💾 Archived View for whitemercury.ddns.net › hamster.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:09:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Due to Tom Scott video suggestions showing up on YouTube all the time; today I discovered that the microwave oven was originally invented to heat up hamsters in laboratories.
Well, that's not entirely true. Microwaves were invented after someone's snack got melted in their pocket while working on a radar device. A microwave oven uses the same technology, a magnetron, as a radar detection system. Realising this would make an excellent product they enclosed the electronics to make a metallic appliance and this was sold to catering kitchens. At this point it was far too expensive for home use.
In England research was being done into freezing hamsters, effectively making them dead and using warm paddles to reanimate them. Bringing them back from the dead. But the heating paddles caused enormous damage and often it wasn't successful. One of the scientists had the idea to use the heating effect that a radar causes, and thus they microwaved hamsters back to life.
Sadly, although the idea had been to one day freeze and reanimate people, it didn't scale with creature size. It worked well on small rodents, but bigger animals it didn't work out for.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This file is located at URL:
gemini://whitemercury.ddns.net/hamster.gmi