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I had to laugh when I first saw this Twaggie posted at the Neatorama Facebook page. See, my old microwave doesn’t have recipes on the buttons (yeah, I finally got rid of my dial microwave), but my mother’s does, which confused me at first. Matt Lassen illustrated this one from at Tweet by @perlanation. Link
You know how microwave ovens heat or defrost your food unevenly? You must either rotate or stir your food between zaps to get it “done.” Lenore at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories accidentally uncovered the pattern her microwave uses when she heated some Indian snack crackers called appalams.
Holy crap!
As an area of the cracker cooks, it bubbles up in just a few seconds, leaving clear marks as to where there is microwave power and where there isn’t. For this particular microwave, Saturn-shaped objects will cook evenly.
Obviously what is happening is that there are two hotspots in this microwave: one in the center, and one offset from center which traces out a circle thanks to the rotating plate in the bottom.
And then, like any good scientist, she recreated the entire experiment in four other microwave ovens to see if the results could be duplicated. Link
According to Steve Spangler, the tiny amount of water in Ivory’s famous air bubbles heat up and expand. The end product is a “soap souffle”! -via The Daily What
Here’s a neat little kitchen tip: tired of smelly kitchen sponge (but don’t want to buy a brand new one)? Wikimommy has the solution: Microwave it!
First, rinse the sponge and squeeze it as dry as you can, repeat this process twice. Then you put the squeeze-dried sponge (which is still a bit moist) in the microwave, put it on high for about 5-10 seconds maximum. Take the sponge out with care unless you want to end up with a sponge-print on your hands. Run it through some cold water and oh the sweet smell of clean sponge!
From Raytheon’s radar business to your breakfast of leftover pizza, the story of microwave cooking is an interesting read. Like computers, they took off when the size (and price) came down.
The 1947 Radarange was a whopping six feet tall, weighed nearly 750 pounds, and required its own 220 volt electrical line and a dedicated water line for the cooling tube. It sold for $2000, or nearly $22,000 today. Not yet an appliance for the home cook, Raytheon marketed the behemoth appliance to high-volume, quick service restaurants. Busy diners, ocean liners and hospitals all purchased their own Radaranges, cooking hamburgers and sheet cakes in less than 30 seconds.
Link -via Boing Boing
No, it can’t. Microwaves work by speeding up atoms in an object, thus generating heat. “Microwaves can only speed up atoms, not slow them down,” writes Sandeep Ravindran of Popular Science. But Ravindran was curious about whether it would be possible to build a reverse microwave — a device that can instantly chill an object:
Scientists do have a high-tech method for slowing atoms, however: lasers. Shoot a moving atom with a laser, and it will absorb the laser’s photons and re-emit them every which way, causing the atom to hold nearly still. Placing an atom at the junction of multiple beams can slow its momentum in all directions, decreasing its energy and cooling it.
This drops an atom’s temperature a couple hundred degrees Fahrenheit—much colder than anything you’d want to put in your mouth—in less than a second. But because it works most efficiently on low-density gases of atoms of a single element, physicist Mark Raizen of the University of Texas doesn’t think it will be useful for cooling food anytime soon: “Not unless you can subsist on a thousand sodium atoms.”
Link | Photo: NASA
At Chromoscope, you start with a boilerplate view of the Milky Way galaxy. Select options to view it in other wavelengths such as x-ray, infrared, microwave, or radio. Above is the hydrogen alpha wavelength view.
Link. Blog with video explanation. via kottke.
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) has designed an inexpensive laptop computer that it hopes to distribute to children in developing nations. To promote the project, artist Kenny Irwin took one OLPC computer, microwaved it, and sculpted it into the OLPCSlug. It’s currently on sale at eBay. Video of the microwaving process at the link.
