The Microwave, Part 2

nineteen forties, sort of invented by accident. He was working on some radar microwave methods, but in in fact he ended up accidentally creating the radar range which cooks food with microwave radiation exactly. Yeah, he basically was working on some radar equipment. It was like, oh, my candy bar has melted. It is something has cooked it in my pocket, and uh, you know, some tinkering, uh and some experimentation led to the birth of the microwave oven. The technology.

At first, you know, people were a little hesitant. It was expensive, it was bulky. There are some confusion over what this radiation, uh you know, aspect of it might consist of. But over time and especially through some of some relentless marketing. They were able to win people over, and and that's why today you will find a microwave oven just about everywhere in your home, in your gas station,

in your dormitory, on ships, in cars. I believe you were just looking at some microwaves before we came in, and you saw a car model that you can plug into your cigarette lighter right, well for kicks, I was I was googling, uh, microwave cigarette lighter to see if to see if Percy Spencer had ever tried to create one, right that you can light a cigarette with microwaves. I didn't find that, but I did find a microwave for

truckers that you plug into the the adapter in your truck. Uh. My, my sisters once went to Disney World on the on the cheap and brought a microwave oven with them so they could cook hot dogs and I think you know Kraft cheese uh, in their in their hotel room and presumably in their vehicle. Um. So yeah, it's like that kind of convenience of the microwave oven provides. But of course we know that throughout the years, a lot of

microwave fears and microwave panic. Uh, it was there initially, and in some ways it did persist even though the microwave is an extremely popular appliance. Yeah. So well, we're gonna be talking a lot in this episode about microwave safety and just about it, just just you know, eradicating uh, some of your perhaps still lingering fears or superstitions about

the technology. But but but before this happens, I do want to touch on some of the misuses of microwaves and TV and film that perhaps on some level contribute to these ideas of the dangerous microwave. I think for some reason, pop culture is obsessed with perversions of the microwave oven. Yeah, in ways that don't always apply to other household gadgets. Um. For instance, Uh, the big one,

of course is the movie Grimlins. Granted, we get to see a gremlin destroyed in a blender as well, and the blender is perhaps an invention where we look at it and we know that there's a certain bit of danger to it because it has rotating blades at the bottom, but also a gremlin is thrown into the microwave and destroyed in there. It explodes just like it's a pad

of butter that we've put in too long. I think maybe this obsession comes from the fact that the microwave energy is invisible and you can't see a fire or a heating element or anything like that. It's just coming out of this whirring object. Yeah, it's this magic box. And I mean, if you don't understand the science involved. The science, by the way, is explained in the previous

episode if you need to go back and refresh. But other other places that I've enjoyed seeing the microwave used um on Futurama, there's a scene where Leila breaks the front of a microwave and then aims it at the at Bender, the robot Bender biding Red Rodriguez, and just completely destroys them with the the the raw cooking power

of the microwave. And then, of course you will find any number of generally like less than top shelf horror movies or sometimes like outright sleazy horror movies that will utilize a microwave oven in a death. Okay, so, like, was there ever a slasher movie or the slasher character just used a microwave? Well, there is a nineteen seventy nine film titled Microwave massacre, but it contains zero microwave murders, just to prepare everybody. And it's um, it's it's quite

a stinker. Um. But you know, there are other films I'm gonna mention some some other films you probably do not want to see, um, such as the horror movie Ghost in the Shell, no relation to the legendary anime franchise. Uh. That one, I think involves a microwave being tampered with by a like an ai ghost, you know, uh, some sort of spirit in the you know, electrical equipment, and

it makes an entire room microwaved. Cool. Yeah, there's the there's a two thousand seven horror movie title drive Through, which is apparently about a killer clown and uh. And then there are there are a couple of Oh wait, I saw that one. He did. I could have didn't remember it first, but yeah, I've seen it. I haven't seen it, but I saw some stills and it looked it looked terrible. Um, not worth your time. There's the unnecessary two thousand and nine remake of the already unnecessary

nine two film The Last House on the Left. And then there's there's also the Lucio Fulcy film Touch of Death, which features a microwave death, which which I watched just yesterday while researching this, And I think this one is certainly on my lucio Fulcy skip list. As much as I love many, love many of his films, um, and there are many of them, he's often known for gory ways of exploring violations of the human body and the microwave.

