have noticed is perhaps only obvious to a gardener…..
1. How do you water a plant without moving one speck of perlite on the surface of the potting mix? If you look at Days 1 to 5, you’ll see that every single bit of that very lightweight substance is in exactly the same place.
2. How does a dying plant wilt so unevenly? Notice that the longer leaves on the right are exactly the same – robust and turgid – from Days1 to 5, but the others mysteriously change.
3. Where are the leaves that supposedly died? And how do each of the leaf stems end up with a neat, flat cut line at their extremity? Wouldn’t they also be withered?
It’s disturbing to see such rubbish still convincing so many people, if only for their inability to identify the essential elements of a properly conducted scientific trial, all missing from this obvious fakery.
And yes, I will continue to enjoy my highly-nutritious, microwave-cooked vegies!
[**If you ever get an email telling you about some extraordinary or ‘dangerous’ fact, or how a girl dying in the UK needs a gazillion postcards from around the world, run it through the Snopes site first. Odds on you will find it is an internet/email hoax]
Replication is a fundamental principle of science, the ability to repeat an experiment and get the same answers. So let’s replicate this one.
Find 2 plants.
Cut off the leaves of the one you like least.
Blame something.
Thanks kiwi-ian, I needed a good belly laugh today!
G’day guys,
I know that everyone has different thoughts on this topic and they all may be right in one way or another but I have done this experiment myself. I had 3 pots with 1 Bean plant in each, one plant given rain water, one given town water and the other given microwaved rain water. It did take a couple of days for any noticeable differences but 2 of the bigger leaves on the plant started to go yellow as if it was dying and it turned out it was, both of the leaves shrivelled up and fell off, there were roots starting to grow up on the stem of the plant up to probably half a cm above the soil and there were also a very minimal amount of roots on the plant to the other 2 plants. I did exactly the same experiment with cucumber plants and the microwaved water had exactly the same effect but I had 2 cucumber plants in each pot so I had 6 plants all up. If you think that this is a load of crap I don’t care but please by all means I will show you photos if you would like.
Cheers, Zac
Hi Zac – what you’re reporting is not crap but it’s not science either. Observations of something unusual or surprising happening is often how scientists start their more formal and rigorous investigations.
But it’s not an experiment in the scientific sense unless you use correct scientific method, where you start with a hypothesis and design a carefully controlled experiment to test it and then use statistical analysis on the results to reach a conclusion.
For this sort of experiment that means that you need a much larger sample size than just a few plants and you also need to control for all sorts of variables that might affect the results, like variations in seed or seedling quality, transplanting success, light, temperature, growing medium, plant hygiene and pests and diseases – there’s a very long list!
Scientific method also requires replication ie you need to conduct exactly the same experiment many times over and get similar results to be sure that your first result was not unusual.
For real scientists there’s yet another step – they have to submit their experiment for peer review, which means that other professional scientists around the world read the experiment report, and a majority of them must agree that the experiment has measured what it set out to do and the conclusions are based on good quality results and proper analysis. Only then will a scientific journal agree to publish the results and even then it might be later shown by other scientists to be poor science and not reliable evidence.
So until you, or the others out there who worry about microwaved water, can conduct a proper scientific experiment and get reliable, repeatable and peer reviewed results, there cannot be any credible proof at all that microwaved water can harm plants.
Scientific tests ( properly done) showing alteration of the properties of water lasting a long time post microwave treatment . Interesting is the increase in hydrogen peroxide levels. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aot/2017/5260912/
Hello David – while on the surface this published study looks ‘scientific’, I have serious doubts about the reputation of the journal in which it is published.
Credible scientists would not publish a study about the effects of microwaving water in an Egyptian journal called ‘Advances in Optical Technologies’. This journal is defunct after only a few years of publishing, and this study has not been cited once or replicated by any other researcher since it was published 4 years ago. I’m confident that the rest of the scientific world does not accept the validity of its results any more than I do.
Thanks for this piece of humour with a serious side, Catherine. Not only do I agree with the points you make, but I am also a great fan of the Snopes site!
I suppose what vaguely interests me as well is why anyone would bother to mock up the experiment in the first place?!!
My guess is that it’s because some people are obsessed with trying to discredit things they don’t think are ‘natural’, like using microwaves for cooking. Because it’s based on belief not science, they can’t find any proper research that supports that belief, so they have to make it up instead. Obviously they don’t have similar issues with using computers!
BUT HOW DO SOME PEOPLE KNOW THAT MICROWAVE WATER HARMS PLANTS?????????????????????????IM SO FREAKED OUT I NEED ANSWERS FOR MY SCIENCE PROJECT
Nobody ‘knows’ that microwaved water harms plants. They’ve seen this so-called evidence on the internet and accepted it as truth without stopping to think about whether the experiment was either real, plausible or repeatable. Microwaved water has no harmful effect on plants. Go ahead and do your own proper experiments and you’ll find that microwaved water is exactly the same as any boiled water. Maybe you should do a science project on why people manufacture false evidence and publish it on the internet?
My son did this experiment partly to show the fake experiment (shown here) was….urm..fake ! However he now has a problem. He used a control (tap) however the purified water plant is doing really well, tap water one second and microwaved one in third. It is not dying, and does not look unhealthy – but there is a big difference now between the size (height and width) of the plant watered with purified water every day and the one watered with microwaved water (boiled and cooled) He just can’t find out why- and why I am googling to see if I can find out why !! He made sure all have same conditions, all were grown from seedlings and are the same age, and all have the same light and amount of water as the same time. The expt was supposed to show there is no difference, but there obviously is! Today he asked random people to say which they thought were the healthiest and all gave 1,2,3 in the same order (purified, tap, microwaved) – not knowing anything about the expt.
Aaarrrgggh. So WHY is there is a difference? It’s not killed it but definitely stunted its growth.
Hi Emma – an important part of any scientific experiment is that it must have an appropriate sample size so you can control for other factors that might affect the outcome. A sample size of one plant per type of watering is not ‘scientific’ as it cannot exclude any other factors. The difference in the plants’ response is most likely due to natural seedling variance but it could also be any number of other factors, like subtle differences in the growing mix, or a fungus/insect etc in the growing mix, or insect attack on the plant (and you can’t always see insects with the naked eye that cause stunting, like thrips) or just poor watering of one seedling before you even bought it which would have damaged its developing root system. Try repeating the experiment with at least 10 plants per watering type before you reach any conclusions about which water type causes a different growth rate. I’ve bought punnets of seedlings of lots of different types of plants that I’ve planted in the garden or in pots and there’s always several that don’t grow nearly as well as the others.
Make sure you use a glass container for the microwave water as plastics leach harmful chemicals
Hi Jazz – although some plastics (Type 3) can leach phthalates, these are harmful to humans as they disrupt the endocrine system, which plants do not have. Plants are not harmed by microwaved water whether the container used for watering is plastic or glass.