Originally published at: There's a thriving microbiome inside your microwave oven - Boing Boing
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Contributed by Allan Rose Hill
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The team suggests that the extremophile strains they found in the microwave ovens might have been ‘selected’ evolutionarily by surviving repeated rounds of radiation, and could have biotechnological applications, such as in the bioremediation of toxic waste.
That’s an interesting idea, and i hope they do some proper research into it. Another notion, and this will require someone with more of an electronics engineering bent, is: Are there ‘corners’ in a typical microwave which just due to the limitations of ‘stirring methods’ don’t receive much irradiation at all? That is, “paint the walls” with microbes and microwaves kill the vast majority yet there might be an odd section or two (e.g. distal side of the light panel) of nigh zero microwaves which nonetheless a swab test picks up. …maybe
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Your digestive system is home to over 17 trillion bacteria. You have tiny skin mites all over your body. RFK Jr. had a worm in his brain in place of good ideas/facts
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This makes me want to culture my oven… what has evolved to survive repeated 425 degree frozen pizza sessions?
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Um no, no my microwaves doesn’t have 100 stains of bacteria growing in it.
Why are you lying to me?
Do you like me staying awake all night scrubbing my microwave?
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You get a whole standing wave/nodal structure. (That’s why you have a rotating tray, to even out the effect of the nodes and anti-nodes.)
See e.g.
You can even use the nodal distance to measure the speed of light:
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So, we can’t nuke 'em in the microwave oven… but can we nuke 'em from orbit?
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Thank you - that’s some cool information! so it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if there were a few places (anti-nodes?) on the walls of a microwave where microbes might survive under relatively low microwave densities.
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It is. Very.
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Clean your microwave regularly just as you (hopefully) do other surfaces in your kitchen.
I wash the plate and the wheeled thingy under it, and go over the damn thing inside & out w/a hot and
paper towel w/50%+ rubbing alcohol on it.
I’ve been wiping down the nuker, the fridge & its handles, the taps & faucets, the sinks, the stove, and the kitchen counters w/alcohol since the plague began.
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If you take Marshmallow fluff and spread it very thinly on tortillas you can place it in the microwave and use it to map the nodes and antinodes via the scorch marks. Fun!
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“fudging the numbers” 
( but also… pretty cool. thanks for sharing it )
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So if I continuously run my microwave, it eventually spawns Daleks?
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more than two dozen microwaves located in homes, offices, and even in chemistry labs.
Every lab I’ve ever been in has a had a big sign on the fridge saying “Don’t store experiments in this fridge” (often with profanity), so I’d expect the microwave in a chemistry lab to be more filthy than the average home. Plus, this bunch of microbiologists chose to test the microwave in a chemistry lab, rather than the one in their own department, which says a lot about what they found in their own microwave…
(PS, the link to the actual study is broken)
Judging by Figure 4 there, I’d say that the walls are all nodes, which are where the microwave’s strength is zero.
It’s hard to make out what is the pan and what isn’t so I might be wrong about the boundary being all nodes. Still, there are two basic (idealized) ways waves can reflect off of a surface. In one the phases rotate 180-degrees and cancel each other out. That leads to having the boundary all nodes. In the other the wave’s phase is unchanged and you get reinforcement at the boundary, leading to the boundary being all anti-nodes. (Non-idealized settings are some mixture of these, plus absorption.) To me, it looks more consistent with the former than the latter.
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Wut… A microwave is non-ionizing radiation, it’s just electromagnetic energy. It makes things hot and maybe a very tiny bit of cellular damage. Actual radioactive things get hot, but not for the same reason a microwave gets hot.
Meaning…mediation of toxic waste is not the same as dealing with microwave energy. You have a better chance of extracting radioactive consuming microboes from Chernobyl than my home microwave.
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surely you’re not suggesting that x-rays/gamma rays aren’t electromagnetic radiation as much as microwaves? [wink]
the notion: microwaves cause waters to flip back and forth and create enough kinetic energy to kill (eventually) any living thing with water in it. so a microwave is likely a sterile environment for the most part…? “no!” say these researchers, as they can culture bacteria from swabs from inside some test microwaves. and what this old biochemist is fecklessly suggesting is that there are likely regions inside a standard microwave oven which don’t actually receive ‘much’ microwave radiation and it’s there the bugs may persist. kinda tedious i know.
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