Try this: Cell Phone Faraday Cage

Try this:

You will need two cell phones, or a cell phone and a land line, and a large piece of aluminum foil. First call one cell phone from the other phone, just to make sure everything is working properly. Next, wrap that cell phone in the aluminum foil, completely enclosing it. Now, call the enclosed cell phone. Write me a comment and tell me what happened!!!

If you did this correctly, you created a Faraday cage around your phone. Here's how it works. As you might remember, cell phones work by receiving radio waves, a type of electromagnetic radiation. Picture a radio wave in your head. Picture a cage in your head. Now, imagine that the mesh in the cage is sooooo teeny that the radio waves cannot fit through the mesh of the cage. The cell phone can't send any signals out, and it can't pick up any coming in. To summarize in more technical language: A Faraday cage will shield an object inside of it from the effects of electromagnetic radiation as long as the microscopic holes in the cage are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.

To learn more about Michael Faraday or Faraday cages, you could start with Wikipedia. To see something really cool about how Fraday cages are applied, click this link: http://www.glumbert.com/media/highpower
Would you want this guy's job?

This is something new.

Welcome to Laboratory 116. This blog chronicles the investigations, discoveries, activities and learning of my students and I as we explore Earth Science, Biology and English. Some of the posts are written by me (Ms. G) and later posts will be written with contributions from students.

All: Maker Faire was this past weekend, and students could go for extra credit. During the share-out, it seemed like everyone who went to Maker Faire saw something different and had a different experience. T.S. reflected: "The event helped me realize that in science, it doesn't matter how many times we fail. If we keep trying, someday we will get the results we want." Thanks for a good quote about the hard-working attitude it can sometimes take to succeed. Remember, though, that in lab experiments we want to keep working until we can explain the results we have. Of my 150 students, 9 went to Maker Fair, and I saw 3 of them. I kept wondering how I could use that information for crowd estimation, but I imagine we'd have to tag people somehow. Maybe next year...

ESS: What is an ecosystem? Is Neaveh's fishtank an ecosystem? What makes an ecosystem stable, and how do ecosystems change? We began exploring these questions with a KWL chart.

BIO: As if in a Kafka-eque dream, over the weekend our diets, stomachs and mouthparts changed, such that we were hunting the five morphs of Pinus toothpicatus, the toothpick animal, for our snack, capturing them with our modified mouthparts, which looked remarkable similar to laboratory tools (that would be convergent evolution, everyone!)

BIO AE: We worked hard in the computer lab today. Most of us were writing our lab reports about the glowing bacteria. One student, with Mr. H's help, was using a computer for the very first time. Sometimes we take for granted that we have computers in school. Today made some of us more thankful for what our school can teach us to do. E.B. is working on her report at home, , so she sat in the nature area and sketched the kill-deer couple who has made a nest on the ground. They've laid 4 eggs since last Monday.