Oddbean new post about login | logout I very strongly doubt there's anything to this grounding thing. I think it's placebo. But if you believe it, a simple way would be to take a wire from a ground point, whether putting it in the earth literally, or the earth connection of a wall socket, and the other end onto your bed sheets which you have washed with fabric softener. The resistance of the fabric softener treated sheets, even though extremely high, is going to be way lower than that from you to anything exerting an excess or deficit of electrons, i.e. static buildup, effectively grounding you, all night.
They legit make grounding blankets that do exactly this. You can buy them on Amazon 😆 I also have been really skeptical until I saw the experiment where they watched blood under a microscope with and without grounding. And when they were insulated they literally clumped together. They lost their ability to regulate space between each other. Definitely made me raise an eyebrow. 🤔
What was the source of static electricity? Was it just ambient, or did they apply a field, and in that case how strong in comparison to what can be expected day-to-day?
It was taking the blood of someone who hadn’t been grounded for a whole day, and then again after 30 minutes grounded. So they didn’t artificially apply anything. It was a before and after look at the cells and how they interacted.
TBH, that seems more like one of the samples got contaminated with soap or something. The difference shouldn't take much more time to manifest than the time to discharge, which would at most be in the order of seconds. Also, a tiny sample on a plate would have such low capacitance to ground that just sliding the plate in different ways when putting it under the microscope could cause differences in charge. The only possibility I can think of would be if the effect wasn't electrostatic in itself, but something the cells actively do - which I have never heard of, but I don't know enough about biology to confirm or deny it - and the field slowly causes changes in them which prevent them from doing it, and they slowly heal from that in the absence of a field. Seems far-fetched, but I'd need an opinion from someone who knows this part of biology to know. (As I have written before, I don't like the appeal-to-nature-and-the-past "explanations" i.e. "we've always been grounded, so that's what we should do". I want explanations of the mechanisms involved.)