I don't know about the environmental impact, but it sounds like a great idea.

David Brown (host of Marketplace) made this proposal as his favorite why not idea. There are rapid wine coolers as well as quick ice cream freezers. I think the trick would be to ensure surface contact and to have a liquid that is colder than 0c. I think there are some self-cooling cans on the market, including one from icetec.

Using what, those instant cold pack chemicals?

This is not what I orignally posted. It's been monkeyed with. There were two ideas. One was the widget in a can, one was the reverse microwave.

If you release a jet of CO2 gas from a CO2 fire extinguisher, the expansion of the gas cools the jet to such an extent that CO2 ice is formed, which is much colder than water ice. An ampule of compressed CO2 within the liquid container when released within the liquid would not only cool the contents but carbonate it as well. The problem is to design the proper pressure container and the release mechanism.

A reverse microwave is a nice fantasy but I have never heard of the effect. Heat is the amount of molecular movement in a substance. Microwave energy can speed up this movement and thereby create heat. Microwaves have not, according to my information, been able to slow down molecular movement to remove heat.

I am putting you all On Notice that I came up with the concept of the "Macrowave". My family and friends can back me up, I've been talking about it for many years, and they kept saying, "but we already have freezers..."

It would be a microwave-sized box which you could use to very quickly cool down food or drinks. Like a reverse microwave, it would remove energy from the molecules to cause the item to cool or freeze. I just haven't figured out what to do with the excess energy yet....

It's not a matter of disposing of the excess energy. It's a matter of discovering a process that removes that energy from the material being processed. At the moment that process does not exist.

a comment on an old posing...The so called 'macro-wave' was patented in Korea in 1989 and described in a then-current book on Consumer Electronics published in the same year. The non-harmful RF generator was said to be cheap to produce and could even be incorporated into hats or soda cans. The section went on to describe a long-time feud between Japan and Korea which resulted in Japan refusing to license manufacture of Beta video tape players in Korea (which resulted in the VHS standard becoming the dominate market). In consideration of this, Korea refused the license of macrowave technology to Japan which resulted in a smear campaign from Japan discrediting the existence of the technology altogether.A news article [http://www.avantnews.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=121] said the Whirlpool Corp. was manufacturing in the US in 2005.