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Microwave Experiments Cause Sponge Disasters
gollum123 writes "Reports about a study that found microwave ovens can be used to sterilize kitchen sponges sent people hurrying to test the idea this week — with sometimes disastrous results. A team at the University of Florida found that two minutes in the microwave at full power could kill a range of bacteria, viruses and parasites on kitchen sponges. They described how they soaked the sponges in wastewater and then zapped them. But several experimenters evidently left out the crucial step of wetting the sponge. "Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off," one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters."
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How else did they expect it to work? Of course you need the god-damn water in the sponge. Microwaves have a wave length measured in the centimetre. The size of a bacterial spore is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller The size of a bateria is a lot smaller than this again.
This means that if you wanted to destroy the blighters with radiation alone you have to choose a frequency a lot higher than microwaves, otherwise there will be areas in the minima of the standing wave that won't heat sufficently to kill the microbes.
The mechanism for steralisation is through the formation of steam that kills the majority of the nasties - not the microwave energy itself.
Simon
However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off,
He wasn't using one of those Sony battery-operated microwaves, was he?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
The microwave steralizes the wet sponge because it makes the water hot enough to kill anything living. The same effect can be had by dunking the sponge in a pot of boiling water.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
People do not understand microwaves. Berating them for not using their understanding of microwaves is like watching a Spiderman movie and saying "Why doesn't he just fly out of there?"
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
If the sponge caugth fire, the microbes are probably dead by now. Right?
holding your breath underwater for 5 minutes cures stupidity. I take full responsibility for all results of home trials.
Did you soak the cat in water first?
AccountKiller
Lots of smoke? Smells like burning tires? Really pissed off? These people sound like Linux users trying to get their sound cards to work.
Prepare for a Class Action Suit filed against Reuters, the Scientists who did this and news papers that carried it for the damages caused by the fires.
Out of the $100 million that will be awarded, $80 million will go the lawyers, $10 million towards court fees, etc., and the class action plaintiffs awarded a $15 coupon each that can be redeemed for a Microwave at Wal-mart.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
There's this method of execution shown in Tom Hanks' 'The Green Mile' in which the guy to be electrocuted is seated in the chair and a wet sponge must be placed on top of his head. Some guy (Percy) with sadistic intentions 'forgets' to do this and the poor convict burns to death in the chair.
Forgive me if its off-topic, but you can learn a lot from the movies...
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Back in good old days, many centuries ago, there wasn't any kind of this Politically Correct stuff and neither was there protection of the idiots. There was one rule: survival of the fittest.
If you made mistakes dumb enough to kill you , you didn't get anybody to pull you out and nature did its thing and eliminated the "idiot's" gene.
Of course this had nothing to do with real accidents, but in the long term idiots would dissapear.
Nowadays there is no personal responsibility. People do their own mistakes and blame it on somebody else.
This idiot should have had at least his genitals burned so we wouldn't have anymore kids.
Mind you, I am all about protecting and subsidising the weakest, the handicapped, the sick and al. I just believe that dumb people that bring it upon themselves deserve no attention and no compassion whatsoever.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
We Americans measure our bacteria as fractions of an inch so the sponge fires were no doubt caused when people, in their germ kill potential calculations, screwed up while converting centimeter length microwaves to inches. Honest mistake.
In case of human IQ, the evolution feedback works in the wrong direction.
Generally, the more intelligent, well-educated and well-established couples get children at a later age, and get fewer of them.
The "dumber" and lower-class people reproduce faster, and there will be more and more of them.
This effect is clearly visible both on a global scale (developed/developing countries) and locally (lower/upper class).
of course, those of us with children and bottle sterlisers know that placing water and objects in a microwave leads to the steam cleaning them... "well duh" was my reaction when i saw this "news" item yesterday....
Perhaps if you can't follow all the instructions there are some things you really shouldn't be doing.
... how else did _you_ expect it to work?
A simple question for you: water molecules, are they larger or smaller than the bacteria and spores to be killed?
Last time I've checked, the wavelength used in the microwave is about 12.5 cm. Sure, the bacteria are much smaller than that, but is it at all relevant?
KnightTristan
They had this on the BBC yesterday too, I think in the morning they had suggested everyone microwave their sponges and then in the evening news they had a man with a ginger mustache from ROSPA who said that he wouldn't advise microwaving sponges because there is no setting on microwaves for sponges and that he for one didn't have the faintest idea what would happen if you did microwave a sponge except that whatever it was which happened would probably be unsafe and might cause an accident.
