Most likely, the ant never left the floor or walls of the microwave oven, where it was as close as possible to those metal surfaces. The six sides of the cooking chamber in a microwave oven are made from metal (or painted metal) because metal reflects microwaves and keeps them bouncing around inside the chamber.

Metals are good conductors of electricity and effectively "short out" any electric fields that are parallel to their surfaces. Microwaves reflect from the metal walls because those walls force the electric fields of the microwaves to cancel parallel to their surfaces and that necessitates a reflected wave to cancel the incident wave. Because of that cancellation at the conducting surfaces, the intensity of the microwaves at the walls is zero or very close to zero.

The ant survived by staying within a tiny fraction of the microwave wavelength (about 12.4 cm) of the metal surfaces, where there is almost zero microwave intensity. Had the ant ventured out onto your cup, it would have walked into real trouble. Once exposed to the full intensity of the microwaves, it would not have fared so well.

I think that you've rediscovered an experiment in which people cut a grape almost in half, open the two halves like a book and lay it flat on a plate. In the microwave, the thin bridge between the halves carbonizes and than emits flames. Basically, the fruit pieces or berries are acting as antennas for the microwaves, which drive electric currents through the narrow bridges between parts. The berries aren't great conductors, but they're not true insulators either. Those bridges overheat (like an overloaded extension cord) and burn up. The flames come from the burning bridges.

If you let the flames go on long enough and enough carbon develops, you'll probably start getting plasma balls in the oven (lots of fun, but not great for the oven... you can scorch its top surface because those plasma balls rise and skittle around the ceiling of the oven). Anyway, you can probably find the carbon areas if you look closely enough, but they're no worse than a little burnt toast.

What you propose to do is far more difficult than you imagine. Determining the chemical contents of food is hard, even with a well-equipped laboratory and permission to destroy the food in order to study it. The idea of analyzing a casserole in detail simply by beaming microwaves at it is science fiction. Think how much easier airport security would be if they could chemically analyze everything that came in the front door just by beaming microwaves at it.

That said, however, let me make two comments. First, the question quickly turns to computer interface issues, as though the chemical analysis part is trivial in comparison to computer presentation part. Physical science and computer science are truly different fields and not everything in the scientific domain can be reduced to a software package. Physics and chemistry haven't disappeared with the advent of computers and there will never be a firmware upgrade for your microwave oven that will turn it into a nutritional analysis laboratory. As a society, we've gone a bit too far in replacing science education with technology education, particularly computer software.

Second, while remote chemical analysis isn't easy, it can be done in certain cases with the clever use of physics and chemistry. One of my friends here at Virginia, Gaby Laufer, has developed an instrument that studies the infrared light transmitted by the air and can determine whether that air contains any of a broad variety of toxic or dangerous gases in a matter of seconds. Air's relative transparency makes it easier to analyze than an opaque casserole, but even when you can see through something it's not trivial to see what it contains. Gaby's instrument does a phenomenal job of fingerprinting the gas's absorption features and identifying trouble.

Note added: a reader informed me that there are now microwave ovens that can read bar codes and adjust their cooking to match the associated food. A scale in the base of the oven can determine the food's weight and cook it properly. Another reader suggested that a microwave oven might be able to measure the food's microwave absorption and weight in order to adjust cooking power and time. While that's also a good possibility, ovens that sense food temperature or the humidity inside the oven can achieve roughly the same result by turning themselves off at the appropriate time.

I figure that some day, we'll turn to our landfills as resources for precious elements like copper and gold. That assumes, of course, that we survive global warming. In the meantime, we'll just keep throwing stuff out.

Despite the scary title "microwave radiation," a microwave oven is basically just another household electronic device. It is an extremely close relative of a convention cathode-ray-tube television set. If you're OK with putting CRT televisions and computer monitors in the landfill, you should have no problems with putting microwave ovens there, too. Even when the microwave oven is on, all it has inside it is microwave radiation and that's just not a big deal. The instant you turn it off, it doesn't even have those microwaves in it. It's just boring inert electronic parts and they'll sit in the landfill for generations, rusting and decaying like every other abandoned electronic gadget. I'd rather see it go to a recycling center and have its precious materials returned to the resource bin, but as landfill junk goes, it's not all that bad. Given that toxic chemicals are the primary concern with landfills, microwave ovens are probably rather innocuous. They have no radioactive contents and although the high-voltage capacitor might have oil in it, that oil can no longer be the toxic PCBs that were common a few decades ago. Even when that oil leaks into the environment, it's probably not going to do much.

So there you have it, microwave ovens go to their graves no more loudly or dangerously than old televisions or computers or cell phones.

In fact, I might start calling cell phones "microwave phones" because that's exactly what they are. They communicate with the base unit by way of microwave radiation. Given the number of people who have cell phones semi-permanently installed in their ears, concerns about microwave radiation should probably be redirect from microwave ovens to "microwave phones." Think about it next time your six-year-old talks for an hour with her best friend on that "microwave phone."

You’re right. Whether the microwave oven is grounded or not makes no difference on its screen’s ability to prevent microwave leakage. In fact, the whole idea of grounding something is nearly meaningless at such high frequencies. Since electrical influences can't travel faster than the speed of light and light only travels 12.4 cm during one cycle of the oven’s microwaves, the oven can't tell if it's grounded at microwave frequencies; its power cord is just too long and there just isn’t time for charge to flow all the way through that cord during a microwave cycle.

When you ground an appliance, you’re are making it possible for electric charge to equilibrate between that appliance and the earth. The earth is approximately neutral, so a grounded appliance can’t retain large amounts of either positive or negative charge. That’s a nice safety feature because it means that you won’t get a shock when you touch the appliance, even if one of its power wires comes loose and touches the case. Any charge that the power wire tries to deposit on the case will quickly flow to the earth as the appliance and earth equilibrate.

But charge can’t escape from the appliance through the grounding wire instantly. Light takes about 1 nanosecond to travel 1 foot and electricity takes a little longer than that. For charge to leave your appliance for the earth might well require 50 nanoseconds or more. That’s not a problem for ordinary power distribution, so grounding is generally a great idea. Each cycle of the 60-Hz AC power in the U.S. takes 18 milliseconds to complete, so the appliance and earth have plenty of time to equilibrate with one another. But a cycle of the microwave power in the oven takes less about 0.4 nanoseconds to complete and there’s just no time for the appliance and earth to equilibrate. At microwave frequencies, the electric current flowing through a long wire is wavelike, meaning that at one instant in time the wire has both positive and negative patches, spaced half a wavelength apart along its length. It’s carrying an electromagnetic ripple.

The metal screen on the oven’s door has to reflect the microwaves all by itself. It does this without a problem because the holes are so much smaller than 12.4 centimeters that currents easily flow around them during a cycle of the microwaves. Those currents are able to compensate for the holes in the screens and cause the microwaves to reflect perfectly.

That tear in the window screen presents three potential problems: microwave leakage, evanescent waves, and arcing. As long as the hole is small, less than a centimeter or so, it's not likely to allow much microwave leakage. The oven's microwaves have a wavelength of 12.4 centimeters and they'll reflect from conducting surfaces with holes much smaller than that wavelength. A foot from your oven, there probably won't be any significant microwave intensity, although the only way to be sure is with a microwave leakage meter.

The evanescent wave problem is more likely. When any electromagnetic wave reflects from a conducting surface that has small holes in it, there is what is known as an evanescent wave extending into and somewhat beyond each hole. It's as though the wave is trying to figure out whether or not it can pass through the opening and so it tries. Even when it discovers that the hole is far too small for it pass through (i.e., much smaller than its wavelength), it still offers electromagnetic intensity in the region just beyond the hole. The extent of the evanescent wave increases with the size of the hole. The microwave oven's screen has very small holes and it is located inside the glass window. The evanescent waves associated with those holes cut off so quickly that you can hold your hand against the glass and not expose your skin to significant microwaves. But once you've torn a larger hole in the screen, the evanescent waves can extend farther through that screen and perhaps out beyond the surface of the glass window. If you press your hand against the window just in front of the tear while the microwave oven is on, you may burn your hand.

