Science Is (Literally) Cool
4/13/202646 min
Is the kitchen home to some of the most extraordinary technology humans have ever invented?
Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore the science of everyday appliances, from the strange physics of coldness to the wartime origins of the microwave. They explore how humanity learned to trap 'coolth', beam heat into leftovers, and turn the most ordinary room in the house into a high performance laboratory!
From ice merchants and exploding eggs to magnetrons and magnetic fridges, this is the surprising story of the science hiding in plain sight.<...
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMichael Stevens· Host0:01
Hello, and welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.
Hannah Fry· Host0:04
And I'm Hannah Fry. Michael, what is your favorite room in the house, and why is the answer the kitchen?
Michael Stevens· Host0:08
Oh my gosh, we're jumping right in. So my answer has to be the kitchen. Is this a setup for your episode?
Hannah Fry· Host0:13
It's, it's the correct answer.
Michael Stevens· Host0:15
Okay. I, I wanna 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. [laughs] Before we record episodes, she's always talking about refrigerators, and I'm like, "Hannah, one of these days- One of these days- You can- ...
Hannah Fry· Host0:31
my time will come ...
Michael Stevens· Host0:32
you can get it out of your system.
Hannah Fry· Host0:33
My time will come.
Michael Stevens· Host0:34
No, I'm really excited to hear this, and of course my favorite room in the house is the kitchen, if that's gonna help move things forward.
Hannah Fry· Host0:39
I'm not... See, this is the thing. I've, I've, I've managed to, um, I've managed to expand from not just my love of fridges, but I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do other, other household items in the kitchen too, Michael. This is- Oh ... this is gonna, this is gonna be a little justification as to why the, uh, the kitchen is the room that contains all of the most interesting high-performance scientific equipment in your house. [synth music] This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.
Michael Stevens· Host1:10
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. Okay? That's the scale of the DNA rule book inside each one of your cells, telling it when to grow, when to divide, and when to stop.