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Helium. It's not a gas you probably pay much attending to, unless you work in a scattering of very specific industries, savour playing with insane overclocking rigs, or have a task filling political party balloons. But helium is critical in the cryogenics industry, which ways it's used in hospital MRI scanners to go on the superconducting magnets operating at the necessary temperature. That fact has led to the discovery of a rather odd issue with Apple iPhones — they tin shut down when exposed to helium, sometimes for days at a time.

A long Reddit thread by Systems Specialist Erik Woolridge and subsequent iFixit write-up lays out the story. During the installation of a new MRI machine at Morris Hospital near Chicago, calls started coming in to IT reporting that Apple iPhones had stopped working. iPhones in a higher place the iPhone 6 and Apple Watches were both impacted (the single iPhone five in the building was not). Apple's official user guide for the iPhone actually mentions this. Apparently, the official Apple fix is as follows:

If your device has been affected and shows signs of non powering on, the device can typically exist recovered. Get out the unit unconnected from a charging cable and let it air out for approximately one week. The helium must fully misemploy from the device, and the device battery should fully discharge in the process. After a calendar week, plug your device straight into a power adapter and permit it charge for up to one hr. Then the device can exist turned on again.

Nosotros say "apparently" because we can't actually detect that statement on any Apple guidance, despite the fact that both the original Reddit post and the iFixit story link to the same folio of the Apple tree guide and quote information technology. Either this guidance has been removed or is located in a dissimilar department of the site (we've reached out to the original Reddit author to confirm that the company has changed its site). Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine did not archive the page.

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During his investigation of the issue, Wooldridge discovered that a helium leak had indeed occurred inside the hospital and that information technology seemed to be responsible for the iPhone failures, with more than forty devices impacted in total. And co-ordinate to iFixit, the most likely culprit for this problem is the miniaturized clock circuit Apple tree uses in its devices. Instead of relying on an quondam-fashioned quartz oscillator, Apple uses a Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Arrangement or MEMS silicon solution with a miniaturized clock oscillator instead of a more than traditional scrap — and iFixit's investigation confirmed both that iPhones terminate responding when exposed to helium and that this is a known outcome for MEMS silicon in general.

MEMS devices can exist susceptible to helium, a senior marketing director for InvenSense Move, a MEMS company that builds silicon for the Pixel three, told iFixit:

Helium tin can diffuse through the fusion bond oxide and cause the crenel pressure to increase. In our pressure sensors, helium could crusade the accented accuracy to temporarily degrade. In our gyro sensors, helium could cause the offset to drift and could cause the oscillation to temporarily stop. In whatsoever [accelerometer] sensors, helium should have very little touch. All our InvenSense parts should recover once removed from any helium surroundings.

In this case, the helium is evidently interfering with some primal role of the clock generator. Obviously, the practical affect of this bug on most people is nil. Merely information technology'due south an interesting example of how small glitches tin can betrayal weaknesses in device design that you'd never fifty-fifty think to expect for as a consumer. Trace amounts of helium ordinarily wouldn't be considered an issue for electronic hardware — simply the wrong combination of events can lead to devices shutting off and refusing to piece of work for days or even a week.

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