Finally, there is the issue of arcing. To reflect the microwaves, the conducting screen must carry electric currents. The microwaves' electric fields push electric charge back and forth in the conducting screen and it is that moving charge (i.e., electric current) that ultimately redirects the microwaves back into the cooking chamber as a reflection. Those electric currents in the screen are real and they're not going to take kindly to that tear. It's a weak spot in the conducting surface through which they flow. Weak electrical paths can heat up like lightbulb filaments when they carry currents. Moreover, charge that should flow across the torn region can accumulate on sharp edges and leap through the air as an arc. If either of these processes happens, it may scorch the window and the screen, and cause increasing trouble.

You could be lucky: the leakage could be zero, the evanescent waves could remain far enough inside the window to never cause injury, and the tear could never heat up or arc. But the risk of operating this damaged microwave oven is not insignificant. Since it's an installed unit, I'd suggest replacing the screen or the door (assuming that such replacements are available).

Yes, but it's not a good idea. Depending on the type of plate, you can either damage your microwave oven or damage the plate.

If a plate is "microwave safe," it will barely absorb the microwaves and heat extremely slowly. In effect, the microwave oven will be operating empty and the electromagnetic fields inside it will build up to extremely high levels. Since the walls of the oven are mirrorlike and the plate is almost perfectly transparent to microwaves, the electromagnetic waves streaming out of the oven's magnetron tube bounce around endlessly inside the oven's cooking chamber. The resulting intense fields can produce various types of electric breakdown along the walls of the cooking chamber and thereby damage the surface with burns or arcs. Furthermore, the intense microwaves in the cooking chamber will reflect back into the magnetron and can upset its internal oscillations so that it doesn't function properly. Although magnetrons are astonishingly robust and long-lived, they don't appreciate having to reabsorb their own emitted microwaves. In short, your plates will heat up slowly and you'll be aging your microwave oven in the process. You could wet the plates before putting them in the microwave oven to speed the heating and decrease the wear-and-tear on the magnetron, but then you'd have to dry the plates before use.

If a plate isn't "microwave safe," then it will absorb microwaves and heat relatively quickly. If it absorbs the microwaves uniformly and well, then you can probably warm it to the desired temperature without any problems as long as you know exactly how many seconds it takes and adjust for the total number of plates you're warming. If you heat a plate too long, bad things will happen. It may only amount to burning your fingers, but some plates can't take high temperatures without melting, cracking, or popping. Unglazed ceramics that have soaked up lots of water will heat rapidly because water absorbs microwaves strongly. Water trapped in pores in such ceramics can transform into high-pressure steam, a result that doesn't seem safe to me. And if a plate absorbs microwaves nonuniformly, then you'll get hotspots or burned spots on the plate. Metalized decorations on a plate will simply burn up and blacken the plate. Cracks that contain water will overheat and the resulting thermal stresses will extend the cracks further. So this type of heating can be stressful to the plates.

No, there is no square-peg in round-hole effect going on in microwave ovens. Microwaves reflect from conducting surfaces, just as light waves reflect from shiny metals, and they can't pass through holes in conducting surfaces if those holes are substantially smaller than their wavelengths. The holes in the conducting mesh covering the microwave oven's window are simply too small for the microwaves and the microwaves are reflected by that mesh.

Microwaves themselves have no well-defined shape but they do have firm rules governing their overall structures. Books usually draw microwaves (and all other electromagnetic waves) as wavy lines, as though something was truly going up and down in space. From that misleading representation, it's easy for people to suppose that electromagnetic waves can't get through certain openings.

In reality, electromagnetic waves consist of electric and magnetic fields (influences that push on electric charge and magnetic pole, respectively) that point up and down in a rippling fashion, but nothing actually travels up and down per say. The spatial structures of these fields are governed by Maxwell's equations, a set of four famous relationships that bind electricity and magnetism into a single, unified classical theory. Maxwell's equations dictate the structures of electromagnetic waves and predict that electromagnetic waves on one side of a conducting surface can't propagate through to the other side of that surface. Even if there are small holes in the conducting surface, holes that are much smaller that the wavelength of the waves, those waves can't propagate through the surface. More specifically, the fields die off exponentially as they try to penetrate through the holes and the waves don't propagate on the far side.

The choice of round holes in the oven mesh is simply a practical one. You can pack round holes pretty tightly in a surface while leaving their conducting boundaries relatively robust. And round holes treat all electromagnetic waves equally because they have no wide or narrow directions.

As long as the oven's metal bottom is sound underneath the rust, there isn't a problem. The cooking chamber walls are so thick and highly conducting that they reflect the microwaves extremely well even when they have a little rust on them. However, if the metal is so rusted that it loses most of its conductivity in the rust sites, you'll get local heating across the rusty patches and eventually leakage of microwaves. If you're really concerned that there may be trouble, run the microwave oven empty for about 20 seconds and then (carefully!) touch the rusty spots. If they aren't hot, then the metal underneath is doing its job just fine.

The salesperson you spoke to was simply wrong. If you'll allow me to stand on my soapbox for a minute, I'll tell you that this is a perfect example of how important it is for everyone to truly learn basic science while they're in school and not to simply suffer through the classes as a way to obtain a degree. The salesperson is apparently oblivious to the differences between types of "radiation," to the short- and long-term effects of those radiations, and to the importance of intensity in radiation.

Let's start with the differences in types of radiation. Basically, anything that moves is radiation, from visible light, to ultraviolet, to X-rays, to microwaves, to alpha particles, to neutrons, and even to flying pigeons. These different radiations do different things when they hit you, particularly the pigeons. While "ionizing radiations" such as X-rays, ultraviolet, alpha particles, and neutrons usually have enough localized energy to do chemical damage to the molecules they hit, "non-ionizing radiation" such as microwaves and pigeons do not damage molecules. When you and your organic friend worry about toxic changes in food or precancerous changes in your tissue, what really worry you are molecular changes. Microwaves and pigeons don't cause those sorts of changes. Microwaves effectively heat food or tissue thermally, while pigeons bruise food or tissue on impact.

Wearing a lead apron while working around ionizing radiation makes sense, although a simple layer of fabric or sunscreen is enough to protect you from most ultraviolet. To protect yourself against pigeons, wear a helmet. And to protect yourself against microwaves, use metal. The cooking chamber of the microwave oven is a metal box (including the screened front window). So little microwave "radiation" escapes from this metal box that it's usually hard to detect, let alone cause a safety problem. There just isn't much microwave intensity coming from the oven and intensity matters. A little microwaves do nothing at all to you; in fact you emit them yourself!

If you want to detect some serious microwaves, put that microwave detector near your cellphone! The cellphone's job is to emit microwaves, right next to your ear! Before you give up on microwave ovens, you should probably give up on cellphones. That said, I think the worst danger about cellphones is driving into a pedestrian or a tree while you're under the influence of the conversation. Basically, non-ionizing radiation such as microwaves is only dangerous if it cooks you. At the intensities emitted by a cellphone next to your ear, it's possible that some minor cooking is taking place. However, the cancer risk is almost certainly nil.

Despite all this physics reality, salespeople and con artists are still more than happy to sell you protection against the dangers of modern life. I chuckle at the shields people sell to install on your cellphones to reduce their emissions of harmful radiation. The whole point of the cellphone is to emit microwave signals to the receiving tower, so if you shield it you spoil its operation! It would be like wrapping an X-ray machine in a lead box to protect the patient. Sure, the patient would be safe but the X-ray machine would barely work any more.

Returning to the microwave cooking issue, once the food comes out of the microwave oven, there are no lingering effects of its having been cooked with microwaves. There is no convincing evidence of any chemical changes in the food and certain no residual cooking microwaves around in the food. If you're worried about toxic changes to your food, avoid broiling or grilling. Those high-surface-temperature cooking techniques definitely do chemical damage to the food, making it both tasty and potentially a tiny bit toxic. One of the reasons why food cooked in the microwave oven is so bland is because those chemical changes don't happen. As a result, microwave ovens are better for reheating than for cooking.

What a remarkable story! As much as I like to think I can predict what should happen in many cases, there is just nothing like a good experiment to bring some reality to the situation. Your microwave evidently sent a significant fraction of its 900 watts of microwave radiation through that crack between cooking chamber and door and roasted your finger instantly. This is a good cautionary tale for those who are careless or curious with potentially dangerous household gadgets. While I continue to think that serious injuries are unlikely even in a leaky microwave oven, you have shown that there are cases of real danger. Fortunately, you had time to snap you finger away. It's like Class 3 lasers, which are now common in the form of laser pointers and supermarket checkout systems: they can damage your vision if you stare into them, but your blink reflex is fast enough to keep you from suffering injury. Thanks for the anecdote and I'm glad your finger recovered.

