Microwave hearing effect

Most, if not all, microwave biological effects and potential medical appHcations are beheved to be the result of heating, ie, thermal effects. The phenomenon of microwave hearing, ie, the hearing of clicking sounds when exposed to an intense radar-like pulse, is generally beheved to be a thermoelastic effect (161). Excellent reviews of the field of microwave bioeffects are available (162,163). 

A rather grisly example of biological effects of microwave radiation is provided by the story, possibly apocryphal, of the woman who put her cat in a microwave oven to dry after it had come in out of the rain. The cat exploded And one hears tales of crows and seagulls being shot out of the sky with intense microwave beams. 

There are three widely accepted routes by which bone-conducted sound stimulates the cochlea. These are the compres-sional, inertial and osseotympanic theories of bone conduction (12). Compressional bone conduction implies that the cochlear shell is compressed slightly in response of the pressure variation caused by a sound. Inertial bone conduction alludes to a relative motion between the ossicular chain and the temporal bone for low frequency vibrations. The osseotympanic theory denotes a mechanism by which relative movement of the skull, with respect to the mandible, sets up pressure variation in the air present in the auditory meatus. Since perception of microwave pulses are correlated with the capacity to hear high-frequency sound, it rules out inertial or osseotympanic bone conduction as potential mechanisms for microwave acoustic effect. 

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