If I were to take a guess, I would say that the majority of you have a secret love for… CHOCOLATE Now I know some of you out there do not enjoy the dense, smooth, sweet texture of this popular dessert; however, this doesn’t mean we can’t learn a little science about this unique...
Candy that would pop or fizzle in your mouth have been around since the 1800’s. Scientists back then mixed together a sugar syrup (that contained very little water) with baking powder. Baking powder is a mixture of a powdered acid and baking soda. When these two molecules are dry, they do not react at...
I know that I do not use a lot of audio in my blog; however, I do use it tremendously within several science resources in my website. It took me quite some time to figure out how to manipulate audio clips to do what I wanted them to do. Luckily, I stumbled across a...
I remember the days when hard candy was the #1 item in the candy store. Peppermints, butterscotch, fruit-flavored hard candies… everything seemed to be made ready to crack a tooth with a single bite. Recently, we have learned that to make hard candy you need to boil most of the water out of a...
It’s no secret that opposites attract. People with opposite personalities end up as best friends; flavors that (rationally) shouldn’t work together are absolutely delicious (sugar in your spaghetti sauce, sweet and sour sauce, etc.); dogs and cats live together in the same home… OPPOSITES ATTRACT! And this rule is the foundation for most chemical...
Last week, you got a crash course in the main sweetener of most cold drinks – high fructose corn syrup. This sweetener is created within corn syrup through the rearrangement of ATOMS within its glucose molecules to form a different sugar molecule – fructose. And since fructose is TWICE as sweet as glucose, this...