Floss is not just for teeth

Question: First it was made of silk, then nylon, then Gore-Tex — 3 million miles of it bought annually in the United States alone but not nearly enough, with about a third of us lying about using it. Some unorthodox applications include as shoelaces, cheesecake cutters, kite or ukulele strings, picture hangers, fishing lines. One guy even used it to cut through a wire fence, another to saw through steel bars, a third to braid a rope for scaling a wall. You've probably got some in your bathroom, don't you?

Answer: Your dentist certainly hopes so. Dental floss, introduced in 1882, is under-used for its recommended purpose but "overused" in novel ways, including the ones above from prison archives of attempted inmate escapes. BTW, when floss gets flushed down the toilet (as it often does), it can gum up municipal sewer systems, report "American Heritage" and "University of California Berkeley Wellness Letter."

Question: What was the very first microwaved food?

Answer: Did you guess a candy bar? It was 1945, and scientist Percy Lebaron Spencer was visiting a magnetron testing laboratory. When he leaned over an operating magnetron (generator of microwaves), the candy in his shirt pocket melted. Immediately recognizing what had happened, he soon had popcorn popping in the lab and even cooked an egg until it exploded, says physicist Louis Bloomfield in "How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary." "Cooking has never been the same since."

You can think of an operating microwave as akin to a crowded party where everyone is suddenly told to face the front of the room. People brush against each other as they turn and the sliding friction creates thermal energy. Now if everyone were told to turn back and forth repeatedly, things would get hotter and hotter. That's basically the way with foods' polar water molecules in a microwave, which twist back and forth billions of times per second in the fluctuating electric field, bumping and bumping.

Question: It turns out that a baseball outfielder chasing down a long fly ball and a dog catching a tossed frisbee have a LOT in common. Explain.

Answer: Both employ the LOT model of retrieving objects in flight, for "linear optical trajectory." Here the player tries to keep the image of the ball at a relatively stable spot on his retina, so it appears to move in a straight line of sight and constant speed relative to home plate and any background features, says Ivars Peterson in "MathTrek" online.