23 ms·
iPhones are allergic to helium
- blattimwind 8y ago> So what else could it be? Well, at the heart of every electronic device is a clock. Traditionally, these are quartz oscillators, crystals that vibrate at a specific predictable frequency—generally 32 kHz. Watch crystals run at 32[.768] kHz because you can divide with a binary counter by 2^16 and get 1 pps to drive the Lavet stepper driving the seconds hand. Watch crystals are also commonly used by MCUs for their RTC (real time, very low power clock), but never used to produce the main clock of a SoC or something like that. Mostly because that'd need an insanely high multiplication through a PLL (higher frequency multiplication ~ higher phase noise). Base clock crystals are typically 20-50 MHz. Quartz crystals used to be hermetically sealed.
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- IshKebab 8y agoI agree it is unlikely to be the RTC clock at issue unless it runs a watchdog of done form. But given that they are using MEMS for the 32kHz clock it seems likely they are using it for other clocks too.
- blattimwind 8y ago> I agree it is unlikely to be the RTC clock at issue unless it runs a watchdog of done form. Fairly standard technique to run the watchdog off the RTC clock, because that might still work if the main clock is wonky.
- analog31 8y agoIndeed, and historically, a slower RTC clock was also preferred because it would draw a lot less current during sleep mode. And it allows the rest of the system to throttle the main system clock up and down for power savings. I said "historically" because I don't know is if these are still important issues on a modern system relative to all of the other things that are probably using the main system clock during sleep mode, and the more generous battery.
- dbcurtis 8y agoClock throttling is still a thing. Many ARM Cortex-Mx parts, when in deep sleep, draw less current than the self-discharge rate of a standard alkaline battery sitting on a store shelf waiting to be purchased. It is common to leave the RTC running, stash important data in the small RAM that is backed up by a super-cap, and go into a “wait for interrupt” deep sleep mode.
- hazeii 8y agoIn the embedded world this is very standard; timed wake-up from sleep is driven by the 32.768KHz clock, the code then wakes up faster clocks/peripherals as required by the application.
- DrStalker 8y ago> Quartz crystals used to be hermetically sealed. Are they sealed against helium though? It can get through a lot of materials that more common gases can't.
- Triesault 8y agoHermetically sealed by definition is airtight, i.e. "excludes the passage of air, oxygen, or other gases". [1] With that said, the diffusion rate depends on both the properties of both the seal and the gas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_seal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_seal
- garmaine 8y agoVery few air seals protect against helium, the smallest gas. Most materials, even metals, are like sponges to helium. It'll seep through slowly.
- hanniabu 8y agoCase in point, helium filled balloons that deflate over a couple days.
- yetihehe 8y agoAir filled balloons also deflate over a couple days.
- namibj 8y agoCompare with aluminium coated foil. They don't deflate that fast.
- Keloo 8y agoOr intestines of cattle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin Early Zeppelins used rubberised cotton for the gasbags, but most later craft used goldbeater's skin, made from the intestines of cattle
- zik 8y agoNit-pick - you mean to divide 32.768kHz by 2^15, not 2^16 to get 1 pps.
- tejuis 8y agoMore nit-picking... according to wikipedia Lavet requires two states for one step, so 2^16 looks good based on this.
- tejuis 8y agoDamn... I mean 2^14 looks good. :)
- davrosthedalek 8y agoIf you divide by 2^15, you have 1pps, but two states per second (high/low). That might be enough.
- tejuis 8y agoWell, division was to be made with a binary counter. They typically work with rising edge clock, and you get a smaller circuit if you have 14 bits compared to 15 bits. I agree that 2^15 can be made to work by using both edges of clock signal.
- saagarjha 8y ago> Hydrogen and helium are notoriously hard to contain because their molecules are so small. You probably didn't mean "helium molecule"–or if it was, that would very odd, as helium as a molecule is very rare…
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- Kadin 8y agoI've heard plenty of good chemists refer to monatomic gases (and sometimes ions) as molecules, or "molecular", colloquially, and particularly when talking generically in terms where they could be replaced by another gas. That helium is monatomic is both well understood and not especially relevant in many contexts. He2 is rare enough that the few times I've heard it spoken about, people have usually said "helium dimer" to make it clear that's what they mean. Since that's the rare case, it's the logical one to be explicit about.
- saagarjha 8y ago> I've heard plenty of good chemists refer to monatomic gases (and sometimes ions) as molecules, or "molecular", colloquially, and particularly when talking generically in terms where they could be replaced by another gas. I have also seen this, but it has normally been almost exclusively confined to when people talk about the "particles" of gas from a kinetic theory point of view.