I'm sure it had to show up at some point. Yeah, when you when you direct that many films, the microwave is going to be used, especially when you're so upset with melting people. Uh, there's a number of you may be thinking of this. There's a microwave death scene in the two thousand ten movie kick Ass, which is also grizzly and unnecessary. Uh. It's a standard underling murdered by

a mobster scene. Uh, and I think it was probably inspired by the grizzly death of Anthony zerbas character character's death in the James Bond film License License to Kill From I don't remember Anthony zerbe Got was in that. Yeah. Yeah, he played an underling who's killed by the the the evil drug boss um in that film. He's he's putting like a pressurized change. Yes I remember. Now in kick Ass, the underling is put into a walk in microwave and

the same thing happens. Um. Yeah, it's described as yeah, yeah, that's the thing. It's described as being like an industrial microwave oven. And yeah, these do not exist as far as I can tell. If you if you know of a mic walk in microwave oven, uh, please right in and set the record straight. But I believe this is a complete fictional creation. But it's not just like horror movies, melt movies and the like where you see this obsession with perversions of the microwave oven to to damage and

hurt people. Uh Like. There are lots of urban legends about it too. Write the things about people putting hamsters and microwaves and stuff. Yeah, hamsters, microwaves, dogs and microwaves, and of course the big one, the baby in the microwave. Ye by grotesque urban legend, uh generally revolving around uh you know, a deranged hippie babysitter who's whacked out on trucks.

So you've got you got the double here. You have the microwave panic, and you have uh, you know, a panic about say l S d or you know, hippie counter culture. The idea is that the parents leave, they come back, they find the babysitter, again whacked out on drugs, has changed a TV Dinners diaper and has has cooked the baby in a microwave. Now, according to the Straight Dope and an extensive of uh and and actually quite disturbing City Lab article, Uh, there there certainly are unfortunate

tales of child abuse and or death via microwave. Uh and they but they all seem to involve mental illness rather than drugs. Still, the urban legend itself lives on. You see it referenced even in things like the season one of True Detective mentioned but not depicted in that show, Folks were getting an urgent update from our producer Seth, who tells us that, in fact, there is such a thing as a walk in microwave. He looked it up, he found out. He says that you can have a

walk in microwave to treat lumber. Okay, well, I I stand corrected. Then, um, kick ass is redeemed. But still the scene itself is unnecessary and grotesque. Well, I'd say, don't put anything alive in the microwave, even if it's a walk in microwave, right, right? What about what about the lobster though, that we discussed in the episode, Well, I guess, I guess I don't have an opinion on that.

Darcy Spencer himself, the inventor of the microwave oven, gives you a method of cooking the lobster in the microwave, and you do not trust his his instincts here, his culinary instincts. Where did the marshmallow in the microwave thing come from? Oh? Yeah, that is a That is another favorite, the exploding of the torture of say a microwave. We're especially a peep um peep marshmallow around Easter time. Oh yeah, they do they like swell up real big or something.

Uh they yeah, they do strange things like that. Yeah, alright, Well, one thing I think we should separate is the idea of using a microwave in a way that it is not intended to be used, and that that being you know, whether in fiction or in real life. You know, sad awful stories from real life that having bad consequences versus microwaves representing a danger win in normal use. Yes, So

let's get into discussion of microwave safety. As we already mentioned, the microwave was born into a world somewhat suspicious of the word radiation. This was, after all, the during the aftermath of the Second World War. Throughout its existence, though, the microwave oven has continually been subjected to a fair amount of urban legend and misinformation, based generally on an incomplete understanding of how a microwave works and what indeed

microwave radiation actually is. So I want to turn to a paper by a John M. O. Sup Chuck called a History of Microwave Heating Applications that I found from I Triple A Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques from nineteen eighty four. Uh, And the author here, Chuck, talks about how there were actually a number of high profile attacks on microwave radiation and the safety of microwave ovens, especially in their early consumer years. So I guess this

