This $8.6 million mansion is actually a giant Faraday cage
If you've ever wanted to live in a fancy Faraday cage, here's your chance. An $8.6 million condo for sale in San Francisco has walls thickly covered in semiconductive graphite paint, floors connected to the walls with wire tape, and walls connected to the ceilings with wire strips. Oh, and its windows are coated with EMF-blocking polymer. All these are courtesy of the people who snapped up the condo, which was then a fixer-upper, back in 2007. They basically wrapped the whole place in aluminum foil-like substance in order to keep out any EMF radiation emitted by phones, GPS devices, WiFi routers and other electronics.
Unless those alterations weren't done properly, you can forget making calls from inside the three-bedroom, four-and-a-half bathroom property. After all, the owners specifically cite a 2011 World Health Organization study that said cell phone radiation was a possible carcinogen as the reason for their modifications. The topic's still controversial to this day, but the WHO and the National Cancer Institute have since announced that there's still no solid evidence that radiation from phones causes cancer. Now, while the condo's looking more and more like a home fit for paranoid folks, Faraday cages do have benefits, such as keeping out high-tech thieves and spies.
[Image credit: 2170 Jackson Street]