I promise this story about microwaves is interesting.

Why HN readers recommended it

HN recommends it as a well-told chase of a weird fact that lands a rare interview with Lovelock at age 101.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Tom Scott

Topic

history of the microwave

Format

explainer

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

9

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2021–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Despite everything else he accomplished in his quite storied professional career as one of the last independent scientists... Including his work on the Viking mars landers! [LINK] To me he will always be the man who invented his own microwave to thaw frozen hamsters. The …

• They already studied this. It sometimes worked with small animals like mice, but fails as organisms get larger. There was a really interesting video about how microwaves were first used to test this: [VIDEO]

• That's purely a size thing iirc. Lot quicker to get enough heat into a mouse to thaw it, than a human. Edit to add an interesting related video: [VIDEO]