would be in the late nineteen sixties. I mean, I guess they've been around to some degree for a couple of decades at this point, but this is going to be when they're first becoming really like affordable and widespread, right, So in nineteen sixty eight, the US Congress passed the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act, and osip Check argues that this law was enacted mainly in reaction to fears that color televisions were emitting harmful X rays, but

the language in the bill was made much broader and ended up raising safety implications for all kinds of radiation from electronics, including microwaves, radio waves, and acoustic vibrations, and osup Chuck writes that this was quote presumably as a prudent step and not because of any practical health or

safety problem involving microwave or radio frequency energy. But during this period, government bureaus and consumer safety organizations coordinated in in the following years to test and establish safety standards for microwaves, such as the maximum power density of leakage from microwave ovens that would be allowed and considered safe. Now, of course, it's not practical to make a microwave that releases no microwave, that leaks no microwaves into the surrounding area.

But question is like at what distance is it enough microwave energy to really heat you up and burn you um And in most cases like modern microwaves are going to be very safe in in these regards um but due to the fact that some older microwave ovens exceeded these established leakage limits, and also due to some popular articles raising concerns about the potential dangers of microwaves. Osip Chuck writes that the public's perception of risk from microwave

ovens actually grew somewhat in the early nineteen seventies. And I want to do I want to be fair that well. I do think microwave ovens are generally extremely safe today. If you were living in the early seventies and you didn't trust that electronics manufacturers of the time we're being completely forthright with you about the safety of their products,

I probably wouldn't blame you, right. So, one example of a microwave fear episode that took place in public, as documented BIOSI Chuck, was that in seventy re there were allegations by Consumers Union I think this was the magazine that later became Consumer Reports, and the allegations were that

microwave ovens might be a serious radiation hazard. In the same year, there were hearings before Congress in which a figure named Dr Milton M. Zerret testified that quote there is a clear, present and ever increasing danger to the entire population of our country from exposure to the entire non ionizing portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. And apparently among the dangers discussed were things like development of cataracts and

temporary male sterility due to microwave exposure. And this actually, when I was reading about it, this knock something loose in my head because I remember now when I was a kid, some adult I don't remember, who might have been a friend's parent or something, warned me not to stare through the window into the microwave because I would get cataracts. And I remember thinking this for a long time, like I'd stay away from the microwave while it was

cooking because I didn't want to get cataracts. U. I remember being told not to stare through the front of a microwave. I don't remember if cataracts were invoked or not. Yeah, So I decided to look this up. Is there any risk of getting cataracts from a microwave? I would say The answer is technically yes, but effectively no. Uh. The risk of cataracts from microwave exposure is actually, I think best best understood simply as damage to the eyes from heat.

The lens of the eye is especially sensitive to heat because there is little mechanism for it to dissipate heat. It can't carry the heat absorbed away through blood flow

or something. Right now, what are cataracts? Cataracts form when the lens of the eye is injured or deteriorates naturally with age, causing a breakdown of proteins that leads to clouding in this lens, the layer of the eye that should ideally be crystal clear because it's supposed to work like a lens, and that clouding, of course makes it hard to see. Uh So, one cause of the clouding and the lens is repeated exposure to intense heat, and

this is sometimes known as glassblowers cataracts. I don't know if you've heard of this, Robert, but yeah, this is something I read about before. But it's not just glassblowers. It can happen to metal workers, any workers who chronically expose their eyes to powerful sources of infrared heat near the face, and this heat exposure can damage the lens and the iris over time, of course, leading to clouding

of the lens and which is cataracts. So a modern properly functioning microwave oven with standard safety features used in a normal way should not leak enough microwave radiation to cause this kind of heat damage to the eyes. I suppose there could possibly be a risk from say like a bootleg microwave you made yourself, or like an old damaged,

malfunctioning microwave model. I was trying to figure out, how would you know if a microwave oven is damaged in a way that could possibly cause a risk of microwaves coming out and you know, burning your eyes or something. The main problem I think you would look for would be something in the door, if like the door the hinges the seal are warped or damaged, or if it's somehow able to operate with the door open. Again, it shouldn't be able to do this. Their safety features that

should prevent any of this from happening. But if somehow it operates with damage to the door, not ceiling, or being open, you probably want to get rid of it and get a new microwave. And I guess that brings us back to also the fears about male sterility. Uh, And it turns out I think these fears follow a similar pattern. Actually, it's again a concern about heating. Right.

