Turning heat into mechanical or chemical or electric energy directly is really hard, you know.
It's funny that you can get more energy from gas by using it to heat water and using a steam turbine to drive whatever. It's just not always practical.
Hokei, so. Usb "packets" are 12 bytes or something, and it's not good for performance to stop the flow. The solution is, as always, to have a buffer. Problem is that some kernel geniuses decided that GIGABYTES is a good buffer size. This was all when spinning hdds were the standard and new fast usbs were comming, but still.
Oh, and for some reason the transfer bar sometimes works fine for me.
I had to move a horse, to fill its water bucket while it was eating. I tap and talk, nothing. I push, can't. I had to punch it literally as hard as I could so it would acknowledge me. They have really thick skin.
Disclaimer: Don't punch a horse if you don't know it and what you are doing. They get scared easily and you won't be the first to get your jaw wired back together.
Magnets, heat, idk. A crystal could grow by fusing drifting material to itself. It could grow as big as a planet ober billions of years and fire lazors. Time or size don't need to fit our human perception. Then there's physics stuff we still don't know (subatomic, dark matter, including magnetism).
It can be cristals and photons. Carbon is the basis of life because it's good for looooong molecules. But it's not like it's the only option. It may not even be the best option on planets with different temperatures or pressures.
Anyway life may not even need food or care about the passage of time.
Microwaves are ~2.4GHz, same as wifi. That is the resonant freq of water. They don't go deep, not even close to a milimeter. And it all converts to heat.
The sun is more damageing then microwaves of same power. And ionizing radiation is the really harmful one.
Fun fact: you can download the whole wikipedia and use it offline.