Stealth aircraft are designed to absorb most of the microwave radiation that hits them and to reflect whatever they don't absorb away from the microwave source. That way, any radar system that tries to see the aircraft by way of its microwave reflection is unlikely to detect anything returning from the aircraft. In effect, the stealth aircraft is "black" to microwaves and to the extent that it has any glossiness to its surfaces, those surfaces are tipped at angles that don't let radar units see that glossiness. Since most radar units emit bright bursts of microwaves and look for reflections, stealth aircraft are hard to detect with conventional radar. Just as you can't see a black bat against the night sky by shining a flashlight at it, you can't see a stealth aircraft against the night sky by shining microwaves at it.

Like any black object, the stealth aircraft will heat up when exposed to intense electromagnetic waves. But trying to cook a stealth aircraft with microwaves isn't worth the trouble. If someone can figure out where it is enough to focus intense microwaves on it, they can surely find something better with which to damage it.

As for detecting the stealth aircraft with the help of cell phones, that brings up the issue of what is invisibility. Like a black bat against the night sky, it's hard to see a stealth aircraft simply by shining microwaves at it. Those microwaves don't come back to you so you see no difference between the dark sky and the dark plane. But if you put the stealth aircraft against the equivalent of a white background, it will become painfully easy to see. Cell phones provide the microwave equivalent of a white background. If you look for microwave emission near the ground from high in the sky, you'll see microwaves coming at you from every cell phone and telephone tower. If you now fly a microwave absorbing aircraft across that microwave-rich background, you'll see the dark image as it blocks out all these microwave sources. Whether or not this effect was used in the Balkans, I can't say. But it does point out that invisibility is never perfect and that excellent camouflage in one situation may be terrible in another.

During the defrost cycle, the microwave oven periodically turns off its magnetron so that heat can diffuse through the food naturally, from hot spots to cold spots. These quiet periods allow frozen parts of the food to melt the same way an ice cube would melt if you threw it into hot water. While the magnetron is off, it isn't emitting any microwaves and the food is just sitting there spreading its thermal energy around.

As far as anyone has been able to determine so far, the wattage is so small that this microwave radiation doesn't affect us. Not all radiations are the same, and radio or microwave radiation is particularly nondestructive at low intensities. It can't do direct chemical damage and at low wattage can't cause significant RF (radio frequency) heating. At present, there is thus no plausible physical mechanism by which these phones can cause injury. I don't think that one will ever be found, so you're probably just fine.

Both processes allow dissolved gases to escape from the water so that they can't serve as seed bubbles for boiling. When you heat water and then let it cool, the gases that came out of solution as small bubbles on the walls of the container escape into the air and are not available when you reheat the water. When you let the water sit out overnight, those same dissolved gases have time to escape into the air and this also reduces the number and size of the gas bubbles that form when you finally heat the water. Without those dissolved gases and the bubbles they form during heating it's much harder for the steam bubbles to form when the water reaches boiling. The water can then superheat more easily.

Don't operate the oven open. You're just asking for trouble. The oven will emit between 500 and 1100 watts of microwaves, depending on its rating, and you don't need to be exposed to such intense microwaves. The chamber effect is important; without the sealed chamber, the microwaves pass through the food only about once before heading off into the kitchen and you. The food won't cook well and you'll be bathed in the glow from a kilowatt source of invisible "light."

Imagine standing in front of a 10-kilowatt light bulb (which emits about 1 kilowatt of visible light and the rest is other forms of heat) and then imagine that you can't see light at all and can only feel it when it is causing potential damage. Would you feel safe? Your video camera won't enjoy the microwave exposure, either.

If you want to videotape your experiments without having to view them through the metal mesh on the door, you can consider drilling a small hole in the side of the cooking chamber. If you keep the hole's diameter to a few millimeters, the microwaves will not leak out. Then put one of the tiny inexpensive video cameras that widely available a centimeter or so away from that hole. You should get a nice unobstructed view of the cooking process without risking life and limb.

The cooking chamber of a microwave oven has mesh-covered holes to permit air to enter and exit. The holes in the metal mesh are small enough that the microwaves themselves cannot pass through and are instead reflected back into the cooking chamber. However, those holes are large enough that air (or light in the case of the viewing window) can pass through easily. Sending air through the cooking chamber keeps the cooking chamber from turning into a conventional hot oven and it carries food smells out into the kitchen.

Superheated water doesn't always wait until triggered before undergoing sudden boiling. All that's needed to start an explosion is for something to introduce an initial "seed" bubble into the liquid. Sometimes the container already has everything necessary to form a seed bubble and it's just a matter of getting the water hot enough to start that process. Many seed bubbles begin as trapped air in tiny crevices. As the water gets hotter, the size of any trapped air pocket grows and eventually it may be able to break free as a real seed bubble. When water is sufficiently superheated, just a single seed bubble is enough to start an explosion and empty the container completely. In your case, the coffee flash boiled spontaneously after something inside it nucleated the first bubble.

This sort of accident happens fairly often and we rarely think much about it as we sponge up the spilled liquid inside the microwave oven. But had your friend been unlucky enough to stop heating the coffee a second or two before that POP, she might have been injured while taking the coffee out of the oven. The moral of this story is to avoid overcooking any liquid in the microwave oven. If you must drink your coffee boiling hot, pay attention to it as it heats up so that it doesn't cook too long and then let it sit for a minute after the oven turns off. If you don't like your coffee boiling hot, then don't heat it to boiling at all.

I'm afraid that there's no easy answer to this question. You can use a microwave oven to superheat water in any container that doesn't assist bubble formation. How a particular container behaves is hard for me to say without experimenting. I'd heat a small amount of water (1/2 cup or less) in the container and look at it through the oven's window to see if the water boils nicely, with lots of steam bubbles streaming upward from many different points on the inner surface of the container. The more easily water boils in the container, the less likely it is to superheat when you cook it too long. (If you try this experiment, leave the potentially superheated water in the closed microwave oven to cool!)

Glass containers are clearly the most likely to superheat water because their surfaces are essentially perfect. Glasses have the characteristics of frozen liquids and a glass surface is as smooth as... well, glass. When you overheat water in a clean glass measuring cup, your chances of superheating it at least mildly are surprisingly high. The spontaneous bubbling that occurs when you add sugar, coffee powder, or a teabag to microwave-heated water is the result of such mild superheating. Fortunately, severe superheating is much less common because defects, dirt, or other impurities usually help the water boil before it becomes truly dangerous. That's why most of us avoid serious injuries.

However, even non-transparent microwaveable containers often have glass surfaces. Ceramics are "glazed," which means that they are coated with glass for both sealing and decoration. Many heavy mixing bowls are glass or glass-ceramics. As you can see, it's hard to get away from trouble. I simply don't know how plastic microwaveable containers behave when heating water; they may be safe or they may be dangerous.

If you're looking for a way out of this hazard, here are my suggestions. First, learn to know how long a given amount of liquid must be heated in your microwave in order to reach boiling and don't cook it that long. If you really need to boil water, be very careful with it after microwaving or boil it on a stovetop instead. My microwave oven has a "beverage" setting that senses how hot the water is getting. If the water isn't hot enough when that setting finishes, I add another 30 seconds and then test again. I never cook the water longer than I need to. Cooking water too long on a stovetop means that some of it boils away, but doing the same in a microwave oven may mean that it becomes dangerously superheated. Your children can still "cook" soup in the microwave if they use the right amount of time. Children don't like boiling hot soup anyway, so if you figure out how long it takes to heat their soup to eating temperature and have them cook their soup only that long, they'll never encounter superheating. As for dad's coffee water, same advice. If dad wants his coffee boiling hot, then he should probably make it himself. Boiling water is a hazard for children even without superheating.

Second, handle liquids that have been heated in a microwave oven with respect. Don't remove a liquid the instant the oven stops and then hover over it with your face exposed. If the water was bubbling spasmodically or not at all despite heavy heating, it may be superheated and deserves particular respect. But even if you see no indications of superheating, it takes no real effort to be careful. If you cooked the water long enough for it to reach boiling temperature, let it rest for a minute per cup before removing it from the microwave. Never put your face or body over the container and keep the container at a safe distance when you add things to it for the first time: powdered coffee, sugar, a teabag, or a spoon.