- dredmorbius 8y agoA single-atom molecule is a very simple molecule. But it is a molecule: "The smallest part of any substance which possesses the characteristic properties and qualities of that substance, and which can exist alone in a free state." Molecular helium happens to be identical with atomic helium, where an atom is the smallest unit of an element (not a chemical substance). Water (H20) is a substance whose smallest unit is a molecule of 1 oxygen + 2 hydrogen atoms. Helium is a substance who's smallest unit is 1 helium atom.
- dvno42 8y agoHere is the Post-mortem from the OP on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem_mri_disables_every_ios_device_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- macintux 8y agoThere are some fascinating weird stories in that thread.
- tlrobinson 8y agoIt reminds me of the classic "500 mile email" https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
- ar0b 8y agoOne of my favorite conference talks is semi related to problems like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE Brian Cantrill - Zebras all the way down
- TremendousJudge 8y agoThe excel email attachments one was insane, and great writeup (https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem_mri_disables_every_ios_device_in/e8rbgmg/?context=2 https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...)
- fma 8y agoThanks. The article has lots of external links but not to the original reddit post...
- bdz 8y agoFrom where do they know the guy's name and where does he work?
- saagarjha 8y agoThey probably contacted him through Reddit.
- TwoBit 8y agoWhat is it about Helium that breaks the device? Is the device intended to contain a vacuum?
- oddevan 8y agoTL;DR: it breaks the oscillator that keeps time on the device. This breaks the clock and eventually has a cascading effect on the system. The article is pretty straightforward and engaging; it's worth a read!
- kwiens 8y agoHey, thanks! I had fun researching it.
- oddevan 8y agoYou're welcome! I'm a sucker for a good meandering, low-stakes mystery.
- SilasX 8y agoOh wow, so the clock is unnecessarily coupled to the other systems?
- sp332 8y agoTons of events are tied to the real-time clock. For example if the interface code wants to know how fast you're dragging your finger across the screen, it divides the distance between digitizer samples by the elapsed time. Or to know if a "tap" is a "long press", it has to know how long it was. All kinds of stuff depends on that clock.
- SilasX 8y agoI remember the double-click (which is time-dependent) still working on my Mac Plus when the clock was stuck at midnight. It also didn't crash the OS and make the computer turn off.
- easymovet 8y agoAnthropomorphizes the iPhone when you think about how humans react to gaseous general anesthesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflurane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflurane
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- comboy 8y agoAnybody can provide a reason why SiT1532 wouldn't be hermetically sealed? They are talking about high accuracy, intuitively it would seem that if helium affects it this badly, then it would be susceptible to some atmospheric pressure changes (unless the seal worked against air but not helium).
- txcwpalpha 8y ago>(unless the seal worked against air but not helium). That is exactly the case. From the article, helium (and to a lesser degree, hydrogen) have very very small molecules and are able to slip past very small imperfections in hermetic seals.
- londons_explore 8y agoThe seal works against air but not hydrogen or helium because the molecules are so small they'll diffuse through pretty much anything. It's really hard to contain helium. It'll leak through pretty much any solid material.
- _ph_ 8y agoSealing against Helium is vastly more difficult than sealing against air, as air is made out of molecules of rather large atoms, while Helium gas consists of single small atoms. That is why divers watches often have a "helium escape valve". The watches are sealed against high pressures of water or air. But when worn in pressure chambers where divers live on a mix of high pressure helium and oxygen, the helium gets into the watch. When depressurizing at the end of the pressure chamber time, the helium pressure could blow the watch crystal from the watch if not released by the escape valve. For a similar reason pilot watches have special fastening of the watch crystal, so that underpressure doesn't lift it off.
- afturner 8y agoFew things; Isn't it a bit odd that a hospital MRI machine room isn't being monitored for these kinds of things? I'm curious, not accusatory. Also, this could be a potentially catastrophic tool for terrorists. As trivial as it sounds, it's even worse than a traditional frequency jammer because it renders the device unusable instead of just not being able to communicate with the outside world. Edit: On the other hand, interesting counter-terrorism tool as well. Is there any precedent for the CIA using this sort thing intentionally?
- na85 8y agoThe idea that some terrorists are plotting to ruin our phones with helium, and that we should consider it "catastrophic" is laughable.
- afturner 8y agoLol you clearly underestimate some people, but I'm wondering what makes you think that even a frequency jammer in the wrong hands couldn't be potentially catastrophic?
