Fun With Microwaves

For those of you who can count, it should be obvious that Fun with Microwaves 3 is our third video messing around with the cooking box. We weren’t initially sure if we’d find enough stuff to make a new video worthwhile, but as you’ll see here, there’s a ton of stuff we cut. Mostly because a lot of stuff failed, but still!

In case it’s not wholly clear from the video, we went out to buy a microwave, and when we got it back to the Moonbase, we couldn’t quite remember how we’d gotten decent footage before. The white grill on the front completely obscured anything inside. We wrongly assumed that we must have previously removed that grill, so we did that.

Quick aside, being exposed to microwaves will not give you cancer. It is not ionizing radiation. It will, however, cook you if you’re dumb enough to stand there long enough. So, while it’s obviously a terrible idea to take your microwave’s grill off, it’s not the instant death ray you may think.

Turns out that we had previously used an older style of microwave with a thinner, black grill that we could actually focus through such that it seemed invisible. So we had to go find one of them and lucked out on an absolute goliath of an oven in the Panasonic Genius II. Thank goodness we did, because we didn’t have a backup video planned!

Extra thanks to Cam, who spent some time explaining all that science to us one afternoon. We were so fascinated by it that we asked him to give us a lecture for this video. We hope you enjoyed our microwavable fun, seeing behind the scenes, and our little Fun with Photons science lesson! See you next week!

Fun with microwaves trivia:

• There’s even some items we misplaced on the day, like a jar of Cheez Whiz and a foil-and-glitter-coated penguin statue. These may appear in a later edition!
• Some failed experiments that were too boring even to show you here were a potato, bubble bath, a dry sponge, and stainless steel sphere. We’d read a totally dry sponge would do something cool. They were all totally nonreactive.
• We were disappointed by the laser discs too, but it wasn’t just the lighting. They sadly weren’t as reactive as CDs usually are.
• The popcorn you see in the Loading Time took over 30 minutes to pop. Ugh.