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by lpcvoid 725 days ago
>soldiers keeping themselves warm by stepping in front of a radar emitter

Holy, did people actually do this? A quick search yielded no results. Not sure if thankful or not.

2 comments

Works, it's a weird feeling, speaking from experience. HF antennas can give some respectable burns too.

But the effects are debated and not entirely scientific: https://www.reddit.com/r/army/comments/13r6hod/i_keep_being_...

Weren't microwave ovens invented because someone's chocolate melted in their pocket while operating a radio transmitter? Maybe it's just a lady godiva story since it seems weird that the person wouldn't feel overly hot as well, but maybe.
It's a well known story, he was doing maintenance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery

The thing is, you don't need a lot of extra heat to melt a chocolate bar on your pocket. It's perfectly possible that everybody felt hot when working on an active radar, but didn't discuss it or maybe even notice the correlation.

The bit on that wikipedia page about reanimating frozen hamsters is a bit of a sci-fi nightmare
Tom Scott has a great video on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y
Oh wow it's even known what brand of a bar it was, funny that.

> The first food deliberately cooked with Spencer's microwave oven was popcorn, and the second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters.

They were having a blast I see.