How to make plasma in the microwave using a grape (don’t)
For those of you who don’t want to watch the whole video (I recommend watching it, if only for the guy’s extremely blase attitude to fire and poisonous gas in his microwave, here is just the plasma part:
And the crazy thing is, even though people have been making videos of this for over 20 years, scientists didn’t actually know why it happens until 2019.
Basically, plasma is what happens to matter when it is superheated enough that electrons start to come loose from the atoms they belong to and just create a soup of charged particles. This Science article explains well how this effect is created by a halved grape connected by a thin strip of skin:
“Water-heavy grapes trap the wavelengths of energy microwave ovens emit because the waves are roughly the same size as the diameter of grapes. That energy starts charging up electrolytes inside the fruit, which then flow from one half of the grape to the other—using the strip of skin like an electrical wire and gaining energy as they go. The current quickly burns through the skin, causing the charged electrolytes to try to jump from one half of the grape to the other, supercharging the surrounding air into a bright flare of plasma—the same light-emitting state of matter responsible for the sun’s rays and fluorescent lighting.”
You can see in these energy diagrams of the microwaved grapes that when the grape halves are moved closer together, alllllll of the energy that is normally distributed throughout the two grape halves condenses down into an extremely small area between them to form a hotspot of radiation. The energy of this area is so great that it can heat the surrounding gas enough to turn it into plasma.
All this to say that this is a super cool quirk of science that you definitely should NOT try at home (the scientists doing the experiment to find out why this happened destroyed 12 different microwaves in the process lol)
thinking about what is and what isn’t allowed in frame with reference ecosystems in prairie restoration
Explanation from OP in the replies
restoration ecology tends to want to restore to a past state of an ecosystem, but magically that past state never involved people! Harvest, reciprocity, etc are all ignored because we pretend there’s such a thing as prairie without people. Turns out, that imagined prairie never existed, there were always people here and there should people involved in restored prairie too!
The famous Jacques Grange style is displayed in its most perfect form in the living room… On the mantelpiece is a bust by Gimond; this corner of the room is simple in its arrangement and muted in color - but the windows look out on the green world of the Palais Royal gardens.
The French Touch: Decoration and Design in the Most Beautiful Homes in France, 1988