I found it very reassuring that ROSPA ( Royal Society For The Prevention Of Accidents ) does its research so thoroughly before making announcements.
... but maybe some of the people didn't read the article :-)
You are implicitly supposing that IQ is a genetic trait, which may not be the case. Intelligence (or the develoment of) could be more related to social or monetary issues.
Oh, but you say, taking things as fact without questioning why is a folly committed only by stupid people, thus making them ignorant. The two are really the same. I would then ask you why light is both a particle and a wave and why electrons jump to a different energy level when hit by the right frequencey of light. There's probably less than 1,000 people on the planet who can give a good answer to these questions, and unless you're one of them, you've committed the same folly as your average suburban mom - you still don't truly know why a microwave works.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I'll let your guess.
Dumbass.
About 4.5 years ago a guy I later worked for had a new office/factory built. This freshly decorated building included a kitchen area with, amongst other things, a combination microwave/oven. Someone put a jacket potato in and cooked it for 20 minutes on the microwave setting. The room stank of smoke for months afterwards. The potato allegedly looked like a barbeque briquette.
IMHO a better way to sterilise a sponge is as follows:
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Ask yourself: who wants to have sex with someone who burns sponges in his microwave?
Yes, I am the one with the legendary sig.
The evolution feedback, in case of human IQ, has worked just fine till now. Almost all human institutions are organized in a pyramid-like structure: the more intelligent, well-educated people will be more at the top, leading. The "dumber" and lower-class people are more near or at the bottom, doing more of the menial work. ...?
.... So, we'd have 1 billion people, of which 99.99% have nothing to do, except to just try and enjoy themselves. My guess is most of them would get really bored really fast...
Now, until we have robots (or other technological solutions) that can take over most of the unskilled and lower-skilled work, we do need these "dumber" and lower-class people or the entire economy and our way of life will come to a standstill. Or do you really think, that if everybody was more intelligent and well-educated, that we'd have enough people with PhD's who would find satisfaction in working at the checkout of a supermarket or cleaning toilets or
The question then becomes: what if we do get to the point where we have robots (or whatever) to do most of the unskilled, lower-skilled and maybe even medium-skilled tasks? We'd have 5 billion people in the world, "mostly" not well-educated and due-to the evolutionary feedback up till now a "big" percentage would not be intelligent enough to be well-educated. What should become of these people? What would they do all day if they're all unemployed?
Even if natural selection would step in hard at that point and we'd be left with only with 1 billion people, all well-educated, what would THEY do all day? I mean, can you imagine 1 billion well-educated people working on innovations or being "artists"? Soon enough there would be little left to invent, or at least not enough to keep 1 billion people occupied, and then what? Spread out across the universe and colonize other planets? Sure, but seeing as everybody would ofcourse take all the knowledge with them there'd be nothing "real" to do on those planets as well, apart from just living.
I suspect we have a potential entry for the 2007 Darwin Awards.
--- This meme is memory intensive
One exceptional feature of a microwave is that it will keep heating at full effect no matter how hot the target gets. The only limit how you design your target.
d omestic-microwave-oven/
You can for example melt and cast most metals:
http://net127.com/2005/01/24/melting-metals-in-a-
With some research, you may even be able to use your kitchen microwave to generate some fusion reactions.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
When I was in college, someone took one of my coffee mugs, filled it up with Hershey's chocolate syrup, and put it in the microwave for 90 minutes. Then they left. As best as we can tell, the syrup first boiled over and filled up the bottom of the microwave. Eventually it hardened into a black crust and caught fire. That's when the fire alarm woke us up, you know -- it was three o'clock in the morning.
The microwave was ruined, and there was some damage to the cabinet. And I lost my favorite coffee mug too. But it's probably the best use for Hershey's chocolate syrup that I could think of (since it's pretty awful stuff).
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
People read the original article and played dumb for a bit, temporarily throwing out conventional wisdom regarding non-food objects in the microwave as they followed Reuter's authoritative instructions.
But, hey, this is slashdot and people don't play, rather, they are dumb, and we all have a good laugh at their misfortune while we're glad it was somebody else who ruined their microwave and not us.
And yes, I did make a whole bunch of toxic smoke years ago by forgetting to put the bowl of water while nuking a CD.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
There are really intelligent folks around.
