Comment and Opinion

AntiBio Technologies

AntiBio, AntiSense (7/8/2004)
My local non-commercial television station, run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has a weekly show named "The New Inventors". (The word "new" is in there because there was a similar program called "The Inventors" several years ago.) The premise of the show is to provide a forum for inventors to display their creations, and the public perception is that it is a way for amateur inventors to publicise their work. Another public perception is that the ABC is somewhat more reliable than the commercial networks when it comes to fact checking, particularly when anything scientific is involved. Both these perceptions were damaged a couple of weeks ago when the show featured a blatant piece of pseudoscience which has been on the market for about three years. The AntiBio System is supposed to purify water, and has been sold to several operators of public swimming pools where it is supposed to kill micro-organisms, reduce the need for chlorine, and make sand filters more efficient.

It doesn't take long looking at the AntiBio web site to see that this is pure crackpottery. The thing is supposed to use sound waves to disrupt the breeding cycles of bacteria and viruses (ignoring the fact that a virus has no independent means of reproduction outside a host cell), tear electrons off calcium molecules (sic), and keep the water sparkling clean, and to do this for an Olympic sized pool by apparently using the power of just one of those little nine-volt batteries that last for about six months in the smoke detector in my office. It demonstrates the sorry state of science education and knowledge that nobody associated with the program even suspected that this device might be a fraud. Here is the message I sent to the producers of the show. (To their credit, my message was published on the show's web site.)

When I first heard about this thing I thought that it was something to treat a domestic water supply, like a Britta filter. While I suppose it is possible to kill germs with sound (we have a brown dog who has to be kept away from some of my daughter's CDs in case the noise kills him), an AntiBio device on your kitchen tap would just be a financial scam.

When I read the ABS web site, however, I find that it works by stripping electrons off calcium atoms. This reduces the need for chlorine in pools. Perhaps it also rips out some protons, turning calcium into chlorine (this would require the release of some neutrons as well, but perhaps it's a way of making helium: Ca -> Cl + He + H). When I think of the sound level on the grid at the start of a Formula One race and the fact that Michael Schumacher can finish a race without jellied bones and green gas coming out of his nostrils, I'm not sure that I would like to be near anything with this much sound energy.

Did I mention that the sound from the ABS makes particles agglutinate better in the filter?

They call it ABS. Correct - All BS.

In early 2005, I was informed that the AntiBio device no longer uses a little transistor radio battery to provide the enormous amount of power necessary to clean up Olympic pools. It now uses mains power. An inspection of the pictures of the equipment on the AntiBio site showed that this was correct. No longer do municipal authorities have to keep a box of spare batteries on hand, because they can now power the equipment using one of those small transformers that we all use to charge our mobile phone batteries.

Did I mention that the AntiBio device is a fraud, and the people who have been stealing money from town councils should be made to pay it back before they go to prison?

The AntiBio fraud (5/3/2005)
Each year, Australian Skeptics presents the Bent Spoon Award to "the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudoscientific piffle". The 2004 award went to a television show which had uncritically promoted a fraudulent, pseudoscientific electrical device which was supposed to clean the water in swimming pools using principles unknown to science. One of the things I do in my spare time is manage the web site for Australian Skeptics, and a complaint was received about the site this week. The complaint came from the Chief Executive Officer of AntiBio Technologies Pty Ltd. His objection was to the following words, which appear on the Bent Spoon Award page:

The winners for 2004 were the producers of the ABC television show The New Inventors, principally for giving consideration to an obvious piece of pseudoscience, the AntiBio water water conditioning system.

According to the CEO, the statement is preposterous and damaging to his business and unless it is removed from the site his company will take serious action. I have suggested that as soon as he supplies AS with the scientific studies demonstrating the power of a speaker driven by one of those little transformers you use to charge your mobile phone battery to a) sterilise an entire Olympic-sized swimming pool by using sound to disrupt the breeding cycles of pathogenic organisms and b) strip electrons from calcium molecules (sic) then something might be done about people saying bad things about his company on the web. As his company claims to have received several grants of tax-payers' money from the government, I feel that the appropriate parliamentary audit and oversight committees will have to be notified that someone is using bluff and unscientific nonsense to rifle the cash box.

You can read some more about the AntiBio fraud here. Did I say "fraud"? Well, what else would you call selling a box of wires and saying that it can do impossible things?