- gruez 8y ago>but I'm wondering what makes you think that even a frequency jammer in the wrong hands couldn't be potentially catastrophic? It is, but only in the same sense that a van in the wrong hands could be potentially catastrophic.
- na85 8y agoDefine "catastrophic" in the context of Apple devices ceasing to function.
- lolc 8y agoScaling a "helium attack" against electronics is one of the dumber terrorist plots I've come across. But let's play. Say I scored a big truckload of helium, 5000 l. (The contents of my tank will expand to 3750 m3 of He gas.) Then I got access to a ventilation duct into the subway. I manage to hook up my tank and start depleting into the subway. Assuming 20 m2 cross-section for a tunnel: if I could do the emptying at once, I could fill 0.187 km of tunnel completely with He; killing all vermin in that section. But hey my goal is not to suffocate (that would be boring, right?) but to fritz electronics. So I do it slow and steady into a station. Say I want to keep the concentration of He in the station at around 0.1%. (I assume it would take time for operators to detect this. I don't know how sophisticated gas detection is in subways.) Let's assume an airflow of 5 m3/s into that station. I'd need 0.005 m3/s He or 400 m3 per day to keep the level at 0.1%. So for only one day, I'd need to get around 500 l liquid helium into position. There are easier pranks to play.
- ThePhysicist 8y agoHelium is very good at getting through the tiniest cracks due to its small atomic diameter. One uses it to find leaks in devices with ultra-high vacuum seals (e.g. in low-temperature physics) by attaching a pump with a simple mass spectrometer sensitive to Helium to the device under test and then using a small helium gun to test different parts of the device from the outside. When spraying it at the leak some of it is pushed inside by the pressure difference and can be detected by the pump spectrometer. Hydrogen would be even better of course but it is rather dangerous when mixed with air.
- klodolph 8y agoWouldn’t hydrogen only work if it was atomic hydrogen? I thought molecular hydrogen gas was larger than helium.
- mamon 8y agoAs a bonus hydrogen is higly explosive, helium is not.
- athenot 8y agoHydrogen is no more explosive than other flammable gasses when mixed with ambient air. To get the explosive effect, you need to mix it with oxygen in the right proportion (2:1, molecule-wise) and not have any filler gas such as nitrogen.
- kens 8y agoOne of the dangerous things about hydrogen is its wide flammability range: from 4% to 75% concentration of hydrogen in air. Hydrogen will detonate in concentrations between 18% and 59%. In comparison, gasoline has a surprisingly small flammability range of 1.4% to 7.6%.
- monochromatic 8y agoWhat drives this wide range of flammable concentrations? Is it just an issue of low activation energy?
- rustcharm 8y agoIt would be an interesting attack if you needed to disable an iPhone.
- murdockq 8y agoAny security hardware using this oscillator would be at risk too. I can see the Mission Impossible plot to use it to attack a security systems and IP cameras if they used those chips.
- rtkwe 8y agoI'm not sure how far this vulnerability will ever get an attacker because most devices will probably continue to use regular quarts oscillators that aren't sensitive to this like MEMS devices. Apple probably only uses them because they're squeezing every ounce of space and their markups can stand the increased cost of the MEMS vs the quartz/ceramic oscillators.
- gok 8y agoI feel like the buried lede is that the MRI operators vented large quantities of helium into the hospital's HVAC and didn't think to tell anyone.
- jedberg 8y agoThey thought they were venting outside. It only went inside because of an undetected leak.
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- GhostVII 8y agoYea, that sounds incredibly dangerous considering how easily you can suffocate inhaling helium
- knodi123 8y agohow easy is it? It floats, so it only fills a room from the top down... and if you fall over unconscious, you're automatically moving to a part of the room with more oxygen. it would have to displace all of the air in a room in order to suffocate someone, no?
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoMulti-story building. The floor could be, given enough gas, under.
- sebazzz 8y agoIf helium is small enough to get in a watertight phone, it is certainly small enough to dissipate in a probably not so watertight building.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
- agumonkey 8y ago"Hospital cooling gas caused cardiac arrest in fresh Apples."
- anticensor 8y agoHospital cooling gas caused clock arrest in fresh iPhones.