We discussed on stuff to blow your mind, concerns about male fertility being related to say, heating of of the testicles, right, like immersing yourself in a hot tub, that sort of thing. Yeah, and so osup. Chuck writes that scientists engaged in direct research at the time about the bio effects of radiation

fought back against Eric's testimony. In nineteen seventy three, he quotes one pair of scientists named Bud Appleton and Tom Eli who pointed out that quote jockey shorts promoted in the Consumer Union, that magazine that was critical of microwaves quote posed a far greater hazard to temporary sterility of males than microwave leak is, which I think is a

decent point of comparison, assuming they're correct. I think they probably are there that there's going to be more potentially threatening heating of of of the testicles through underwear design than there's going to be from microwaves escaping from a microwave oven. Uh. And also a scientist named Im Brady wrote about quote the humorous contrast between the warning signs proposed by the Consumer Union as necessary near microwave ovens and the absence of such signs when primitive man first

learned to utilize the heat of fire. But I mean again, it's emphasizing that the main thing that you should actually be concerned about when you if you're seriously concerned about microwaves, is heat. That they have the ability to heat water,

and that can damage you. You can get burned by the heat from a microwave, but the situations where that's going to happen are usually going to be like you heating up food in a dangerous way and then taking it out and burning yourself with it, right, like heating up a cup of noodles or something in the microwaven,

removing it and and that that's where the dangers. And yet the movie is called microwave Massacre, not cup of noodles massacre, right, it's not or or Another example I've seen is like the stairway in your house is far more dangerous statistically than the microwave oven, like seedingly, you know, just when you look at the numbers, And yet the stairway massacre is as far as I know, not a thing. Right.

And of course, on top of this, again modern microwave ovens that are made by reputable companies, the kind you could buy at a store. They're generally not going to be leaking many microwaves anyway. They've got safety features, they contain the radiation, and they're not supposed to work with the door open anything like that, So generally they are safe. All right, on that note, we're gonna take a break, and when we come back, we're going to continue to

discuss microwave safety. Alright, we're back. So some of the other, um, you know, potential threats of microwaves that are sometimes brought up in you know, urban legends and you know, misinformation and whispers online. That's the thing is, like some of these are still continue to make their way around via

social media. Uh. We already mentioned not looking through the screen at cooking food, but also the idea that microwaves will destroy nutrients in your food when you nuke it, that microwaves will radiate your house, that will alter your DNA, and that they will ultimately give you cancer. And if you want to get into the sort of conspiracy theory part of the internet, you can find articles alleging this today. Uh, there are plenty of great sources though that point us

in the opposite direction towards truth. For instance, electrical engineer, neuroscientists and Chief Scientists of Australia Alan Finkel wrote a great article on this for Cosmos magazine back in and he stressed that, you know, again, one of the big things to keep in mind is that X rays are not microwaves. Microwaves are not X rays. Now. Certainly, as we've discussed on the show before when we did an episode on the X ray, X rays can be quite

deadly if misused. Of course, you don't want to be exposed to any more X rays than you absolutely have to write. And the early history of X ray research is riddled with cases of radiation injury and death due to close proximity and just uh, you know, the individuals involved often being just unaware of what the true risks were. But Finkel's you know, stresses that there's a key difference here. Quote.

