I'm trying to find good ways to disinfect and reuse N95 respirators at home. From this article  it's apparently possible to disinfect in a microwave, using steam to kill viruses. My question is, would a food steamer also work?
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Please forgive the obvious question.   H2O2 vapor sterilization is deadly for the layperson but should be workable for hospitals. I can't find the small Chinese study I read the other day about it. Here are two more quickly googled sources.        2.
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I need some help with solving question number 2. The statement of the question is huge and so I refrained from typing it. This is last year's ZIO paper.   So, I thought that rather than vanishing bacterias and then again increasing it, we could keep $K$ bacterias as it is and decrease the number of instructions $A, B, C$ by 1 each. Then we can try to form the rest of the bacterias $i.e (N-K)$ using the 'modified' instructions.   I tried but cannot reach $N$ and I also need to develop a generalized algorithm so that all the test cases are solved easily. Thanks in advance.   This is not an ongoing test.
106950
I have a friend that has developed an allergy or sensitivity of some kind to tomato sauce in foods. She has been craving pizza, pasta, and lasagna for a while now and I've been searching for a way to make those sorts of dishes without using tomatoes, but while maintaining a similar flavor i.e. not a white sauce flavor.  Any ideas suggestions?
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I'm a newbie cook from to prepare the nightly dinner for my wife and I. I usually have a meat and stream or boil sweet potato, corn, Brussels sprouts, asparagus or broccolini.  It occurred to me that I was adding a little bit of butter and salt to everything that I cooked. I know if I bake something I could add rosemary etc, but how can I season / flavour food different steaming / boiling? Adding herbs to the water??
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Is it safe to reheat food in any type of plastic container or are there only some types of plastic ware that are safe to use?
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Sometimes I have suggested that food that sat out a little longer than optimal may be safe to eat.    Granted, this is based on my experience, and I always qualify that it shouldn't be served to guests (and by extension, customers) and that one should determine their own tolerance to risk, but I want to know if there is information as to the methodology of the FDA guidelines.  Specifically, what is the contamination rate at n hours, and what are the initial conditions of the food and environment?  How much risk is there REALLY (in incidences per n-population and such) in a standard kitchen for food that has sat out 50%, 100%, 200%, etc. longer than recommended?
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If a home canned jar has botulinum in it can the jar be cleaned and saved? If so what is the correct way to clean the jar?
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I have ethanol , Reagent Grade 99.8% v/v  can i use this to make hand sanitizer ? is it safe for hand skin ?  I will be  &lt;&lt; have a look at that link.  I am planning to dilute the Ethanol with water to get a 65% concentration .  Can i proceed with making the sanitizer ?  Look at the Ethanol specs on the picture below
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I haven't done this for a very long time. I am following , which conveniently fits perfectly into a little hack-job of containers I already had. (Related: ) @Athanasius' answer to that question led me to what I'm doing with this batch. At this point I feel pretty comfortable with it:    The two containers are identical, and I have a few inches of water in the top container so that it weighs down the cabbage in the lower container. It seems to be working pretty sweet. I'm three days in and it's starting to smell like something is happening. There is a funk in the air.  So far so good.  Now I am dying to stir it...to do something! Everything I have read (including Athanasius' answer) suggests that in a less awesome container I might have to stir, but now I don't necessarily have to do anything but scoop off scum which has yet to appear.  That's killing me.  Is there a reason not to stir? Will stirring offer any benefit?