*ducks*
w00t
-Al
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
> I mean, can you imagine 1 billion well-educated people working on innovations or being "artists"?
Sure. According to Mr Jobs, that's what's happen inside their Cupertino HQ.
640KB of virtualized ram will be enough for everybody
Intelligence (or the develoment of) could be more related to social or monetary issues.
Ah, but rich parents typically bear rich kids (trust funds, inheritance, better opportunities, better educations leading to better paying jobs, etc.) and poor parents typically do not offspring that go on to make millions. Rags to riches (or riches to rags) *can* happen, but neither is commonplace. Similarly, kids do tend to reflect their parents' religion, social standing, morality, etc.
Don't assume that enviromental variables aren't inheritable. In most cases, I don't think that genetic predisposition can hold a candle to environmental predisposition. If Einstein was born to a family living in the slums (instead of an upper-middle class family), do you think he would have still come up Special Relativity? How nice it would be to pretend that he would; yet, it would be utterly naive to suppose that even an individual of Einstein's calibur could have completely overcome his environment, somehow educated himself, and then somehow pursued the academic community to listen to these crackpot "time dilation" theories coming from a man who could not afford a decent suit, let alone college.
Well, actually, I got a sneak preview of the next Jean M Auel book. You will recall that Ayla has already invented flint and steel for making fire, horse riding, needles and dogs, and Jondalar has invented guns. In this new book, Jondalar invents Rock and Roll (but Ayla gets jealous and smashes his instrument when he starts "sharing Pleasures" with groupies) and Ayla invents the Courts and becomes the first lawyer. She successfully prosecutes the First Cave of the Lanzadonii for breach of patent when they start sewing with needles, and later goes on to represent a woman who cuts herself on a flint knife which was not properly labelled as sharp. Later in the book, she nearly loses a case brought by the S'Armunai Wolf Women, but the case turns around when she calls one of Jondalar's exes from the Sharamudoi as a surprise witness.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
": the more intelligent, well-educated people will be more at the top,"
I presume you're not an American?
Even if natural selection would step in hard at that point and we'd be left with only with 1 billion people, all well-educated, what would THEY do all day? I mean, can you imagine 1 billion well-educated people working on innovations or being "artists"? Soon enough there would be little left to invent, or at least not enough to keep 1 billion people occupied, and then what? Spread out across the universe and colonize other planets? Sure, but seeing as everybody would ofcourse take all the knowledge with them there'd be nothing "real" to do on those planets as well, apart from just living. .... So, we'd have 1 billion people, of which 99.99% have nothing to do, except to just try and enjoy themselves. My guess is most of them would get really bored really fast...
Errr, what the hell are you arguing? Seriously, I can't figure it out. That there's a finite limit to our intellectual pursuits and/or technological achievements? That existence itself is pointless? That smart people don't know how to have fun?
Society as a whole will always figure out something to itself occupied. Individuals that don't see the point anymore will inevitably withdraw from society and/or commit suicide--either way, removing themselves from the gene pool--leaving only those individuals who are able and willing to find a purpose. I don't see how intelligence or lack thereof has anything to do with it.
It's seems to really be a moot point whether IQ is genetic, social or monetary as an individual's children will (generally) be raised in the same social and monetary situation as the parents. No personal experience, but my father has been a guidance counselor at a High School since he retired from the military,(about 7 years) and he swears it's genetic. According to him, 95% of the time, if the kid is an idiot, when the parents come in for a meeting they're going to be idiots too, and the same thing holds true for the smart kids.
Humans set goals which evolution can work for or against. In the case of the goal "All humans become smarter and more peaceful, and achieve worldwide safety and comfort, and stop shooting each other over which hand the invisible man in the sky wants you to wipe your a** with", the goal is nearly universal, at least among men who have thought at all about the optimal future state of mankind.
It is implied, and obvious to everyone except for pedantics like yourself, that value judgments about evolution are using that goal as the standard of value. And therefore evolution can move in 'right' or 'wrong' directions, relative to that goal.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Because microwave ovens work best by vibrating water molecules. As they vibrate friction causes them to turn to steam which is what sterilizes the sponge in the first place.
The Nazis practiced genocide and encouraged eugenics. The fact that the distasteful former has so completely colored the latter to the point of tainting its meaning is obvious in your case.
Eugenics is practiced with every prenatal screening, gene screening to discover genetic abnormalities prior to conception, and with almost every in-vitro process. Do you consider those "horrible"?