Finally, it would be great if some entrepreneurs came up with ways to avoid superheating altogether. The makers of glass containers don't seem to recognize the dangers of superheating in microwave ovens, despite the mounting evidence for the problem. Absent any efforts on their parts to make the containers intrinsically safer, it would be nice to have some items to help the water boil: reusable or disposable inserts that you could leave in the water as it cooked or an edible powder that you could add to the water before cooking. Chemists have used boiling chips to prevent superheating for decades and making sanitary, nontoxic boiling sticks for microwaves shouldn't be difficult. Similarly, it should be easy to find edible particles that would help the water boil. Activated carbon is one possibility.

Last night's report wasn't meant to scare you away from using your microwave oven or keep you from heating water in it. It was intended to show you that there is a potential hazard that you can avoid if you're informed about it. Microwave ovens are wonderful devices and they prepare food safely and efficiently as long as you use them properly. "Using them properly" means not heating liquids too long in smooth-walled containers.

Water doesn't always boil when it is heated above its normal boiling temperature (100 °C or 212 °F). The only thing that is certain is that above that temperature, a steam bubble that forms inside the body of the liquid will be able to withstand the crushing effects of atmospheric pressure. If no bubbles form, then boiling will simply remain a possibility, not a reality. Something has to trigger the formation of steam bubbles, a process known as "nucleation." If there is no nucleation of steam bubbles, there will be no boiling and therefore no effective limit to how hot the water can become.

Nucleation usually occurs at hot spots during stovetop cooking or at defects in the surfaces of cooking vessels. Glass containers have few or no such defects. When you cook water in a smooth glass container, using a microwave oven, it is quite possible that there will be no nucleation on the walls of the container and the water will superheat. This situation becomes even worse if the top surface of the water is "sealed" by a thin layer of oil or fat so that evaporation can't occur, either. Superheated water is extremely dangerous and people have been severely injured by such water. All it takes is some trigger to create the first bubble-a fork or spoon opening up the inner surface of the water or striking the bottom of the container-and an explosion follows. I recently filmed such explosions in my own microwave (low-quality movie (749KB), medium-quality movie (5.5MB)), or high-quality movie (16.2MB)). As you'll hear in my flustered remarks after "Experiment 13," I was a bit shaken up by the ferocity of the explosion I had triggered, despite every expectation that it would occur. After that surprise, you'll notice that I became much more concerned about yanking my hand out of the oven before the fork reached the water. I recommend against trying this dangerous experiment, but if you must, be extremely careful and don't superheat more than a few ounces of water. You can easily get burned or worse. For a reader's story about a burn he received from superheated water in a microwave, touch here.

Here is a sequence of images from the movie of my experiment, taken 1/30th of a second apart:

The spoon will have essentially no effect at all on the food. Metal left in the microwave oven during cooking will only cause trouble if (a) it is very thin or (b) it has sharp edges or points. The microwaves push electric charges back and forth in metal, so if the metal is too thin, it will heat up like the filament of a light bulb and may cause a fire. And if the metal has sharp edges or points, charges may accumulate on those sharp spots and then leap into space as a spark. But because your spoon was thick and had rounded edges, the charges that flowed through it during cooking didn't have any bad effects on the spoon: no heating and no sparks.

As far as the food is concerned, the presence of the spoon redirected the microwaves somewhat, but probably without causing any noticeable changes in how the food cooked. There is certainly no residual radiation of any sort and the food is no more likely to cause cancer after being cooked with metal around than had there been no spoon with it. In general, leaving a spoon in a cup of coffee or bowl of oatmeal isn't going to cause any trouble at all. I do it all the time. In fact, having a metal spoon in the liquid may reduce the likelihood of superheating the liquid, a dangerous phenomenon that occurs frequently in microwave cooking. Superheated liquids boil violently when you disturb them and can cause serious injuries as a result.

The microwaves would flow out of the oven's cooking chamber like light streaming out of a brightly illuminated mirrored box. If you were nearby, some of those microwaves would pass through you and your body would absorb some of them during their passage. This absorption would heat your tissue so that you would feel the warmth. In parts of your body that have rapid blood circulation, that heat would be distributed quickly to the rest of your body and you probably wouldn't suffer any rapid injuries. But in parts of your body that don't have good blood flow, such as the corneas of your eyes, tissue could heat quickly enough to be permanently damaged. In any case, you'd probably feel the warmth and realize that something was wrong before you suffered any substantial permanent injuries.

Not significantly. Air doesn't absorb them well, which is why the air in a microwave oven doesn't get hot and why satellite and cellular communication systems work so well. The molecules in air are poor antennas for this long-wavelength electromagnetic radiation. They mostly just ignore it.

Yes, this sort of accident can and does happen. The water superheated and then boiled violently when disturbed. Here's how it works:

Water can always evaporate into dry air, but it normally only does so at its surface. When water molecules leave the surface faster than they return, the quantity of liquid water gradually diminishes. That's ordinary evaporation. However, when water is heated to its boiling temperature, it can begin to evaporate not only from its surface, but also from within. If a steam bubble forms inside the hot water, water molecules can evaporate into that steam bubble and make it grow larger and larger. The high temperature is necessary because the pressure inside the bubble depends on the temperature. At low temperature, the bubble pressure is too low and the surrounding atmospheric pressure smashes it. That's why boiling only occurs at or above water's boiling temperature. Since pressure is involved, boiling temperature depends on air pressure. At high altitude, boiling occurs at lower temperature than at sea level.

But pay attention to the phrase "If a steam bubble forms" in the previous paragraph. That's easier said than done. Forming the initial steam bubble into which water molecules can evaporate is a process known as "nucleation." It requires a good number of water molecules to spontaneously and simultaneously break apart from one another to form a gas. That's an extraordinarily rare event. Even in a cup of water many degrees above the boiling temperature, it might never happen. In reality, nucleation usually occurs at a defect in the cup or an impurity in the water--anything that can help those first few water molecules form the seed bubble. When you heat water on the stove, the hot spots at the bottom of the pot or defects in the pot bottom usually assist nucleation so that boiling occurs soon after the boiling temperature is reached. But when you heat pure water in a smooth cup using a microwave oven, there may be nothing present to help nucleation occur. The water can heat right past its boiling temperature without boiling. The water then superheats--its temperature rising above its boiling temperature. When you shake the cup or sprinkle something like sugar or salt into it, you initiate nucleation and the water then boils violently.

Fortunately, serious microwave superheating accidents are fairly unusual. However, they occur regularly and some of the worst victims require hospital treatment. I have heard of extreme cases in which people received serious eye injuries and third degree burns that required skin grafts and plastic surgery.

You can minimize the chance of this sort of problem by not overcooking water or any other liquid in the microwave oven, by waiting about 1 minute per cup for that liquid to cool before removing it from the microwave if there is any possibility that you have superheated it, and by being cautious when you first introduce utensils, powders, teabags, or otherwise disturb very hot liquid that has been cooked in a microwave oven. Keep the water away from your face and body until you're sure it's safe and don't ever hover over the top of the container. Finally, it's better to have the liquid boil violently while it's inside the microwave oven than when it's outside on your counter and can splatter all over you. Once you're pretty certain that the water is no longer superheated, you can ensure that it's safe by deliberately nucleating boiling before removing the cup from the microwave. Inserting a metal spoon or almost any food into the water should trigger boiling in superheated water. A pinch of sugar will do the trick, something I've often noticed when I heat tea in the microwave. However, don't mess around with large quantities of superheated water. If you have more than 1 cup of potentially superheated water, don't try to nucleate boiling until you've waited quite a while for it to cool down. I've been scalded by the stuff several times even when I was prepared for an explosion. It's really dangerous.

For a reader's story about a burn he received from superheated water in a microwave, touch here.

Yes. The paint is simply decoration on the metal walls. The cooking chamber of the microwave has metal walls so that the microwaves will reflect around inside the chamber. Thick metal surfaces are mirrors for microwaves and they work perfectly well with or without thin, non-conducting coatings of paint.

