It appears quite a few startup companies are using electricity/pemf devices to improve the yield of the plants. Hoping to see the real practical applications soon to help the mankind!
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I think there is something to it. I published this paper recently on the effect of PEMF on seed germination:
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I read your paper TYVM.
My thoughts:
As I have posted a few days ago elsewhere on these forums, I believe that there is one variable which most people, most often forget to take in to account when using PEMF and that is to consider how great of a receptor to the magnetic field, the target is? And that thearfore results can greatly improve if the targets chemical structure is adjusted to make it more receptive to the magnetic field.
In your case, my gut feeling is that you might want to repeat your experiment using highly mineralized water, with a PH which is otherwise known to be most beneficial for these plants.
I suspect that doing so would show entirely different results because the water would then be much more receptive to be impacted by the PEMF.
Although I understand why you chose to use Reverse Osmosys purified water, but I think that this undermined the ability of this experiment to show possibly, an otherwise, perhaps much more impressive potential result of the water was OPTIMIZED in PH and minerals.
And, perhaps the reason why some seeds showed more impressive results than others, might possibly be as simple as it inherent natural, self contained minimal content in the seeds. So that perhaps the seeds which has a more ideal natural optimised minimal content, were the same ones which were able to be more beneficially receptive to the PEMF exposure.
What do you think?
The more pure the water is?
The worse of an electrical conductor it is, so RO water greatly diminishes the chances of showing possibly much more impressive results of the beneficial impact of PEMF
not necessarily. When you design a scientific experiment, you need to control most variables to get at the variables of interest, which in this experiment was PEMF: YES or NO
As soon as you start adding more unknown things, the experiment becomes intractable and the results end up being weak, non-specific, and useless.
Take my word for it (or not, as you like), scientific experimental design is an extremely difficult professional skill to attain. The fact is, most academic scientists have a poor grasp of experimental design.
Let me put this into perspective for you specifically. I think you mentioned in one of your posts that you dealt with welding equipment, and so I assume you know something about what it takes to develop a high level of skill as a welder.
When I was very young, I dabbled around a bit with welding with a cheap 110 VAC transformer arc welder from Sears, until I thought I got pretty good at it. One day, I saw my uncle out at his shed with his welding gear, so I went out to talk to him. I was telling my uncle about welding since I had become a self-taught expert in a couple of weeks, and he listened to me but did not say much. Then he calmly pulled out some of his gear, handed me a face shield, and proceeded to weld two empty beer cans together, side by side.
Then he filled each one with water. Neither had a leak, and the welds looked perfect.
He said, almost in a whisper, “when you can do that, come tell me something about welding. Now get me another beer, boy.”
You must be mixing me up with someone else, because I never said I had anything to do with welding so the welding story is just a diversion from the universally accepted concept that:
As long as the control group vs the PEMF group all have 100 percent identical factors (such as Exact Identical mineral water, regardless of which water… as long as it’s all 100 percent identical) there cant possibly be any reason why one or the other is doing better or worse except for the 1 and only variable change, of Yes PEMF or No PEMF.
Nothing matters
Except that all groups are 100 percent identical.
hahaha…i thought he was the welding guy too! i had to check… Can PEMF be used for "chronic illness" - not specific diseases or organs got my wires mixed up.
welder or not, i think the point you were making may have been missed …
at any rate, the great thing about the experimental devices that we all have access to can be used for our own suggestions and experiments. why wait for someone to try the experiment that you’re suggesting @Maplewood? let us know what you find if you care to share… or maybe we can find users in this group to try a protocol you design 
That’s really not true. Some of what you are saying is sort-of correct, but not in the absolute way you assert, and what you are saying does not carry through to your arguments. The welding story (sorry it was not you) was not a diversion, it was to illustrate that it takes years or decades to develop skill in a highly specialized area. Not just science or some other theoretical academic skill, but very practical skills like welding, and many other skills. But it is easy to think you can learn this skill quickly, until you really try it. This is generally described by the Dunning-Kruger effect:
This is normal human behavior for everyone, even people of high domain skill and intelligence, and I am as susceptible to it as anyone else when I stray outside my area of expertise. The only problem arises when you make strong assertions or consequential decisions when you overestimate your competence to do so.
I can tell by the way you are writing that you really do not have a lot of experience designing scientific experiments. That’s OK, most people don’t have this skill. So this is not meant as an insult, but it is really clear to me (a scientist with 40 years of experience) that your assumptions and assertions are those of a person who is well-intentioned, but not very experienced with this highly-specialized skill. That was one of the meanings of the “welder story”. A little bit of experience welding makes you feel like you know something, and in fact you do know something new and useful. But to really be good at welding, good enough to make suggestions to expert welders, it takes many years of full-time practice of the skill, significant technical insight, and serious dedication. Designing scientific experiments is the same way.
But that does not mean that your experiment is a bad Idea. To the contrary, your experiment is a fine Idea, and I think you should go ahead and do it. I’m not kidding, it would be great to hear from you how it turns out.
