A dose of radio waves seems to encourage plant seedlings to grow slightly faster, a find that, if confirmed, could have applications from farming to medicine.

Margaret Ahmad at Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and her colleagues exposed thale cress seedlings ( Arabidopsis thaliana ) to weak pulses of radio frequency (RF) radiation at 7 megahertz, a frequency normally used by amateur radio operators.

The team found that this altered the activity of a type of light sensor in the plants called a cryptochrome. The expression of several genes regulated by …