This is merely encouraging a subset to remove themselves from the gene pool. There's a major difference between showing someone cliff-diving and describing its wonders vs forcibly shoving someone off a cliff.
Or do you hold that the Darwin Awards website is an abomination as well?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
>>>Back in good old days, many centuries ago, there wasn't any kind of this Politically Correct stuff and neither was there protection of the idiots. There was one rule: survival of the fittest....
Yes, you just hogtied people to a stone, and threw them in the lake. The ones that sank drowned, and the ones that did not survived.
Or you made them walk on burning coal. The ones that got burnmarks were killed, and the ones that did not could live.
This is called survival of the fittest.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
When I first heard the experiment, I was thinking, "Finally! Eileen does not have hoard her sponges and search for sponge-worthy men!" Just zap and reuse! But these disasters are more Krameresque than Eileeny.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
From the FAQ:
"Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma."
Thus the reason that people will mod a Funny post Informative.
SYS 64738
Eugenics is practiced with every prenatal screening, gene screening to discover genetic abnormalities prior to conception, and with almost every in-vitro process. Do you consider those "horrible"?
These are controversial ethical debates. Some people, especially the disabled community, do not believe that those who are born disabled should be screened out. Of course, the definition of "disability" and "disease" varies greatly.
I agree there's much debate on this topic. In a contrary view, there was a story in the insert in my Sunday paper this past weekend about a married dwarf couple wanting to ensure their child was born a dwarf. This would be intentionally producing a child with what is considered a genetic abnormality by, at a rough guess, 95+% of the population. Personally, I feel that intentionally disadvantaging a child in this manner, because they will be at a disadvantage in today's society, is not unlike unnecessarily amputating a new born's legs or arms at birth. The story also made mention of intentionally selecting deafness for a deaf couple. I feel the same way about that.This is merely encouraging a subset to remove themselves from the gene pool.
Deliberately encouraging people to kill themselves would... land you in a fair bit of trouble, I think.
Or do you hold that the Darwin Awards website is an abomination as well?
More like insensitivity to loved ones.
Telling someone to "drop dead" if you will, is not punishable. As an example of how stupid our society has become as a whole, I was by pure happenstance viewing an ad on TV this morning. It was of the new Lexus IS, and they had one on a runway racing against an IS dropped from a helicopter across the drop target. The ground based IS squeaks right under the falling IS in classic thrilling escaped by a hair style.What makes this germane to this discussion is the text that was apparently felt by someone that needed to be included in the ad. Underneath, it stated first off, "all ariel sequences were simulated", followed by "Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt."
Now, if you have to tell someone that measuring out 4000 feet on a runway and racing a car dropped from a helicopter @ 4000 feet is something you shouldn't attempt, I'd say that anyone so tempted should be allowed to go ahead and potentially remove themselves from the gene pool.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
"Yes, you just hogtied people to a stone, and threw them in the lake. The ones that sank drowned, and the ones that did not survived."
Actually, the ones that survived were burned for being witches. After all, how else could they survive? Talk about a shitty test.
In college I lived in a cooperative house where 50 of us shared a big industrial kitchen. Todd, a guy I was friendly with, walked in with a hot dog wrapped in foil-backed paper. He said, I can put this in the microwave, right? And I'm thinking "Um, you never heated a hot dog in the microwave? That's what they're best at!" It did not occur to me that he meant, including the foil-backed paper. Who doesn't know you can't put foil in the microwave?
So he stuck it in there and pop! the paper explodes in flame. I yelled "what are you doing!?" and he said "you said it would be fine!"
I guess in a way this was my first experience in tech support: you can never be too clear.
How else did they expect it to work? Of course you need the god-damn water in the sponge. Microwaves have a wave length measured in the centimetre. The size of a bacterial spore is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller The size of a bateria is a lot smaller than this again.
...Or maybe someone who feels superior to "the masses" need to really review the concept of dielectric heating.
So, are you suggesting that any body shorter than the wavelength of microwave radiation (12 cm) will be left unheated? Neat! That must be why my pizza rolls are still frozen when I get them out.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why not just put your sponges in a pot of boiling water for two minutes and skip all the exploding parts? It even works on metal scouring pads.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
my karma will hurt after this post. [...]And so I say "farewell to karma..."
People who try to apply reverse-psychology on moderators should be treated with -1, Provocation.
You are implicitly supposing that IQ is a genetic trait, which may not be the case. Intelligence (or the develoment of) could be more related to social or monetary issues.
