C'MON, MAN, HIS LAPDOGS JUST SPENT A WEEK PRETENDING OBAMA DID IT...:

The White House on Monday walked back a key point of President Donald Trump's unsubstantiated allegation that President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones in Trump Tower during the 2016 election.

Namely, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump wasn't referring to wiretapping when he tweeted about wiretapping. [...]

Spicer also said that Trump was referring to the Obama administration broadly -- and not accusing Obama of personal involvement -- when he tweeted that "Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower" and accused Obama of being a "bad" or "sick guy."

Appliances that can be hacked to spy on you usually include a microphone or a camera, if not some other method for receiving data. But microwave ovens don't typically include either of those.

That means it would be up to the microwaves themselves -- the actual waves, that is -- to somehow create and transmit images. So is that possible?

"We image things with microwaves all the time, but not in the way that it sounds like she was implying," Robert McNees, a theoretical physicist at Loyola University Chicago, writes in an email to The Verge. "For instance, we make maps of the relic microwave radiation left over from the early universe. And I think I've heard of medical application of microwave imaging, too[.]"

But those applications are pretty far from what's happening inside a typical microwave. "With a regular, consumer microwave oven?" McNees asks. "That sounds far-fetched to me."

Wired asked a researcher who works on microwave imaging and got a similar response. "I can't conceive of an effective way to do any of it from your microwave oven," University of Massachusetts-Amherst researcher Stephen Frasier told the publication.

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