X rays oscillate more than a billion times faster than microwaves, and their wavelengths are more than a billion times shorter. At these extremely short wavelengths, X rays act like tiny bullets, and if they hit the DNA inside the nucleus of a cell, they can do permanent harm. Microwave radiation is at a much lower frequency and the wavelength is about the length of a toothbrush, millions of times bigger than the cell nucleus. These big radio waves pass around our

tiny DNA molecules without them noticing each other. So he's saying that outside, uh the oven with the door closed, nothing is going to get to you, and even if it did, it would heat you, it would not irradiate you. Uh So, Finkelle continues quote by analogy, if you were in a rowboat far from land, X rays would be like powerful waves that could potentially capsize your boat, while microwaves would be like the rising and falling of the tide,

of which you would be blissfully unaware. And he points out that we have more than twenty five thousand research articles that have been published over the past thirty years on electromagnetic radiation at the frequency of microwave ovens, and they conclude that there is no evidence to confirm any adverse health consequences from exposure to a microwave oven. Again, normal exposure to a microwave oven, if you climb inside it, all bets are off and in terms of just the

effects on the food itself. Microwaves have no non thermal effects on food. So again, the microwave oven certainly has a thermal effect on your food, and anything that heating food can do to food, it can do. But anything outside of that, uh is is probably gonna be the

domain of of misinformation and urban legend. Yeah, I'm trying to understand the fear of lingering radiation effects on food that That's another thing you'll see is that there's a belief that the microwave makes food radioactive, like that if you take the food out of the microwave, the food will somehow retain some kind of radiation property, even though it's non ionizing radiation to begin with. But like even if it were ionizing radiation, that it makes the food radioactive.

I think this just comes from the idea dea of radioactive contamination, where like after a nuclear meltdown, you know, thing they're like radioactive particles that can get into the environment and contaminate things you don't want to ingest them. So that's one possibility I think. I guess it's also possible that like UH, an object bombarded with ionizing radiation or like with neutron radiation or something can itself become radioactive. But yeah, that nothing like that happens with food inside

a microwave. To come back to another thing, you mentioned the idea that you know, so you said it has no non thermal effects on food. Nothing we can really measure other than heating it up. Uh, there is a thing I've seen alleged again, Um that microwaving food rob's food of its nutritional value, right, that it makes food unhealthy or robs it of its nutrients. Does anything like

that happen? I would say again, the answer to this question is kind of like you could say, technically yes, but effectively this is not shol or unique to a microwave. So the question does the microwave make the food dangerous or unhealthy? For another good succinct explainer, This one was from Scientific American from nine. According to Honorada Prakash, Assistant Professor of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at Chapman University, there is no evidence at all that microwave

food is unhealthy or detrimental to humans. But what about making it? What about being you know, just non nutritious or nutrients destroyed by the microwave. The true part is that heating generally does have effects on the nutritional contents of food, and to some degree, the method in which you heat food can also have some effects. But the fact that heating can destroy some nutrients and food is equally true of food heated up by all other means,

including the stovetop in the oven and whatever. Vitamin C, for example, can break down in the presence of high heat. There is some evidence also that foods cooked in liquids, such as boiling in water or frying in oil, can sometimes lose a greater percent of some nutrients to the fluid than if they're cooked to the same temperature via some other method like steaming. Uh and I think the idea here is that some nutrients can be leached out into the liquid that the food is floating in if

you boil it. But the other side of this is that in some cases microwaves actually preserve more nutrients than other cooking methods because microwaving generally takes less time than than usual then you would use than you would use an oven or a stove top four to heat something to the same temperature, and these nutrients can break down as a function of time spent exposed to heat, so it varies case to case and nutrient by nutrient, but generally no food cooked in the microwave does not generally

retain any less nutritional value than food cooked in a pot on the stove or by other methods, and in some cases it actually probably retains more nutrients. All Right, On that note, we're gonna take one more break, but we'll be right back. All right, we're back, all right.

