HOWTO, Cook an Egg With Your Cell Phone

xPosiMattx writes "Suzzanna Decantworthy published an article in her Wymsey Weekend column that described how to cook an egg with two cell phones. From the article: "Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza.""

Easyish to achieve

[grahamsz]

Placing large metal objects round the phones until their signal strength meters read 1 bar would be an easy way to max out the power consumption.

However this is obviously BS. Especially as phones all talk to the tower, so using two of them serves no other purpose than halfing the cook time.

This is your brain on CDMA

Re:This will never work

[Darth Liberus]

To make water heat up, you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.

Actually, that's 1/9th of the peak resonant frequency [wikipedia.org]. I only mention this because I recently stumbled upon it :)

Okay, but ...

[whitehatlurker]

How many honey bees [sciencenews.org] does it take to cook an egg?

Back of the envelope calculations; it won't work

[Roger_Wilco]

An egg has a mass of about 50 g; assume that's all water, that it's at room temperature, and that we want to raise it to boiling.

So we have (50 g)*(80 degrees C)*(4.2 J/(g * degree C))

=16800 J

Assume that our phone is putting out 2 W=2J/s, and that it's all going into the egg, it'll take 8400 s, or more than 2 hours. That's assuming the egg cup insulates perfectly.

Re:Not so fast there.

[ars]

"Where did you get 20 minutes from?"

From thin air? I really don't know. Somehow that's what I remembered.

And you are right about the water level of an egg, looking at the Nutrition Facts I count 11g of other stuff in a 50g egg, AKA 39g of water AKA 78%.

I now acknowledge that this is a hoax. There really is no way for a cell phone to cook an egg in 3 minutes.