It's a common misconception that the microwaves in a microwave oven excite a natural resonance in water. The frequency of a microwave oven is well below any natural resonance in an isolated water molecule, and in liquid water those resonances are so smeared out that they're barely noticeable anyway. It's kind of like playing a violin under water--the strings won't emit well-defined tones in water because the water impedes their vibrations. Similarly, water molecules don't emit (or absorb) well-defined tones in liquid water because their clinging neighbors impede their vibrations.

Instead of trying to interact through a natural resonance in water, a microwave oven just exposes the water molecules to the intense electromagnetic fields in strong, non-resonant microwaves. The frequency used in microwave ovens (2,450,000,000 cycles per second or 2.45 GHz) is a sensible but not unique choice. Waves of that frequency penetrate well into foods of reasonable size so that the heating is relatively uniform throughout the foods. Since leakage from these ovens makes the radio spectrum near 2.45 GHz unusable for communications, the frequency was chosen in part because it would not interfere with existing communication systems.

As for there being a laser in a microwave oven, there isn't. Lasers are not the answer to all problems and so the source for microwaves in a microwave oven is a magnetron. This high-powered vacuum tube emits a beam of coherent microwaves while a laser emits a beam of coherent light waves. While microwaves and light waves are both electromagnetic waves, they have quite different frequencies. A laser produces much higher frequency waves than the magnetron. And the techniques these devices use to create their electromagnetic waves are entirely different. Both are wonderful inventions, but they work in very different ways.

The fact that this misleading information appears in a science book, presumably used in schools, is a bit discouraging. It just goes to show you that you shouldn't believe everything read in books or on the web (even this web site, because I make mistakes, too).

This is an interesting question because it brings up the tricky issue of what is the temperature in a microwave oven. In fact, there is no specific temperature in the oven because the microwaves that do the cooking are not thermal. Rather than emerging from a hot object with a well-defined temperature, these microwaves are produced in a coherent fashion by a vacuum tube. Like the light emerging from a laser, these microwaves can heat objects they encounter as hot as you like, or at least until heat begins to escape from those objects as fast as it's being added.

So instead of measuring the "temperature of the microwave oven," people normally put thermometers in the food to measure the food's temperature. This works well as long as the thermometers don't interact with the microwaves in ways that make them either hotter or inaccurate. Electronic thermometers are common in high-end microwaves. There is nothing special about these electronic thermometers except that they are carefully shielded so that the microwaves don't heat them or affect their readings. By "shielded," I mean that each of these thermometers has a continuous metallic sheath that reflects the microwaves. This sheath extends from the wall of the oven's cooking chamber all the way to the thermometer probe's tip so that the microwaves themselves can't enter the measurement electronics. Since the sheath reflects microwaves, the thermometer isn't heated by the microwaves and only measures the temperature of the food it contacts.

On the other hand, putting a mercury thermometer in a microwave oven isn't a good idea. While mercury is a metal and will reflect most of the microwaves that strike it, the microwaves will push a great many electric charges up and down the narrow column of mercury. This current flow will cause heating of the mercury because the column is too thin to tolerate the substantial current without becoming warm. The mercury can easily overheat, turn to gas, and explode the thermometer. (A reader of this web site reported having blown up a mercury thermometer just this way as a child.) Moreover, as charges slosh up and down the mercury column, they will periodically accumulate at the upper end. Since there is only a thin vapor of mercury gas above this upper surface, the accumulated charges will probably ionize this vapor and create a luminous mercury discharge. The thermometer would then turn into a mercury lamp, emitting ultraviolet light. I used microwave-powered mercury lamps similar to this in my thesis research fifteen years ago and they work very nicely.

While it's true that microwaves twist water molecules back and forth, this twisting alone doesn't make the water molecules hot. To understand why, consider the water molecules in gaseous steam: microwaves twist those water molecules back and forth but they don't get hot. That's because the water molecules beginning twisting back and forth as the microwaves arrive and then stop twisting back and forth as the microwaves leave. In effect, the microwaves are only absorbed temporarily and are reemitted without doing anything permanent to the water molecules. Only by having the water molecules rub against something while they're twisting, as occurs in liquid water, can they be prevented from remitting the microwaves. That way the microwaves are absorbed and never remitted--the microwave energy becomes thermal energy and remains behind in the water.

Visualize a boat riding on a passing wave--the boat begins bobbing up and down as the wave arrives but it stops bobbing as the wave departs. Overall, the boat doesn't absorb any energy from the wave. However, if the boat rubs against a dock as it bobs up and down, it will converts some of the wave's energy into thermal energy and the wave will have permanently transferred some of its energy to the boat and dock.

Some experiments are so sensitive to electromagnetic waves that they must be performed inside "Faraday cages". A Faraday cage is a metal or metal screen box. Its walls conduct electricity and act as mirrors for electromagnetic waves. As long as a wave has a wavelength significantly longer than the largest hole in the walls, that wave will be reflected and will not enter the box. This reflection occurs because the wave's electric field pushes charges inside the metal walls and causes those charges to accelerate. These accelerating charges redirect (absorb and reemit) the wave in a new direction--a mirror reflection. Just as a box made of metal mirrors will keep light out, a box made with metal walls will keep electromagnetic waves out.

A properly built and maintained microwave oven leaks so little microwave power that you needn't worry about it. There are also inexpensive leakage testers available that you can use at home for a basic check, or for a more reliable and accurate check--as recommended by both the International Microwave Power Institute (IMPI) and the FDA--you can take your microwave oven to a service shop and have it checked with an FDA certified meter. It's only if you have dropped the oven or injured its door in some way that you might have cause to worry about standing near it. If it were to leak microwaves, their main effect would be to heat your tissue, so you would feel the leakage.

While most microwave ovens operate at 2.45 GHz, that frequency is not a resonant frequency for the water molecule. In fact, using a frequency that water molecules responded to strongly (as in a resonance) would be a serious mistake--the microwaves would all be absorbed by water molecules at the surface of the food and the center of the food would remain raw. Instead, the 2.45 GHz frequency was chosen because it is absorbed weakly enough in liquid water (not free water molecules) that the waves maintain good strength even deep inside a typical piece of food. Higher frequencies would penetrate less well and cook less evenly. Lower frequencies would penetrate better, but would be absorbed so weakly that they wouldn't cook well. The 2.45 GHz frequency is a reasonable compromise between the two extremes.

When the microwaves bounce around inside the oven's cooking chamber, they experience an effect called interference. Interference occurs when similar waves, or portions of the same wave, follow different paths to the same region in space. As they pass through that region, their crests and troughs ride up on top of one another and they interfere. Sometimes the crests of one wave ride on the crests of the other wave, creating enormous crests--an effect called constructive interference. However, it is also possible for the crests of one wave to ride on the troughs of the other wave, so that they cancel one another out--an effect called destructive interference.

These interference effects are quite visible in wave waves, but they also make themselves apparent in microwaves. In your oven, they lead to regions of the cooking chamber that heat quickly (regions where the microwaves experience constructive interference) and regions that don't heat well at all (regions where they experience destructive interference). Because these fast and slow cooking regions can't be avoided, many microwave ovens incorporate turntables to keep the food moving through the various regions inside the oven. Some ovens use rotating metal paddles to stir that microwaves around inside the cooking chamber, so that the fast and slow cooking regions move about.

Your experience with uneven heating of coffee or milk is an example of this interference problem. The solution is to move the cups occasionally while they are being heated.

The fact that sound waves can pass through the cooking chamber's metal walls doesn't mean that microwaves can. These two types of waves are very different and the chamber's walls handle them very differently.

Any type of wave will partially reflect from a surface if passing through that surface causes the wave's speed to change or, more generally, introduces a change in the "impedance" the wave experiences. Impedance is a quantity that relates various parts of a wave to one another--it relates pressure to velocity in sound and it relates the electric field to the magnetic field in a microwave. Since both sound waves and microwaves change speeds and impedances when they encounter the cooking chamber's metal walls, they both partially reflect. The sound that you hear when popcorn pops inside the oven is slightly muffled because the sound is having some trouble escaping from the cooking chamber. However, the impedance change for the microwaves is so enormous that the reflection is complete. No microwaves at all escape from the cooking chamber! The same effect occurs when you hold a large mirror up in front of your face. You can hear what's happening on the other side of the mirror because some sound can pass through the mirror. But light is completely reflected and you can't see through the mirror at all.