So we've been talking about microwave safety and microwave fears and uh, and this persistent fear throughout the years that somehow using a microwave oven could make food radioactive, which there's no evidence that it does, and it doesn't really make any sense that it could. On the point about exposing food to ionizing radiation or making food radioactive, again,

microwaves are non ionizing radiation. Their effects are thermal. But beyond that, I thought it would just be worth pointing out for context that food manufacturers actually do sometimes intentionally exposed food to real ionizing radiations such as X rays or gamma rays. Uh. They will literally bombard food we eat with X rays on purpose, and we eat it anyway. So why would we do that well. There was actually a really good article about this on the Salt by

Nancy shoot From I was reading. It quoted a number of industry and radiation and health safety experts, and so there are a couple of reasons that you might bombard food with ionizing radiation like X rays. One is a quality control process which is screening industrially produced food packages for metal contaminants. So in some cases X rays in the food industry are literally four imaging purposes, just like medical X rays to see inside. So imagine a metal

screw somehow falls into a pecan pie. That could be really bad, right, somebody could break a tooth on that. So some food products are X ray screened to make sure things like that don't get through to the customer. In fact, I think it was just reading about there was a big chicken recall I think, yes, involving a certain fast food restaurant. Oh yeah, with with fear. I don't know if anything was actually discovered, but I think there were fears that there could be like hard metal

contamination of the chicken. So that's not good. Sometimes food is X ray screened, uh, and the amount of radiation the food is exposed to during this process is minuscule, we should say, even though it is X rays. The bombardment required to get the images is very short and weak. It's equivalent, according to one researcher they quoted in the article, to the amount of ionizing radiation a pie would receive from the atmosphere just by sitting out in the air

for two and a half hours. So that's not too bad. Of course, the greater risk is that a hobo will steal the pie. Yeah, the bugs bunny will take it. Wait, no, who takes pies? Is it Yogi Bear? If there's a cartooned character who takes pies off window sills, Seth chimes in with with Yogi sometimes takes pies, but is more picnic basket focus. Well, perhaps there's some cartoon hobo that

we're just kind of half remembering. You know. Another version of food exposure to ionizing radiation happens in order to sterilize food products. This would be to kill any insects, germs, or other parasites that might be living in or on the food. So this is literally this is a heavy bombardment of ionizing radiation in order to kill things on purpose. Uh, Now, normally you could accomplish the same thing with heat, such as in canning, but not all food products are good

candidates for that kind of ceiling and heating process. This the products that this happens with the most by far, apparently are spices, because often spices are left out in the open too dry while they're being prepared for market or your TB packaged and shipped, so anything can get in them basically, and so they can get irradiated on their way to you know, out of the factory or whatever.

That makes sense. But even when exposed to deadly ionizing radiation like X rays, you wouldn't want these rays projected on you. The food itself still does not become radioactive through this process. This reminds me of some of the proposals for sending humans on prolonged space flights to say Mars, and how we could use the water and food for the crew as a means of shielding the crew itself. Oh yeah, surrounding them with all this uh this like

biomaterial and water. Yeah, so like cosmic rays coming in from from the universe and from the Sun. I don't remember which is the main concern there. Well, anyway, you'd have radiation from space hitting the spacecraft. Instead of penetrating the brains of the the crew, it would be mostly hitting atoms within the food and the water out there, and that you could still eat this stuff and drink

this water and you'd be okay. Again, if you're actually concerned with radioactive contamination of food, I think primarily the kinds of things you you should worry about would be exposured radioactive particles, like tiny particles that are themselves highly radioactive that could possibly get into food or other substances in the event of something like a nuclear meltdown. But again that's going to come from a nuclear meltdown like it's Chernobyl style event, as opposed to your worries about

a microwave oven in your house. Right, bombarding cinnamon, even with X rays, does not put radioactive caesium particles into the cinnamon UH, and lots of major food safety organizations, including the w h O and the American FDA and all that have investigated this and ruled it safe, and this has been for decades now. So like even the irradiation of food with real ionizing radiation, the actual deadly kind UH does not seem to make the food unsafe

to eat. Now, I want to briefly touch on just some other avenues of microwave research that I think are rather fascinating and it helps us to realize that the microwave technology is not just about cooking our food. For instance, UM, there's wireless power transmission UM, specifically microwave power transmission or MPT UH. This entails using microwave emitter to send energy through the air to a receiver. One avenue here is

