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by rndphs
1544 days ago
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I think though that any biological process using these sorts of energies on the molecular level will be swamped with noise and therefore wouldn't be a useful mechanism. 3GHz is like 0.00001eV. A process with Gibb's free energy change of 10ueV has an equilibrium constant of essentially 1 at room temperature, and so is almost completely reversible. The reason why we can make things interact with radio waves at all is essentially because electrical conductors provide coherent modes for low energy photons to couple to. Without conductors and their free electron cloud we would have a very hard time building anything to receive or transmit radio in any way that isn't thermal. It is true that there is some degree of conductivity in cells but without a non-thermal way of coupling between current and molecular processes I don't see how radio waves could affect cells in a non-thermal manner Edit: I guess nerves have a non-thermal coupling mechanism from low frequency currents to molecular mechanisms, so it must be possible. But the machinery for that has been highly evolved for that specific task, I'm not sure if it follows that such machinery would appear commonly in cell processes. |
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And for the non-thermal effect discussion, have you considered voltage-gated ion-channels in cell-membranes?