While microwave heating could be used to sterilize sewage, it's not the most energy efficient or inexpensive technique. Microwave heating is really only worthwhile in cases where you can't reach the inside of an object directly--as is the case in most solid foods. Since sewage is essentially liquid, it can be heated quickly and efficiently by passing it close to a hot surface. Just about anything can be used to heat that surface--electricity, natural gas, coal, you name it.

But to be even more energy efficient, the sewage that was just sterilized a minute ago and is still hot can be used to heat the sewage that is about to be treated! A well designed thermal treatment facility could employ "counter-current exchange"--that is it could pass the hot, treated material through a heat exchanger to allow it to transfer most of its excess heat to the cooler, untreated material that is about to be sterilized. By recycling the heat in this manner, the facility could avoid having to burn so much fuel. The only drawback with this technique is that the heat exchanger must be leak-proof--it must keep the sterilized material from touching and being contaminated by the unsterilized material.

Just about any cooking damages the cells of the food being cooked, so microwave cooking is nothing unusual. Since our digestive systems destroy cells in the food we eat, cellular damage in cooking is inconsequential. As for the rumors about the unhealthiness of food cooked in a microwave oven, these are simply myths promulgated by people who don't understand what microwaves are and fear them irrationally. The world was awash in microwaves from natural sources long before the developments of electricity and microwave ovens.

Apart from the usual precautions with hot food, there is nothing unsafe about food cooked in a microwave oven. You can eat it the instant the microwave oven turns off. The microwaves in the oven are absorbed so quickly that they vanish almost immediately after the oven stops producing them. By the time you get the oven door open, there is nothing hazardous left inside the cooking chamber or in the food. However, a microwave oven tends to heat foods unevenly, particularly if they were initially frozen. Thus you should be careful to stir the food or test its temperature at various places so that you don't burn yourself. You should be particularly wary of solid foods, such as raisin biscuits, that are generally dry but have moist, microwave-absorbing objects inside them. Those moist objects can become dangerously hot and have been known to cause life-threatening burns in people who tried to swallow them without letting them cool off.

That said, a reader notes that the uneven cooking in a microwave oven can lead to bacterial safety problems--if parts of the food aren't heated sufficiently to kill dangerous bacteria, then you could be exposing yourself to those bacteria. He suggests using the microwave oven for reheating only. He also notes that the lack of surface heating leaves the food relatively tasteless, as compared to more conventional cooking.

No more so than conventional heating does. Overheating some nutrients can damage them, so that microwave cooking does affect food's nutritional value. But microwave cooking is far less likely to cause serious molecular damage to food than flame broiling or frying.

No. When a microwave oven is off, the cooking chamber contains nothing special at all--just some trapped air and perhaps a little light that enters through the window. Even when it is operating, a microwave oven never produces any ionizing (high energy) radiation so there are no long-term effects such as radioactivity present in the cooking chamber when the oven is off. The tomato was simply sitting in a sealed metal box overnight. Since some fruits ripen faster in sealed environments, perhaps that accounts for your observation.

If the distributions of temperatures inside the items were the same after cooking, they would cool at the same rate. However, a microwave oven tends to cook relatively evenly throughout the food while the stove tends to cook from the outside of the food inward. That means that food cooked in a microwave oven tends to have more thermal energy near its center than food cooked on a stove, even when those foods contain the same total amount of thermal energy. Since foods lose heat through their surfaces, the extra thermal energy in the food cook by microwave will take longer to flow out to the surface of the food and from there to its surroundings. All else being equal, I would expect the food cooked in the microwave oven to cool slightly slower than the food cooked on the stovetop.

Aluminum foil and graphitic carbon are both conductors of electricity. When they're exposed to microwaves, the electric fields in those microwaves causes currents to flow through them. If the aluminum were thick enough, it would be able to handle the currents without trouble. But aluminum is very thin and the current that flows through it may be more than it can tolerate, particularly if it's only a narrow strip. It then becomes very hot. The effect is the same as would happen if you plugged the aluminum foil into an electric outlet and sent current through it that way. The same heating occurs in the carbon--the current that flows in it heats it up. In short, relatively poor conductors of electricity become hot in a microwave because they permit currents to flow in response to the microwave electric fields but then can't tolerate those currents without becoming hot.

Microwave ovens cook by depositing thermal energy in the water molecules, which isn't the same as cooking food in moist hot air. Microwave cooking tends to heat food uniformly throughout where as more conventional "moist" heat cooking still heats food from the outside in. Nonetheless, the chemical effects on food are very similar for both types of cooking. Virtually all of these effects are caused by elevating the temperatures of the food. I'm not an expert on the chemistry of cooking, but elevated temperatures certainly denature proteins and caramelize sugars.

If the electric field isn't changing with time, then it can't enter a metal cage no matter how large the cage's holes are. In effect, the constant electric field has an infinite wavelength and can't propagate through holes of any finite size. However, the holes don't stop an electromagnetic wave instantly--the wave does penetrate a short distance into the cage before it dwindles to insignificance. The distance over which the wave diminishes by a factor of about 3 is roughly the size of the hole through which it is trying to pass. So if your Faraday cage has holes that are 1 centimeter in diameter, the constant electric field will take several centimeters to diminish to nearly zero. If the holes are much larger than that, the electric field will penetrate far into the cage and the cage will only be an effective shield if it is extremely large. To avoid having to use a very large cage, it's better to use small holes.

If a microwave oven doesn't leak microwaves, then it won't affect such people at all. However, if microwaves do leak from a particular microwave oven, they will cause undesirable currents to flow in the electric leads of the pacemaker. That's because a microwave consists of electric and magnetic fields, and an electric field exerts forces on charged particles. The mobile charged particles in the pacemaker's electric wiring will experience these forces as the microwave encounters them and they will move back and forth with the microwave's fluctuating electric field. The pacemaker's wiring isn't meant to carry these unexpected current flows, and the pacemaker and/or the person attached to it may experience unpleasant effects. While such problems are very unlikely, it makes sense to warn pacemaker users whenever a microwave oven is in use.

My understanding is that there are microwave heating systems that are not enclosed and that are used in medical therapies to provide deep warming to injured tissues in medical patients. But apart from such devices, I've never heard of unenclosed microwave heaters. That's because such heaters would be dangerous, since a user would be exposed to the heating effects of the microwaves. To keep the microwave heating under control, microwave ovens always carefully enclose the microwaves in a metal cooking chamber from which they can't escape.

A normal oven heats foods by exposing them to hot air and thermal radiation. It cooks the foods from the outside in. As a result, a normal oven tends to make the surfaces of food dry and crispy because it heats those outer surfaces first and drives the water out of them. A microwave oven heats the food by heating the water in that food. It cooks foods from the inside out. As a result, a microwave oven tends to drive water out of the middle of the food and into the outer layers of that food. The outer layers are essentially "steamed" and steaming makes everything soggy.

The microwaves in a microwave oven consist of electric and magnetic fields. Since electric fields push on electric charges, microwaves cause electric currents to flow through any metal objects they encounter. These movements of current don't necessarily cause any problems in a microwave oven. In fact, metal objects only cause trouble in the microwave oven when they are so thin or narrow that they can't tolerate the electric currents that flow through them or when they have such sharp ends that electric charges leap off them as sparks. A thin object like a twist-tie can't tolerate the currents and becomes very hot. Its sharp ends also allow charges to leap out into the air as sparks. But the thick, rounded end of a juice concentrate can easily tolerates the currents sent through it by the microwaves and doesn't have the sharp ends needed to send charges into the air as sparks. It doesn't present any problem for the microwave oven.

Properly built and undamaged microwave ovens leak so few microwaves that they aren't dangerous at all. Even if they did leak enough to be in violation of the safety limits, those safety limits are very conservative. While there is no reason to court disaster by holding your face right up to the microwave for hours and hours, it shouldn't hurt you at all.

Because conducting surfaces reflect electromagnetic waves, you can shield a room from electromagnetic waves by enclosing it in conducting surfaces. For example, a room surrounded by metal mirrors will be completely black inside because light won't be able to enter it. Furthermore, if the electromagnetic waves that you're trying to exclude have reasonably long wavelengths, you can put holes in the conducting surfaces because electromagnetic waves can't pass through holes in a conducting surface if those holes are substantially smaller than their wavelengths. So, to shield your room from microwaves, I'd suggest enclosing it in copper screening with holes that are no more than a few millimeters in diameter. Many scientific experiments are performed in such screen rooms, which are generally called Faraday cages.