- agumonkey 8y agowell, ticker is ticker ;)
- pftburger 8y agoI would be very interested in seeing the the iPhone charges while "anethitized". I severely doubt data would be accessible via standard channels, but as this kills the general clock I am assuming it should prevent any sort of lock protection mechanisms from kicking in indefinitely. Not sure how you would get it going again and / or how necessary that would be. Perhaps heating it to excite the helium trapped in the oscillator and hoping it bounces out. Could end up being a pretty easy go to law enforcement trick. Put a phone and a helium balloon in a ziplock bag, pop the balloon, pause the phone, deal with it later
- gwern 8y agoWe were wondering if this could be used for iPhone scams. It's a dead-simple way to apparently fatally & totally destroy in a deep & non-diagnosable way a pristine iPhone which will however (probably) reverse itself in a few weeks. It seems like this ought to be exploitable somehow. Something like get a new iPhone, helium it, return it for a refund, and somehow hold onto the phone... Couldn't figure out how it would actually work, though.
- pftburger 8y agohow about get a phone, accumulate normal life scratches for 9 months, "helium it" hard, so it lasts a while, then get apple to replace it as defective? iiiiiii dunno... there's a scam in there somewhere, were just not being creative enough!
- gwern 8y agoThe problem with that is that the helium doesn't do anything special. Just damage/destroy the phone some other way. You're not exploiting its special ability to look completely broken but then magically repair itself in a few weeks.
- Treblemaker 8y agoDepends on the how the charging controller is implemented. There is, at the very least a state machine -- if not an MCU -- managing the charging process. So I think it's highly unlikely to _start_ charging with the clock stopped, and one would hope there are some analog triggers to halt charging (eg. battery over-voltage) if the clock stopped while it was charging.
- transpy 8y agoIt was very entertaining to follow r/sysadmin's threads about this weird issue, until the guy found out the source of the problem.
- icameron 8y agoThis is the first time that I remember seeing a story evolve on the internet. What was originally from a post on r/sysadmin 3 weeks ago is now summarized on a Blog article that's at the top of HN. Will it get picked up my mainstream media and be on everyone's news feed by next week? Or tomorrow, now that its picked up momentum? Besides being a really fascinating story, its having an interesting journey as news travels through different outlets and gets condensed and filtered down to more consumable forms.
- blattimwind 8y agoYou weren't around when the Meltdown rumors started?
- Phlarp 8y agoI remember hearing plenty of whispering that Intel had a major bug disclosure coming up, but for most of that time I feel like the majority of speculation was centered around the Intel ME. Sadly my immediate reaction to this post on /r/sysadmin was to discount it, or rather attribute it to some external factor that nobody could possibly figure out and entirely unrelated to the MRI. In this case I was quite happy to be proven wrong by the follow up posts and subsequent article. I'm really curious why something they can generalize to "helium leaking into the quartz oscillator" only affected Apple products. What feat of manufacturing keeps a broad range of OEMs safe on the Android side but so eludes Apple? Worse yet, was some "cost savings" engineered between iphone 5s and 6 that ultimately introduced this issue?
- caf 8y agoIt wasn't a quartz oscillator - it was the MEMS oscillator that Apple was using in place of a quartz oscillator that is speculated to be the root cause. The other phones involved still used quartz.
- ezzaf 8y agoFrom the article: "But quartz oscillators have some problems. They don’t keep time as well at high (and low) temperatures, and they’re a relatively large component—1×3 mm or so. In their quest for smaller and smaller hardware, Apple has recently started using MEMS timing oscillators from a specialized company called SiTime to replace quartz components. Specifically, they’re using the SiT512, 'the world’s smallest, lowest power 32 kHz oscillator.' " So it was size, not cost that led Apple to be using a susceptible component.
- dang 8y agoA smaller discussion on the Reddit thread that this comes from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334630.
- zeristor 8y agoDid iFixit just take a post from reddit and put it on their website? Did they add anything to it, the write up was quite comprehensive. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
- maxwell_smart 8y agoThis article isn't great. First, it illustrates an MRI story with a (mislabeled) picture of a CT scanner. Then, it overestimates the volume of gas expelled by a factor of 1000. 170L X 750 = 90k L = 90m^3. This would fill a 35m^2 (about 350 sq ft) room, maybe the size of a living room, with pure helium.
- Johnny555 8y agoI came up with 125 m^3 here: http://www.airproducts.com/Products/Gases/gas-facts/conversion-formulas/weight-and-volume-equivalents/helium.aspx http://www.airproducts.com/Products/Gases/gas-facts/conversi... But if you're going to criticize their math, you might want to double check your own math. 90 m^3 = 2m (height) x 6.7 m^2 (ok, 2m is a little low, 2.5m would be more comfortable.)
