Do Real Life Magneto’s Exist?

When you think about people controlling electricity, there are a couple of things that would come to mind. The first would be science fiction and the second would be Magneto from X-Men and his purple helmet. However, science fiction stuff like this is beginning to appear in the real world. Debbie Wolf lives near Brighton on the south coast of England and she is one of the ever growing ‘SLIders’. An SLIder is a person who believes that they can interfere with household appliances, anything from cookers to panel heaters.

The ability Debbie claims to have is called Street Light Interference syndrome (SLI) and she has become quite famous because of it. In Japan, Debbie has been compared to heroines from popular comic books, as well as characters from the BBC show ‘Heroes’. Considering that Debbie believes she has SLI, her choice of profession is a little risky. She works in the Royal Susses Country Hospital, fortunately, no electrical equipment has gone wrong so far.

Although it’s always fun to believe that someone can yield that sort of power, it needs to be questioned. Does SLI exist? Or is everything that happens simply coincidence that lead these people to believe they have some sort of power. As with the majority of things, there is a possible explanation.

One aspect of maintaining a suitable room climate is the moisture content of the air. The majority of homes these days have central heating and double glazed windows. This combination along with heaters and oil filled radiators often leads to air within your home gets very dry. Having dry air at home can result in lots of health issues, however, it can also increase levels of static electricity within your home.

A home could be compared to that of a computer data centre. At large data centres an incredible amount of heat is created, this causes the air to get very dry which causes an increase in static electricity. This static can cause great deals of damage to the circuits within the computers. To combat this, humidifiers are used to increase the humidity and reducing the static electricity. This can be the same in your home, having a normal level of humidity in your home would help to maintain a low amount of static electricity. So really all that Debbie needs is a humidifier, she may also find that it improves her health. The reason why Debbie doesn’t damage any hospital equipment is because they are most likely already using humidifiers to protect equipment like industrial heaters aren’t damaged by the static.

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