I've measured several ovens and have only found one that leaks a measurable amount of microwave power. That leaker is an oven that I've used in countless demonstrations and have taken apart several times (it appears on page 514 of my book). Considering the abuse that poor oven has had, it's doing pretty well. At a talk I gave yesterday, I couldn't get it to leak more than about 1 mW/cm² even though I was measuring microwave power directly on the edge of the oven door--the most vulnerable point in the oven. Given that this oven's door sags several millimeters as the result of its rough treatment, that's not bad. In short, I doubt that there are many leaky microwave ovens around that haven't been dropped, crushed in shipping, or otherwise suffered serious mechanical injury.

I think that it's very unlikely that microwaves cause cancer. Microwaves are not ionizing radiation--they don't directly damage chemical bonds. Instead, they heat materials, particularly those containing water. As a result, they may cause damage to proteins in the same way that cooking damages proteins (and hardens egg protein, for example). But while such protein damage can easily cause cell death, I wouldn't expect it to cause the genetic damage associated with cancer.

As long as the microwave oven hasn't been damaged and doesn't leak excessive microwaves, there should be no harm in having children sit near it. I wouldn't hold my face right up against the door edges because that would be asking for trouble with leakage, but it's extremely unlikely that even doing that once in a while would cause injury.

As for being injured by microwave radiation after the cycle has stopped, that's essentially impossible. As soon as the high voltage disappears from the magnetron tube and it stops emitting microwaves, the microwaves in the cooking chamber begin to diminish. Even if they bounce 1000 times off the metal walls of the chamber before they're absorbed by those walls or the food in the microwave, that will only take about 2 millionths of a second. You can't open the door fast enough to let them out before they're already gone.

The walls of a microwave oven's cooking chamber are made of highly conductive metals so that they reflect the microwaves almost completely. Only a very small fraction of the microwaves inside the oven are absorbed by these metal walls and virtually none of the microwaves escape into the room. However, there is a substance inside the cooking chamber that absorbs the microwaves: water in the food! If you don't put water-containing food inside the microwave oven, there will be nothing to absorb the microwaves and they will reflect back to the magnetron and may damage it. The absence of an absorber in the cooking chamber will also increase any minor leakage of microwaves from the oven because the microwave intensity inside the cooking chamber will be much higher than normal.

When you expose the seeds to microwave radiation, you are selectively heating portions of the insides of the seeds. Fats and oils don't absorb microwaves well but water does, so the parts of the seeds that become hottest are those that contain the most water molecules. Evidently, heating the water-containing portion of a sunflower seeds slightly cause that seed to germinate faster, but heating that same portion too much sterilizes the seed. That observation indicates that a moderate temperature rise causes the chemical reactions of germination to occur more rapidly while a more severe temperature rise denatures some of the critical biological molecules and kills the seed. The absence of any effect in carrot seeds may indicate that they don't have enough water in them to absorb the microwaves. It may also indicate that they can tolerate higher temperatures without undergoing the chemical reactions of germination and without experiencing damage to their critical molecules.

A pacemaker contains electronic circuits and wires that can act as antennas for microwaves. If a pacemaker is exposed to sufficiently intense microwaves, currents will begin to flow in those wires and circuits, and these currents may cause computational errors to occur or they may cause the circuitry to overheat. But while a pacemaker is far more sensitive to microwave radiation than say your hand is, I'm still surprised that enough microwave radiation leaked out of the oven to cause trouble. I'd suspect a real problem with that oven.

As for the chemotherapy question, I can't think of any reason why the doctor would suggest avoiding cooking food in a microwave oven. Unless I hear otherwise, I would suspect ignorance on the part of the doctor. The doctor may not understand the difference between "microwave radiation" and "gamma radiation".

Yes. You can get one from a hardware or appliance store for about $5 to $30. ComfortHouse.com sells one on-line at www.comforthouse.com. While I have tended to downplay the leakage issue in the past, I bought a tester and found that the microwave oven in my laboratory actually leaked significantly. I had used it in many class demonstrations, so it had been abused and the door wasn't properly aligned any more. I retired it. Incidentally, the tester contains only two components: a fast diode and a current meter. It detects microwave in the same way that a crystal radio detects an AM radio broadcast. However, I should note that both the International Microwave Power Institute (IMPI) and the FDA caution against trusting those simple and not particularly accurate meters, and recommend that you take your microwave oven to a service shop for inspection with an FDA certified meter.

In addition to the digital controller that runs the microwave, it contains (1) a power relay that allows the controller to turn on and off the microwave source, (2) a power transformer that produces the high voltage electricity needed by the magnetron, (3) a power rectifier that converts the alternating current from the transformer into the direct current needed by the magnetron, (4) a capacitor that smoothes out ripples in the direct current leaving the rectifier, (5) a magnetron that uses the high voltage direct current to produce an intense beam of microwaves, (6) a wave guide that transports the microwaves from the magnetron to the cooking chamber, and (7) a cooking chamber in which the food absorbs the microwaves and becomes hotter.

While water vapor can absorb microwaves at certain frequencies, the absorption mechanism is very different from the one that causes liquid water to become hotter. Steam isn't affected very much by a microwave oven.

When various plastics become hot, their molecules become more mobile. The most obvious such case is when a plastic actually melts. But even before it melts, a plastic can begin to lose molecules to objects that are touching it. However, the plastics used in cooking are pretty non-toxic, so that even eating pieces of those plastic won't cause you any significant trouble. On the other hand, I would be careful with plastics that weren't intended for cooking. Some non-food related plastics are mixed with additives called "plasticizers" that keep them softer than they would be if they were pure. These plasticizers have a tendency to migrate out of the plastics, giving such things as "vinyl" their characteristic odors. Heating a plastic containing a plasticizer can drive this plasticizer out of the plastic and into something else. I don't think that it's a good idea to eat plasticizers so I would suggest not cooking with plastics that weren't intended for use with food. Still, not all plasticizers are bad--water is an excellent plasticizer for such common plastics as hair and cotton.

When a microwave tries to pass through the holes in the metal screen, electric charges in that screen begin to move. The microwave's electric field fluctuates back and forth rapidly and the charges reverse directions rapidly as a result. If the electric current made up of these charges has enough time to travel all the way around each hole before it reverses directions, it will be as though the screen were made of solid metal and the screen will be able to completely reflect the microwave.

Like any electromagnetic wave, a microwave has a wavelength (the spatial distance between adjacent wave crests) and a period (the temporal spacing between adjacent wave crests). The electric current that a microwave propels through a metal travels about one microwave wavelength during one microwave period. Therefore, the current can work its way around a hole in the metal only if the hole is significantly smaller than the microwave wavelength. The amplitude of the microwave doesn't matter--increasing the amplitude of the microwave just makes more current flow.

In a microwave oven, water-containing foods absorbs microwaves. The microwaves disappear as they pass through the food and the food becomes hotter. Microwaves are transferred from the small antenna near the magnetron to the cooking chamber by sending those microwaves through a metal pipe. This rectangular pipe is typically a few inches wide and an inch or so tall, and is called a "wave guide." Finally, the walls of the cooking chamber reflect the microwaves. When a microwave encounters a metal surface, it pushes electric charges back and forth in the metal and this moving charge causes the microwave to reflect.

You can put a microwave oven anywhere that it's stable and where it has adequate ventilation. A microwave oven has a fan and vents through which it gets rid of its excess heat. You mustn't block the vents or the oven will overheat.

Not one that came from the microwave oven. Microwaves are all around us and are completely innocuous. Your body emits weak microwaves all the time, as part of its thermal radiation! Like light, microwaves don't remain still in objects so you can't eat one that was put in the food by the oven.

According to a reader, most microwave oven capacitors have fuses in them so that when they fail, they usually become open (they lose all of their ability to store separated charge and behave as a simple open circuit). You'd need a capacitor checker to find this open circuit within the capacitor.

Since the cooking chamber of a microwave oven doesn't get hot, there is no way to make a "self-cleaning" microwave oven. Instead, you have to clean it by hand with a sponge and perhaps a little soapy water. As long as you get the soap or any other cleaning agents out, you can clean the cooking chamber just as you'd clean the top of a stove.