to use it to power and aircraft UH. MPT was first used to power a miniature helicopter in nineteen sixty four for ten hours. Uh M I T grad and raytheon electrical engineer William C. Brown as the principal individual here, and he continued to work on MPT throughout his the rest of his career, resulting in a number of experiments that demonstrated the potential. For instance, in the nineteen seventies, he beamed thirty kilowatts of power at eighty four percent

efficiency for one mile or one point six kilometers. Uh. NASA has also explored the potential use of MPT UH it's a sort of power beaming system for space. UH and and some see it as a means of transmitting power harvested by orbital solar arrays back down to Earth. Was there a power plant of this kind in SimCity two thousand where a misdirected beam caused one of the disasters? And said, mode, Um, I don't I never played that game, so I don't know. I seem to recall that. So

you've got like a beam receiver. Uh and uh, my memory is if it gets misdirected and sets your city on fire. Sorry not to be alarm us. Well we're not. We're not quite there yet. So that's that's a future concern. Another avenue of microwave uses potentially communication. Uh. Now, this is a topic we we did an entire episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind on back in the day. Well, so you're talking about in addition to just the normal

telecommunications that uses wireless frequency and all the time. Oh, yeah, there's that. But then the spicier selection here that we did an episode on is the microwave auditory effect. We did an episode titled V two K the microwave Auditory Effect, And basically the idea here's that microwaves can actually induce sounds in the human brain. Um and uh, and it can essentially be used to create something that is described

as a whisper uh by target the human brain. Now, I think part of what we talked about though, also is that that true fact about the the perception of sounds induced by targeted microwaves at a at a human head, unfortunately has been taken by a lot of people as evidence that say, the government is actually putting voices in their head, in which case I think generally what these people are dealing with is some some form of auditory hallucination. Right.

But then there, yeah, they're explaining it away by being part of some sort of conspiracy and uh uh and end up going down that rabbit hole. Um. However, um, you know, there is the potential to use microwave technology as a weapon. Uh. Not by just breaking the front of a microwave oven open and pulling at a robot.

But you know, as we discussed in that episode, various experiments concerning microwave based weapons uh targeting the brain have been have been carried out not merely to induce sounds, but to damage the brain of the target, perhaps via the microwave pulse. Uh. Some commentators even argued that the mysterious attacks on the U. S. Embassies in Cuba and China might have been induced by such technology, though this does not seem to be the current scientific consensus, with

experts favoring sonic or even chemical sources. Yeah, I've forgotten about those mysterious cases for a while. If yeah, I want to get deep in that someday. Yeah, I think that can make for a really good episode of stuff to blow your mind. Yeah, So I think it's interesting to come back again to sort of military um potential uses of microwave technology, because where the radar range, that's

where it began. But then suddenly this one particular investigated as one particular engineer noticed that his candy bar had melted in his pocket, and he decided to investigate further. And now that technology is in you know, pretty much every household in the United States. It has become just a ubiquitous piece of household and kitchen technology. It's the friend of the dorm room gourmand. Yes, it has many many A bag of popcorn has been has been cooked

in one many a hot pocket and leave. Yeah, the little sort of foil like a sleeve that you know, adds the crisp so in my own house, like so much Trader Joe's Indian food has been heated up at lunchtime. I've got a specific request for you listeners out there right in and let us know what is the worst microwave food product you've ever come across? The worst or yeah, I would love to hear there's some good ones out there? Um or also just how how? What are some ingenious

ways that you use the microwave? And if you have ever actually carried out one of these large scale um gourmet from scratch style nineties seventies microwave recipes, I would love to hear from you, especially if you have cooked a Thanksgiving turkey in a microwave all the way, no other ovens involved. I have to hear that story, and I have to know what there is alted product was like? Or lobster? Have you cooked a live lobster in your microwave?

Don't do it just because you heard about it in this episode, but if you have done it before, I would like to hear from you. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Invention, you can find us invention pot dot com. You can also find a show. Wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that is, make sure you have subscribed and make sure you leave a nice comment in some stars. That really helps the show out huge thanks as always to our

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