- maxwell_smart 8y agoMy math was fine, but I did get the base numbers wrong. Should have been 120L as mentioned in the article, which equates to 88.577 m^3 at 15C, which is pretty chilly. 20C is more like room temp. But, I'm not sure your math is quite on the money either.
- trhway 8y ago>the 120 liters ended up going outdoors and how much ended up inside. Helium expands about 750 times when it expands from a liquid to a gas, so that’s a lot of helium (90,000 m3 of gaseous He). the math seems couple orders off - the 120l would make less than 900m3. The 90000m3 would be on the scale of the total volume of a multi-story hospital building.
- unwind 8y agoThree, in fact. 120 × 750 = 90000 liters, or 90 m^3. Very annoying.
- mef 8y agoThat’d be an interesting way to defuse a bomb hooked up to an iPhone with a power-off failsafe
- solarkraft 8y agoTL;DR: Apple uses MEMS clocks (while most Androids contain quarzes), which can be affected by Helium molecules even though they are sealed in the attempt to prevent that.
- aquamo 8y agoWow. This is good to know. As a TriMix SCUBA diver, we should keep our iPhones away from the fill station and away from us when we are venting / testing our mixes :-)
- jsjohnst 8y agoAman! Had the exact same thought and glad this story brought it to my attention.
- anonu 8y agoI love HN. I came here to learn more about MEMS RTCs, something I've never heard about previously... But most of the discussion is about the dangers of a helium leak... Which is a good point, especially if that leak is in a hospital. A bit of googling on MEMS RTC revealed this slightly dated article which I thought was still interesting: https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/5545 https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/55... Turns out one of the main reasons to switch is for the smaller packaging vs quartz oscillators.
- zaroth 8y agoMaybe I'm just a fanboy, but I found one of the most impressive parts of the story, aside from actually tracking down the root cause, was that the iPhone User's Guide actually specifically addresses this, along with explaining that it's necessary to give it about a week for the helium to diffuse.
- 2bitencryption 8y agoYou just know there was a days-long meeting about "the Helium problem", including graphs of how likely different user-personas are to enter a zeppelin, work in a balloon factory, or attend exceedingly well-funded birthday parties. After debating late nights about whether to pony up for the new better-sealed clock, someone said "Screw it, throw it in the user agreement."
- gcb0 8y ago"better sealed clock" would be the universally used quartz resonator, but that would have added 0.002$ to their cost. Unthinkable.
- jsjohnst 8y agoNice try! The SiT512 Apple uses is more expensive than a quartz resonator. I don’t have Apple’s specific BOM details, but I’d guess it’s likely something like 2x the cost.
- gcb0 8y agoit's only more expensive in small quantities. after you ramp up, it's infinitely cheaper as you can produce them on waffers. also you are thinking BOM alone. the selling point of silicon mechanical instead of crystal is that it can be assembled faster and cheaper, greatly offsetting the item cost. but don't trust me, see the "advantages" of manufacturers promotion https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/look-inside-programmable-mems-clock-chips https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/look-inside-programm...
- 8y ago
- userbinator 8y agoIt's good that he was able to reproduce it (although with a far higher concentration of helium), but the original story showed up a few weeks ago at an EE forum I lurk, and everyone there was skeptical of helium and suspecting EMP instead: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-in-the-air-kills-ios-devices/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-in-the-air-kills-i... But an electromagnetic pulse would have taken out medical equipment in the facility as well, and they were working fine! I suspect medical equipment is designed to a higher standard of EMP resistance than most other products, especially equipment designed to sustain life. Phones also have antennae specifically designed to pick up EM fields, while medical equipment like an EEG or ECG is specifically designed to reject them. Likewise, the devices "reviving" after a week is not unusual if they're just resetting due to power loss. Immediately disconnecting and reconnecting the battery would for sure differentiate between helium (device remains dead even after reset) and EMP (device reboots successfully.)
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoBut Android phones were also unaffected.
- whynotminot 8y agoAny particular reason you're ignoring the fact this only happened to iOS devices? Do the various Android manufacturers incorporate additional shielding to prevent the occasional EMP?
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- roywiggins 8y ago> “My immediate thought was that the MRI must have emitted some sort of EMP, in which case we could be in a lot of trouble." I... don't think that's a thing that MRI machines can do. They're even shielded!
- eismcc 8y agoAm I the only one hoping that exposure to helium made Siri sound like a chipmunk?
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agoall 40 devices got helium in them at the same time
- PascLeRasc 8y agoI wonder how aware Apple is of this story. I'm sure engineers browsing here will have seen it, but it'll be interesting to see future iFixit teardowns of devices to see if the MEMS sensor has any different shielding or if they use a different chip entirely.