It has a correlation to monetary issues, but is not "caused" by monetary issues. Diet has a bigger factor in IQ than anything you list, but then you could claim "societal or monetary" could affect diet. Perhaps you should have just said "environmental." That's the real buzz word for the debate. Is it genetic or environmental? And the answer is probably the same as height and many other things. It is 100% genetic, except where affected by the environment. That is to say, genetics sets up the baseline. The environment can cause deviations from he baseline, but the environment does not set the baseline. 1000 people from the same environment will vary wildly. 1000 people with the same genetics are quite close together. This has been shown with twins separated at birth and raised in vastly different environments ending up more similar than different, for hobbies, traints, and yes, results on IQ tests.
The people that imply enviroment has anything to do with IQ or height are trying to come up with excuses for differences between people. Why is it so bad that someone is "dumber" than someone else and it can't be changed? It is people that claim environment that imply a low IQ is a failing that must be explained away.
Learn to love Alaska
The weird things isn't that people forgot to wet the sponge so it wouldn't catch on fire...
The weird thing is that people are so afraid of bacteria that they are going be microwaving their sponges!! Not only that, I see they sell anti-bacteria material sponges pre-made at the store... and anti-bacterial soap... and anti-bacterial air-sprays (don't worry about lung cancer from breathing that crap!). Anti-bacterial teething rings... anti-bacterial towels... anti-bacterial shaving cream...
When did people get paranoid about bacteria all of a sudden? You gotta admit, bacteria isn't a significant problem for most people in the industrialized world, even without all the extreme anti bacteria tactics people are using.
While you are testing out all the theories in this tread, try Peeps (you know those disgusting marshmallow candies that you still have in your closet 2 years after Halloween re-located them from the store shelf to your shelf). They are great fun to watch in the microwave -- try it and see. And no, they won't light everything on fire.
**(For the record, I don't downmod comments)**
The whole robots/unemployment thing has been hashed out repeatedly, argued even before there was a term/name for "robots". The following is the outline of personal notes i used for a speech i had to give in speech class a few years ago:
There's plenty of good jokes here about Darwinism, and some useful discussion about how to actually sterilize a sponge (boiling water, dishwasher, eliminating the sponge as a middleman and simply cleaning plates in the microwave, etc.), but what about the reasons for sterilizing the sponge in the first? Does it even make sense?
Remember, we're talking about a species that used eat stuff raw that had been sitting out in the sun for a couple hours, and beat it into edible sized pieces with sharp rocks. It's a species that still does eat stuff off the floor, picks its nose, and thinks nothing of touching computer keyboards or the handrail on city bus. And here we are worrying about ordinary household bacteria in a sponge that probably gets used in conjunction with some form of antibacterial detergent anyway.
Seriously, how many death certificates note "Cause of death: Scotch Brite scrubber sponge?" How much clinical evidence is there that disinfecting sponges increases longevity or improves your health?
At the same time, there is mounting evidence that moderate exposure (without overdoing it, of course) to microbes may bolster the immune system, and questions about whether antibacterial products might kill only the weakest pathogens, leaving no resource competition to stifle the growth of chemical-resistent bacterial strains.
Don't be paranoid. Most of the microbes out there never hurt anyone.
Or let's put it another way: the more "advanced" a society gets the less applicable natural selection becomes. Why? Because societies in first world countries will try to safeguard its citizens against stupidity or any other "lack of fitness". Not only does it protect its citizens against natural hazards, such as wild animals, bad weather, famines etc. but it also strives to protect them from any new threats arising due to the new life style.
;) - A funny movie none the less.
The example in this case would be: guy hears about scientists sterilizing a sponge, guy rushes to the microwave in order to replicate the experiment, sponge catches fire, guy frantically jumps around in circles while microwave oven and room catches on fire, this sets off the fire alarm which in turn calls the firefighters, they extinguish the fire, guy sues everybody and their grandma, gets rich and procreates like mad..
We have basically neutralized effects of natural selection on us by assuring the survival and procreation of individuals that would be "less fit". Instead we are subjected mainly to genetic drift, the other effect that determines the gene pool of a population.
The movie Idiocracy actually takes it a step further and postulates that stupidity actually increases the "fitness" of an individual (i.e. a stupid individual is more likely to have children), thus a bunch of generations down the line we'll be living in an "idiocracy" such as the one depicted
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.