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My 4 year old daughter recently have scarlet fever. It seems antibiotics are non-negociable for it, and since she has great chance of being allergic to Penicillin, there is only one antibiotic she can get. It is not the first time we have to give it to her, and probably not the last time.  Apparently, that medicine tastes really REALLY bad. She cries a lot, panics every time we say it's time for this medicine, and vomit it most of the time, resulting in even more medicine being force into her mouth.  It is only this medicine that causes problem. She does not tantrum for other medicine, and most of them, she can take the dose we give her all by herself.  We tried reassuring her, explaining why it is mandatory to get it, explaining it will make the scarlet fever go away. We tried mixing it into other food (which seems clearly worse, taste-wise). We tried asking her to take her herself. It seems we tried everything, and the only thing that achieve it for the moment is actually forcing it into her.  We really do not want to force her in any way. Her mother cried yesterday because we had to force her, and we need to do it twice a day. It is very exhausting, and we would welcome any input or new ideas on how to give her this really bad tasting medicine to her.  EDIT : For clarification, it is a liquid medicine that is administrated with a syringe. It seems there are no alternative, although we will check with the doctor again (particularly if pills are available)
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(careful, disturbing!)  I was experimenting with some stray cockroaches that ended up falling in my bath tub overnight (there is currently an infestation undergoing in my apartment building) and I found out that they are very easily killed by simply soaking them in soapy water.  I read that soap blocks some pores in insects' bodies which leads to suffocation, which appears to be the cause of death for my test cockroaches. But what I don't get is why about a half of them died with their innards bursting from their tail end. The water wasn't too hot to make them boil. Is it that they suffocate so hard that attempting to breathe they blow out their insides? Or is it the soap's reaction with the cockroach's bodily materials? Or is something else causing this?  I remember watching a documentary on injecting various insects with hydrogen peroxide which caused much more dramatic explosions, but it's not like I was injecting cockroaches, I just sprinkled them with soap water.
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I've got an old house with some asbestos tape on the heating vents, and some old floor tiles which are asbestos suspects as well; duct cleaning firms won't do cleaning on the vents with the tape present. Do I really need to call in the space suit guys to get rid of it? If I just cover it with new foil tape, will that encapsulate it safely?  Should I just rip it off myself?
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If I look through the microwave window I can see through, which means visible radiation can get out. We know also that there is a mesh on the microwave window which prevents microwave from coming out.  My question is how does this work? how come making stripes or mesh of metals can attenuate microwave radiation yet allow visible radiation?  Looks like an electrodynamics problem to me with periodic boundary conditions (because of the partitions on the microwave oven window). Is it discussed in any textbook?
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I heard that you are not supposed to use substances containing alcohol because it will destroy the anti-grease coating layer that's above the glass.  The problems is that just water and microfiber cloth is not always enough and I want to know what is safe to use.  Update: Please do not recommend a specific product, or at least do not recommend it wihout specifing the content. This is important because most products are not usually available outside the US.
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We know that any object above absolute zero emits electromagnetic radiation. So hotter the object shorter the wavelengths. In the electromagnetic radiation spectrum radio waves has the longest then microwave, then infrared, then visible light, then ultraviolet, then x-ray, then gamma rays. Why do we use microwaves in microwave oven when infrared and visible light are much hotter and how do microwaves cook food when they are cooler than visible light and others.
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Below is my situation:  Is completely (vacuum) sealing leftover meat in the freezer absolutely necessary? I would always just use a plastic bag to cover the meat and fold it around couple of times so it's almost as good as sealed (usually grocery plastic bag is much bigger than the piece of meat) and have never had a problem with it last a decade or so I have been cooking.  But recently I got this new roommate who insists on me using special small plastic bags with sealers to use and he is being very paranoid, obsessive about it.  So my question is: Is he right?
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I was wondering if I could get some advice as I have intolerances to yeast and have heard of a few substitutions from: baking soda, baking powder, lemon juice, milk and yogurt. The question comes to how do I measure these into bread or baking to make whatever I am making rise? I have heard that in the middle east they rarely use yeast for bread baking and their bread still rises. I just don't know the proper measurements I would use, if a bread recipe calls for 1 or 2 packets of yeast and mixing them in water do you mix one tsp of baking soda and 1 tsp of lemon juice in together?   If you can give me any advice on this that would be greatly appreciated, thanks.