The mystery of the glorious fireball emitted by microwaved grapes (featured in my novel Little Brother) has been resolved, thanks to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in which Trent University researchers Hamza Khattak and Aaron Slepkov
explain how they destroyed a dozen microwaves before figuring out that
the grapes were just the right size and had enough humidity to set up
standing waves that amplify the microwaves – and anything roughly
grape-sized will do the same.
The paper is offline at both PNAS and Sci-Hub, which is weird, but there’s good coverage of it at Ars and Wired.
