Did you know that hard candy is actually a glass?
October 27, 2011?|
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-->Michelle Clement has a B.Sc. in zoology (with a minor in American culture studies) and a M.Sc. in organismal biology from The Ohio State University. Her thesis research was on the ecophysiology of epidermal lipids and water homeostasis in house sparrows. She now works as a technical editor for The American Chemical Society. In addition to Crude Matter, Michelle also blogs at her personal blog, C6-H12-O6. Her broader interests include weird human and animal physiology, obesity and enteric physiology, endocrinology, sexual and reproductive health, personal genomics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology (physical and cultural), sociology (mainly GLBT, race relations, etc), and science education and communication. She lives in Ohio with her boyfriend and two cats.


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As Halloween is right around the corner, here?s a video from ByteSizeScience on how hard candy is made:

Making hard candy. Credit: Flickr user taygete05.
Some things of note:
(1) Hard candy is technically a glass made of sugar!
(2) There are three stages of sugar boiling, and the maximum temperature that it reaches determines the physical properties of the resulting candy (I think this is primarily a function of how much water is remaining in the sugar mixture).
(3) If you watch the video, you?ll figure out why hard candy always has a ring around the edge. This was something I didn?t know.
Enjoy. Perhaps I?ll write a post later about what your body does with all that sugar after you eat it. ![]()
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The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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