- morley 8y agoThe article says that Apple's user guide mentions phones not working around helium: Exposing iPhone to environments having high concentrations of industrial chemicals, including near evaporating liquified gasses such as helium, may damage or impair iPhone functionality.
- FriedPickles 8y agoThose MEMS device photos (micrographs) are beautiful.
- MisterTea 8y agoThis is strange and I happen to work at a facility that does a lot of open air helium mass spectrometer leak testing. I'm and Android user so I have no skin the the game. I'll have to talk to some people at work tomorrow. A few guys are iPhone users and work in direct proximity to the helium leak testing stations or use them as well. I know a woman in the office didn't like her iPhone because of numerous problems but I never thought to press her for details.
- gmueckl 8y agoWould the helium concentration in air actually get high enough to cause problems? As far as I understand leak testing, you don't need a lot of helium for that to work.
- MisterTea 8y agoNot much at all but some of the knuckleheads try to speed up the process and crank the pressure until the helium probe is more of a blow gun.
- skwb 8y agoIt's a little hard to take this article seriously when the caption grossly misidentifies a GE BrightSpeed CT scan (x-ray) with a MRI machine. My guess is the magnet was still on (perhaps incorrectly).
- robbiet480 8y agoIt was really fun to watch this story develop over the last few weeks on /r/SysAdmin. I found myself checking the OP's profile a few times a week waiting for the smallest update. It's truly mind boggling to me (a software developer with very very limited hard science experience) to think about the ramifications of invisible forces causing these kinds of wild goose chase mysteries.
- pankajdoharey 8y agoThis is hilarious, additionally the software quality of iDevices have gone down the tube.
- happertiger 8y agoHow will I ever execute my plan to explore the eroding atmospheres of exoplanets when apple can’t even be bothered to handle a little helium. Jeez...
- honestoHeminway 8y agoIphones are allergic to mercury.. like everything milled from alluminium
- jlawson 8y agoI think we just invented a way to get people to put away their phones during concerts, plays, and comedy shows.
- rootsudo 8y agoReddit > ifixit > Hackernews > Buzzfeed/Engadget tomorrow?
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoCouple of days after Engadget it'll be on mainstream.
- methou 8y agoWe had this problem too. Every time my colleague brought his phone to the control room the Cellular stops working for like a day or two, but my 6s worked just fine anywhere even next to a Dewar that's venting Helium. Now the mystery is solved! BTW, among us there are others who accidentally brought their phones near or even into the MR bore during maintenance, but none of these devices has done any permanent damage to our phones, except one accelerometer on a cheap Chinese phone, even in a 7T magnet. So I never thought that MRI could be causing the problem.
- lostlogin 8y agoThe picture in the article that is labeled as an MR scanner is a CT scanner, and the people are wearing lead for radiation protection.
- M_Bakhtiari 8y agoMaybe not a good idea to use MEMS avionics on a blimp or dirigible, then. Here's the Zeppelin NT cockpit, but I can't tell what kind of gyros they may be using: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/2003-07-26_18-06-46_Germany_Baden-Württemberg_Hagnau.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/2003-07-...
- bayesian_horse 8y agoSo I guess IPhone owners need to stay away from children's birthday parties?
- mcnichol 8y agoI think the correct spin would be to say: Apple Devices are Helium Detection Canaries.
- warrenm 8y agoIt's in the iPhone user guide ... maybe not something everyone reads, but it has been known for some time That said - a 120l leak of liquid helium is both stupidly expensive, and highly damaging to the MRI unit: there's a bath of ~1000-1500l of liquid helium in an MRI to keep the superconducting coils at superconducting temperatures. Losing ~10% of that volume probably means the unit won't work
- terramex 8y agoWhen you install a new unit you use additional helium that boils off just to bring it to superconducting temperature.
- warrenm 8y ago>When you install a new unit you use additional helium that boils off just to bring it to superconducting temperature. Nope - well, not with any of the ones with which I am familiar: they're shipped full most of the time
- rkagerer 8y agoSo what's the most effective means we've found to seal against helium penetration?
- rlopezcc 8y agoNice discovery! Now scifi/horror movies can stop using the "I have no reception for no reason" and use helium somewhere in the plot.
- Kipters 8y ago> Perhaps there’s a bug in iOS that causes crashes when it gets faulty data from the gyro? But the bug impacted Apple Watches, too—and they run WatchOS. Technically, watchOS is iOS