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As anyone knows, a microwave oven heats your coffee water and cooks your porridge by exposing it to microwave-frequency electromagnetic radiation. And, of course (stop me if you've heard all this before) this exposure induces polar molecules in the food to rotate and produce thermal energy. And this might be my favorite sentence of the day: your Hot Pocket gets nuked quickly because excitation is fairly uniform in the outer couple of inches of a food item that has a good amount of water in it.

The commercial writes itself: "Friends, try new Mother Nature's new microwaved Pot Pie for that high degree of dinnertime excitation!"

As long as we're talking about microwave ovens, did you know that they were one of those Accidental Discoveries of Science?  Just like the time a guy dropped his slice of American cheese onto a beef patty he was sizzling on the grill and invented the cheeseburger, the use of microwaves for cooking was stumbled upon by "Old Chocolate Pants," Percy Spencer, an American engineer from out of Howland, Maine. He was working with a microwave radar setup one fine 1945 day when he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket was melting like, well, like chocolate in a hot pocket.  It was only a matter of three decades before someone figured out that Americans in the 1970s might like to save time making popcorn and Hungry Man TV dinners (featuring "One Pound Of Food!")

One last microstory: there is a radio telescope in Australia, a big old thing known as "The Dish." 

People who worked for the national science agency, were picking up odd signals called perytons on their telescope.  So accurate was the telescope that it ws able to tell the scientists that these extraneous blips and bleeps were within five kilometers (3.1 miles) of the Parkes Observatory, which is in New South Wales.

The best guess for years was that the perytons were being caused by local lightning strikes.

But no, Captain Radarange!

They finally figured it out. The blips were coming from when someone opened the door to the microwave oven in the break room!

The Dish

What made it all the odder is that the scientists who use the telescope are not even at the observatory! They work it from a remote location, but the custodians who are on site really, really love hot coffee.

End of mystery.