Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens. And I'm Anna Frye. Michael, what is your favorite room in the house and why is the answer the kitchen? Oh my gosh, we're jumping right in.
Chapter 2: Why is the kitchen considered a high-performance scientific laboratory?
My answer has to be the kitchen. Is this a setup for your episode?
It's the correct answer.
Okay, I want to tell the audience, this is an episode where Hannah has come to talk to me about something that is, dare I almost say, annoyingly close to her heart.
No.
Before we record episodes, she's always talking about refrigerators. And I'm like, Hannah, one of these days. One of these days, my time will come. You can get it out of your system. My time will come. No, I'm really excited to hear this. And of course, my favorite room in the house is the kitchen, if that's going to help move things forward.
See, this is the thing. I've managed to expand from not just my love of fridges, but I'm going to do other household items in the kitchen too, Michael. This is going to be a little justification as to why the kitchen is the room that contains all of the most interesting, high-performance scientific equipment in your house.
Music
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. If you wanted to type out the entire human genome, you would have to type at 60 words a minute for eight hours a day for about 50 years. OK, that's the scale of the DNA rulebook inside each one of your cells, telling it when to grow, when to divide and when to stop.
And different tissues read that same rulebook in different ways. So a skin cell doesn't behave like a lung cell.
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Chapter 3: How did ice merchants revolutionize food preservation?
I think you can't really underestimate it.
Oh, yeah. And I just looked it up. Today in America, 99.8% of people have a fridge, have access to a fridge. It is just like air almost. Now, 99.8% isn't 100%.
But when you think about the standard of living and how that's changed and what it just means to live a routine life in America and a lot of the world, it's incredibly different than it was back when the only ice you could get had to come on a ship from Massachusetts.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is it, right? Life expectancy aside from anything else is gigantically different from then. And, you know, these two things are not unconnected. The fridge has made a big difference to quality of life, as well as the length of it.
I mean, you know those videos where people show their water of the day and they fill a cup with water and then they mix in all these flavors and different waters? A person from, you know, 1799 would watch that and go, that's like $18 million worth of ice. Are you a witch? And today we're like, oops, one of them fell off. Better throw it in the sink so it can go away annoyingly.
It's like a bother to us.
I have to say, actually, during the gold rushes, so the Australian gold rush and the Californian gold rush, you know, this is the point when ice is the absolute ultimate luxury, either whether it's come down from Massachusetts or whether it's been built in this absolutely giant honking machine.
People would say that if you had a good day, if you'd gone out in the gold rush and you'd found a lot of gold, if you had a good day, you would come back to the bar and you would buy everybody a whiskey. But if you had a really good day, you would buy people whiskey with ice.
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Chapter 4: What role did Frederick Tudor play in the history of ice distribution?
I think that's super expensive or something at the moment because current refrigerators are really affordable for what they what they do. But they are. Yeah, they're using like a gas that's not so great.
Yeah, because this is the thing at the end of the life of a fridge, that isobutane is pretty nasty stuff. You know, you don't really, you don't want it like floating around. You don't want that kind of in the environment. I think that at the moment, their main focus is on like, I don't know, drinks companies, for example, who have a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton of fridges all over the world.
And for them, you know, decommissioning fridges is like a really serious financial burden. Right. But I mean, yeah, this is like a fridge that never runs out of juice, essentially.
It doesn't even use juice.
Doesn't even use... A juiceless fridge. A juiceless fridge. Dry fridge. Absolute wizardry. Okay, so we've done the fridge. I've got other parts of the kitchen to take you to, Michael. So my tour will continue after the break. Woohoo! Okay. From cooling things down, Michael, I'm going to go straight into hitting things up.
Do you know how a microwave works? Well, I mean, I've never investigated one because I'm scared of them. But I feel like I could say some things about a microwave. Like if my daughter asked how it worked, I would just say, well, okay, so microwaves are a kind of light that we can't see. But it has energy and you can shoot this kind of light at food.
And I think the microwaves that microwave ovens use are like sized just right to especially wobble around water molecules. What happens when a molecule wobbles more? It means it's hotter. So they just do that. And so unlike an oven that it's going to only just like touch the outside with heat, the microwave can make everything, all the water inside hotter all the way through.
We don't need to do anything else.
I've got nothing else to add. I do feel a connection to the microwave because there's this cool thing that I do every so often on X. formerly known as Twitter, if you search the word, not microwave, but search the word microwave, you will find a lot of people who use microwave when they mean microwave. Oh.
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Chapter 5: What are the surprising origins of the microwave oven?
At no point in that history, when you're fixing them on the noses of an aircraft, is someone going to say, oh, okay, well, obviously, there's going to be a point where this belongs in almost every kitchen around the entire world.
But that's what happened.
But that's what happens. There's this notion in the philosophy of innovation that I just really love about the adjacent possible, that it's almost like humans are navigating this great network of connected rooms. And every time you walk into a new room, there is a new invention, there's a new thing to discover. But you have to have opened the room immediately before it in order to discover it.
You can't leap straight ahead. And it's like it's only because they had this U-boat device that any of this was possible. They opened the door that allowed the adjacent possible to be opened.
Wow, yeah. So I'm still not a big fan of World War II, but... It does mean that I get my hot dogs hot fast, faster.
Yeah, I got to go to a microwave factory once, right? Because this is the kind of thing I do, Michael, instead of going to parties. And it was really amazing to be on the assembly line. And all of these people who are, you know, doing their jobs.
It's just the total difference between how mundane this object feels, how like little attention we pay it, and how it's actually using incredibly high-end particle physics. to do something quite so boring. There's something so delightful about that disconnect to me.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's cool to think that we all have a magnetron in our kitchens. Almost all of us do. And that we're using such a space age sounding technology to do such simple things like, oh, I need to warm up my coffee.
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Chapter 6: How did the invention of fridges change food storage practices?
Yeah.
These leftovers are cold. Fix that really quick. And you zap it with invisible light.
Yeah. And there you go. Your toaster, by the way, meanwhile, the guy looking for that, he was trying to do the opposite problem. He was trying to turn heat into electricity. And then he realized he stumbled upon nichromium, which is basically the filament that you get in toasters, but also in ovens, in kettles, in air fryers, all of that.
It's the metal that turns orange hot.
Yes, exactly.
When electricity passes through it.
Because it does exactly the opposite thing, right? He was looking for something that turned heat into electricity and he discovered something that turned electricity into heat. Ends up being phenomenally useful, like phenomenally useful, like incredibly, incredibly useful. The first pressure cooker was invented in like the 1600s. Unfortunately, they were quite prone to exploding.
It's the only thing. But it's like, you know, you change the pressure. It's a bit like trying to boil a kettle at the top of a mountain. You change the pressure, you can cook it, you know, incredible. If you can create this perfect seal and increase the pressure, It sort of changes the situation under which you can cook, right?
You can allow liquid water to reach temperatures of 120 degrees or so without boiling away. Again, it's like it's something that is just playing with the laws of physics in order to just make your weeknight meal a bit more easy.
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