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The Kid Should See This

The Hidden World of Chocolate

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You’ve seen chocolate… but have you seen it under a scanning electron microscope? Johns Hopkins University grad student Jennifer Dailey leads students through a bit of chocolate testing: heating and cooling chocolate in order to create specific crystal structures.

“We put it under a scanning electron microscope. We’re going to be able to image down to microns even nanometers. And believe me chocolate does not look like you expect it to look. We see something that looks like globules mixed in with something that looks like pure crystals– like a diamond would look. Those crystals are actually just chunks of sugar and the globules are the cocoa butter that it’s embedded in… If I look at this I really don’t want to eat it. But we all know in real life we probably do.”

File under: chocolate and materials science. Watch this next: Plants and Insects Magnified Thousands of Times.

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