But in my case, specifically related to the experiment that you read and commented on, where you commented that I “might want to repeat my experiment…”, your assumptions and conclusions are factually wrong. The experiment I published has weaknesses as all scientific experiments do, but it was designed and conducted to test a specific hypotheses, and the results were surprising, but highly repeatable, statistically strong, and directly answered three very fundamental questions related to the effects of PEMF on living systems.
The paper in question is:
https://www.josam.org/josam/article/view/58
Namely, the paper demonstrates that:
1- The response of living systems to PEMF is highly conserved, applying to plants as well as animals. This is a crucial finding for determining what the biophysical mechanism of PEMF might be, and in fact, I was discussing this very paper and this specific finding with scientists at ETH Zurich this morning (by ZOOM), and we all felt that this finding was compelling enough that we would conduct a series of follow-up experiments to measure cellular uptake and cell signaling when PEMF is applied to human cells. We will use fluorescence imaging to observe real-time cellular responses to elucidate the possible biophysical mechanisms of PEMF.
2- PEMF dose and biological effectiveness is a function of the number of pulses of exposure, and not related to “frequency”. This is one of the only papers where different “frequencies” were compared (there is only one other paper so far as I know). By the way, dose-response experiments are far more difficult to run that typical A-B comparison experiments, and as a statistical matter, smooth dose-response curves with well-separated experimental groups act as a further internal replication of results, greatly strengthening the findings. But very few scientists do dose-response experiments because they are very costly, difficult, and time-consuming.
3- The dose-response curve demonstrates (surprisingly) an inverse, tri-phasic hormesis. This result was entirely unanticipated, and never before reported for PEMF. It has many important consequences, including the fact that at the wrong dose, PEMF can be inhibitory in it’s overall effect (need to be very careful when interpreting this), it shows that excessive dosing can reduce the beneficial biological effects, and the fact that the dose-response curve was well described by this log-normal dose response relationship for many thousands of individual samples (seeds).
This triphasic response of seed germination to PEMF exposure is analogous to the response of seeds to other stimuli: sunlight, water, and warmth. In all three cases, too little can cause seeds to fail to germinate properly, too much of any of the three will cause seeds not to germinate properly, but just the right amount of all three (sunlight, water, and warmth) is most likely to result in successful germination. It is astonishing to find that PEMF has effects similar to the basic necessities for seed germination, further suggesting the fundamental nature of the mechanism of PEMF to living organisms.
Finally, you should note that the seed germination response (illustrated in Figure 10) shows nearly full range swings in the possible range of seed germination, which can not be below 0% nor above 100%, and the data show changes in germination rates ranging from below 10% to above 90%. So, the use of mineralzed water, or any other experimental intervention, is not likely, and perhaps not mathematically possible, to show much more of an effect on seed germination
I therefore am of the opinion that my paper is a good contribution to the body of scientific knowledge in the field of PEMF, and it has proven to be sufficient to convince an international team of scientists from a highly-regarded research institution to allocate significant personnel and resources to conduct a series of follow-up experiments.
So, there is no need for me to go back and repeat my experiment in a different way because your gut feeling is that I would get better results. But of course, I could always be wrong, that’s how science works, so I invite you to challenge me by repeating the experiment yourself using the experimental modifications you suggest, and I would actually be very pleased to know if we learn something new from your insight, and if I missed something important or did something wrong.
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There is nothing wrong with your experimental suggestion in general, but it is not the focus of what my paper was about, as I explained to you in detail. Science is all about details, and if you can’t follow detailed and usually lengthy explanations, then you can’t really understand or conduct science.
You are totally missing the point about my lengthy explanations. By taking the time to write them, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are an intelligent person who can understand complex, detailed, lengthy, and nuanced explanations. I explained to you at length the scientific value of the results of the paper in question. The answer to your questions is there.
I have never said nor implied “trust the expert”, but when someone blithely tells me to run along and re-run an experiment to include something I missed, without understanding the first experiment, they are making a mistake. I am not going to re-run a 6-month, $100K experiment based on someone’s “gut feeling”, as you originally said. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate to me that this is necessary, and you have not done so. Further, when scientists question the value, correctness, or completeness of published work, the way to challenge it is to run the experiment yourself, correctly, replicating the key aspects of the work in question.
I also told you the “parable” in a nice way, involving an example of non-scientific expertise, to explain to you that indeed there are experts, in many fields, practical and theoretical, and that I gained an appreciation for this fact as a child. And an adult person should realize that they can and should question information, but they need to do the work and really develop a skill and knowledge before they go spouting off strong opinions where they do not have equivalent experience.
I encouraged you to run the experiment you have suggested, and I mean it. You’ll gain a lot of experience and insight into how scientific experiments are really conducted. Once you have done that, then I can help you understand what you have observed in the context of the much wider field of PEMF. I am happy to help you, and I am interested in your results, but you are in no position to tell me what I need to do.
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