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The first microwave ovens created were being used to gently re-warm frozen live hamsters, because when they tried to reheat the hamsters with conventional cooking methods, they heated unevenly and burned at the edges, which isn't good for the hamsters.
Anyone else randomly think of Joe Cartoon for the first time in a very long time?
I probably got that wrong, but it's also been at least 20 years since I last pressed those blender buttons.
I have to assume the microwave didn't work either, because they cook far more unevenly than an oven.
It was actually rather successful! Some papers about this research are available here (first use of a microwave to thaw living rats) and here (comparison of some other warming methods), and there’s a good Tom Scott video on the experiment as well.
On high, yes. Lower and intermittent power in micro wave heats far more evenly than an oven
Modern ones do have hotspots and cold spots because of resonance and design tradeoffs, but I don't think that was a problem for the hamster application. IDK, maybe they were structured a little more small and special-purpose, but regardless it was just penetrating radiation basically all throughout the hamster which is better than heating it from the outside in and having the heat having to conduct its way through the frozen tissue.
Basically the same reason you can defrost meat in the microwave, but you can't throw it in the oven to defrost more quickly without also cooking the edges.
Microwaves penetrate a certain distance into the material and then turn into heat. Heat conduction from the outside doesn't. I don't know exactly what the average of that distance is and how it compares to the size of a hamster, but I would bet that it's pretty competitive with the thickness of the hamster.
Your whole argument here makes no sense at all. Having the ambient temperature set to the perfect defrosting value would work better than heating the skin of the frozen meat in cycles of full on / full off, if the microwaves were getting stopped right at the skin and then the heat had to conduct in from there.
But you're incorrect. Microwaves penetrate through many substances fairly well, mostly passing through them. The microwave ovens we use to cook are tuned to resonate with water molecules, and as a result the waves interact more frequently with those molecules. But in general, the waves just bounce around until they do interact with something, and it could be any particle within your hot pocket that it interacts with, not just the surface.
All that is to say, microwaves do heat all throughout whatever you put in. Now, these waves can also excite particles and moisture in the air within the oven, and there is convection between the air and your hot pocket... But air is less dense than food, so convection will be secondary heating at best, and cooling at worst.
Yeah. They don't penetrate an unlimited distance into the food, the center of some stuff won't get heated. But they penetrate a lot further than the 0 distance that ambient heat from the outside does, conducting heat straight to the skin of the food and then letting it work its way in from there.
No idea what this person's issue is, I sort of suspect that it's just Lemmy in action, doing its thing.
You will find it is entirely dependent on the size, thickness, and density of the food you're heating.
According to the USDA,
What's the diameter of a hamster?
I don't know what to tell you, you can believe whatever you like. It doesn't matter to me. But this is one of the dumbest discussions I've ever had, so I'm done. Declare yourself "winner" of the discussion if you like.
No, you're a shortcoming assumption.
They were invented because a microwave radar unit melted the chocolate in a guys pocket.
That's actually one of those Urban legends things. The guy made it intentionally to Cook and it was later refined to had stacks of die punched metal sheets instead of the carefully machined blocks.
Ok what the fuck. Is there a source beyond the youtube video I don't want to watch right now. That's pretty wild claim. The few sites I visit seem to reference the YouTube video as the source
Platypus already linked to a paper which references it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1363505/pdf/jphysiol01379-0153.pdf
Why do these white hamsters keep turning brown!?
I used to have a really smart hamster. But something... happened... to him.