mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
ichudov@Algebra.Com (Igor Chudov) wrote :
One thing I would like to buy is a pressure cooker.
I have found them to be of little use. Save some $, try a garage sale.
I used to use them a lot. Great for beans et.c And not as expensive as a goode steamer :-) [...]
Try your regular stove. Set it to, say, 400 degrees and pray that the papers will remain legible. I'd prbobably be more likely to be attacked by meteorites or abducted by aliens than be anthraxed via mail, but *if* I had to sterilize mail, I would use a stove.
In labs an autoclave is used to sterilize everything.
Autoclaves are basically pressure cookers, high pressure steam at 121 deg. Celsius and ~2 Bar kill everything.
If 121C is adequate why not use the same temperature in your oven? I doubt the absolute pressure matters.
Pressure cooker much faster to heat up. Also for large samples the water adds heat to sample faster - food in an oven at 200 degrees is often not much more than 100 inside while the outside is already roasting. Personally I would quite like to keep microbiological samples separate from my cooking equipment :-)
A nitrogen atmosphere might be a good thing to reduce oxidation of inks and paper. I doubt it would help your new Visa card though.
But oxygen is just the thing to be nasty to bacteria. Hit them with activated oxygen. Peroxide works wonders - kills all known bacteria (yes, even spores) and doesn't permanently damage the environment :-)