Why Does A Grape Turn Into a Fireball in a Microwave?
A song for the asking!
That finally has some answers. WIRED breaks down the new findings, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It’s a crowd pleaser, as long as you avoid melting your kitchen appliances. But it turns out, even after millions of YouTube views and probably tens of scorched microwaves, no one knew exactly why the fireball forms. Popular online explanations usually say that the grape halves act like an antenna, and they somehow direct microwaves onto the small bridge of skin to ignite the initial spark. But nobody had actually done the math to prove it. After several summers of microwaving grape-shaped objects and simulating the microwaving of those objects—a trio of physicists in Canada may have finally figured it out.
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