A couple of students in the UK have just developed an innovative new kitchen technique: They’ve used two mobile phones to cook an egg. The instructions are online here, and the concept is basically that you prop up the phones so their antennae are about a half an inch from either side of the egg. Initiate a call from one phone to the other, leave ‘em running for a few minutes, and pretty soon lunch is ready. As the instructions on their site note:

Cooking time: This very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.

Of course, it makes sense that this idea would come from the UK — a country that is simply addled with fear that mobile phones cause brain cancer. While that worry has never really taken off in the US, it’s a staple of British newspaper health coverage. The reality is that the health effects of non-ionizing radiation — the stuff emitted by mobile phones — has been not been closely studied in any longitudinal way, so while we’re probably okay, who knows? Maybe we’ll all grow third eyes. One thing is sure: Power usage alone causes mobile phones to heat up a lot during a prolonged phone call — which is why I suspect this egg trick might actually work.

If you wanted to worry about mobile phones at all, that’d be the concern: Not that radiation will harm your brain, but that the heat will scramble your noggin like a mess of lovely eggs.

(Thanks to William Braine for this one!)