Why Your Microwave Cooks Lava Edges and an Icy Center.

We’ve all been there: you nuke last night’s leftovers, take a bite of a molten-hot edge, then hit a chunk that’s still fridge-cold in the middle. It feels like the microwave is trolling you. It isn’t. That patchy heating is baked into the physics of how a microwave oven works, and researchers are now using heavy-duty computer models to understand it and design their way out of it.