The Shvoong: This Onion Has No Magnetic Powers Over Microbes: An Experiment.

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

This Onion Has No Magnetic Powers Over Microbes: An Experiment.

Ever sicne Internet's early days, when it comprised Usenet forums, till the advent of smartphones and Whatsapp, this tale has been circulating for years claiming that onions had saved a farmer from the influenza outbreak that killed 40 million people in 1919. A miracle onion that cured someone had been brought to a doctor in Oregon. He placed it under a microscope and saw tons of bacteria and viruses.
Mind you, that doctor must have been very rich considering the times, since microscopes were extremely expensive. Doctors back then did not have the time to research bacteria, because it was a subject of a cutting edge research in the academia of that time, and was referred to as a microbe. It was only in 1920 when Paul Ehrlich was able to use a microscope to see the results of his experiments of staining bacteria to study their morphology.
Viruses, thousands times smaller than bacteria, have been visualized in a fuzzy form for the first time ever in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, where an X-Ray scanning microscope was developed for this purpose. The scanning microscope was the size of a room. Today viruses are looked at through an electron scanning microscope, which is the size of a family refrigerator. The cheapest electron mcirsocpe, according to online queries, costs just above $1 million.

The following experiment to see how an onion would absorb viruses and bacteria, hopefully by seeing its change from white to the ominous black, according to many ancient accounts. it's better to carry out an experiment:
A 1/3 of a freshly cut onion, and different parts of it, were saved in a cup. The cup was placed near a chicken which produces excrement many times a day. Chicken excrement is known to contain more bacteria, some of it dangerous and some famously parasitic, like Campylobacter and viruses than other animals.
Since Feb 16 the cup was photographed 10 times or so (obvious from the time stamps of the photographs) The onion changed color to gentle beige, kept drying, then was dry as a cardboard.
The experiment made the chicken coop smell like a kitchen.
The onion did not kill the chicken, which has kept on laying eggs, which have been eaten.
The photos below are from my own experiment's original photos. They are at this Google Photos collection of my own https://photos.app.goo.gl/9izraUoWiAhqRkHYA.

The start:

Monday, February 17, 2020, 8:37 AM