If the metal is a good conductor, then the microwaves don't penetrate more than a fraction of a millimeter. That's because the microwave electric fields push on the metal's mobile electrons and those electrons immediately rearrange in such a way that they cancel the microwave fields inside the metal. Only the skin of the metal responds to the fields and it shields the rest of the metal from the microwaves.

While I have only a little experience repairing microwave ovens, I can make reasonable guesses. The loud hum you hear is probably an indication that something is overloading the power transformer. That suggests that the diode, capacitor, or magnetron are bad. If you have checked the first two carefully, at full operating voltage, and found no problems, then I would suspect the magnetron. I have been told by a reader that magnetrons usually fail by shorting out, the result of electromigration of the filament material. The tube would then draw excessive currents from the high voltage transformer. That has probably happened in your case. Still, free advice like mine is only worth what you've paid for it. I'd suggest you consult a local repairperson, who has test equipment that can pinpoint the problem in seconds.

Microwave cooking leaves no permanent mark on the food. It causes virtually no chemical damage and absolutely no radioactivity. The only drawback with heating milk by microwave is that the heating may be uneven and may denature some protein molecules in regions of the milk that become excessively hot. Since most protein molecules are disassembled by your digestion anyway, this treatment probably has no effects worth worrying about. Even with infant formula, my only concern would be the hot spots. If you carefully shake the milk after heating, so that its temperature is uniform, it should be just fine. I suspect that companies warn you not to heat milk in a microwave because they are worried that you will either not shake the milk to distribute its temperature evenly or that you will overcook it until it boils and the bottle explodes.

Like all electromagnetic waves, microwaves are composed of electric and magnetic fields. Since an electric field exerts forces on charged particles, a microwave pushes electrons back and forth through any metals it encounters. It is this motion of electrons back and forth through the metal walls of the microwave oven that allow that metal to reflect the microwaves and keep them inside the oven. If you leave a spoon in you cup of coffee as you heat it in the microwave, electrons will move back and forth through the spoon. This motion of charge will cause no problems so long as (1) the spoon can tolerate this flow of charge without overheating and (2) the spoon doesn't allow the charges at its ends to leap into the air as a spark. To keep the spoon from overheating, it must be a good conductor of electricity. Since most spoons are pretty thick, the modest currents flowing through them in the microwave will leave little energy inside them and they won't overheat. But a thin twist-tie or small bit of aluminum foil may well overheat and begin to burn. To keep the spoon from sparking, it should have smooth ends. Electrons are more likely to leave the end of a metal surface at a sharp point, so avoiding points is important. Most spoons are smooth enough that no sparks will occur. But a fork, a sharp piece of foil, or a twist-tie may well begin to emit electrons into the air as those electrons pile up at one end of the wire while the microwave oven is on. Like a spoon, the walls of the oven are good conductors of electricity and they have no sharp points. While electrons move back and forth in these walls, they simply reflect the microwaves without becoming very hot and without emitting any sparks. You'll note that the light bulb for the microwave is always outside the cooking chamber because it contains small bits of metal that would have trouble inside a microwave oven.

It isn't necessarily bad to put metal in a microwave oven, but it can cause cooking problems or other trouble. Microwaves cause currents to flow in metals. In a thick piece of metal, these currents won't cause problems for the metal. However, in thin pieces of metal, the currents may heat the metal hot enough to cause a fire. Metallic decorations on fine porcelain tend to become hot enough to damage the porcelain. But even thick pieces of metal can cause problems because they tend to reflect the microwaves. That may cause cooking problems for the food nearby. For example, a potato wrapped in aluminum foil won't cook at all in a microwave oven because the foil will reflect the microwaves. The currents flowing in the metal can also produce sparks, particularly at sharp points, and these sparks can cause fires. In general, smooth and thick metallic objects such as spoons aren't a problem, but sharp or thin metallic objects such as pins or metal twist-ties are.

The black holey stuff on the window of a microwave oven is a metal shield that keeps the microwaves inside the cooking chamber. Because the holes in this metal sheeting are so much smaller than the wavelengths of the microwaves (about 12 cm), the microwaves respond to the sheeting as though it were solid metal and they reflect almost perfectly. By keeping the microwaves inside the oven, this sheeting speeds cooking and protects you from the microwaves.

Microwaves are like light--both are electromagnetic waves and both move extremely quickly. While it is possible to trap a light wave briefly between two mirrors, that wave will eventually be absorbed or released. The same is true of a microwave. It's almost impossible to trap a microwave for more than 1 second, even in very exotic enclosures, so you needn't worry about them becoming trapped in food. The food simply absorbs them and turns their energy into thermal energy.

This experiment is described in Fun with Grapes - A Case Study. While I haven't tried it yet myself, I believe I know why it works. Grape juice is somewhat able to conduct electricity and the two halves of the grape are connected by a weak conducting path: the skin bridge. When the microwave oven is turned on, the microwaves not only heat the water in the grapes, they also push a few mobile electric charges back and forth through the skin bridge from one side of the grape to the other. This current releases energy as it passes through the narrow bridge and it heats the bridge extremely hot. The bridge soon catches fire and the electric current driven by the microwaves begins to pass through the flame. When current passes through a gas, it tends to ionize that gas (remove electrons from the gas atoms) so that the gas itself begins to conduct electricity. When current flows through atmospheric pressure air, it forms a brilliant arc. In this case, the arc that you see is powered by the microwaves as they push electric charges back and forth from one side of the grape to the other. An excellent set of movies showing this and other microwave oven experiments appears at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~maarten/microwave/microwave.html.

Microwaves don't affect the molecular structure of the food, except through the thermal effects we associate with normal cooking (e.g., denaturing of proteins with heat and caramelizing of sugars). That's because, like all electromagnetic waves, microwaves are emitted and absorbed as particles called "photons." The energy in a microwave photon is so tiny that it can't cause any chemical rearrangement in a molecule. Instead, it can only add a tiny amount of heat to a water molecule. During the microwave cooking process, microwave photons stream into the food and heat it up. But millions of them would have to work together in order to cause non-thermal chemical changes in the food molecules and they don't normally do that. The photons can only work together if there is a conducting material, such as a metal wire, inside the oven. In that case, the photons can accelerate mobile electric charges along the conducting paths and create sparks. Such sparks can cause chemical damage, but nothing worse than the chemical damage caused by scorching food with a flame or broiler. Even if your microwave is full of sparks for some reason, I doubt that the food will be any worse for you than it would be if you cooked it over an open flame or barbecue.

I believe that most radar absorbing materials are partially conducting plastic composites. As a microwave from the radar transmitter penetrates these composites, the electric field in that wave drives charges back and forth through the composites. Since the composites don't conductor electricity well, they turn the wave's energy into thermal energy and thereby absorb it. A similar effect occurs for light waves when you shine them on a pile of powdered charcoal. (According to David Ingham, some radar absorbing materials include lossy magnetic materials--materials such as ferrite and carbonyl iron that respond to the magnetic field in a microwave.) Because there is always some reflection whenever an electromagnetic wave enters a material that slows the wave down, stealth aircraft are also careful to deflect the reflected wave away from the radar transmitter so that its receiver won't detect the return wave. In fact, these materials can be corrugated so that any microwaves hitting them reflect into the corrugations and have many opportunities to be absorbed. As I understand it, the microwaves that return to the radar receiver from a stealth plane are remarkably weak. I wouldn't be surprised if a whole stealth plane reflected less microwaves back at the radar unit than would reflect from a foil chewing gum wrapper.

If the piece of food isn't too large, it all cooks at once. The microwaves that heat the food pass deep into it and they deposit energy in every part of the food simultaneously. Only if the piece of food is so large that an appreciable amount of microwaves are absorbed before they reach the center will the center cook more slowly than the outside. I doubt that this shielding of the center is a problem with foods small enough to fit inside a normal microwave oven. However, the microwaves in a microwave oven aren't perfectly uniform, so that some parts of a meal will cook a bit faster than others. That's why it's important to move the food about during cooking to achieve uniform heating throughout.

It is possible for a microwave to lose cooking speed. If the microwave source isn't able to produce as intense microwaves as before or if it doesn't turn on reliably and steadily, it won't cook as fast. For the source to produce less intense microwaves, the high voltage power supply would probably have to be weak. Its storage capacitor could have failed or one or more of its high voltage diodes could have burned out. According to a reader, the most likely cause of weak cooking in a microwave oven is a failed c