Video: Students get taste of materials science with close-up look at chocolate

[Image above] Credit: Lee McCoy; Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0

Valentine’s Day may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean the consumption of our favorite chocolaty confections has to stop.

Beyond scarfing down bags of the sweet stuff, it’s the science behind our favorite treat that reels us in every time. We’ve reported on how chocolate gets its surface sheen, how scientists probe chocolate with X-rays to control surface bloom, and the process behind 3-D printed chocolate.

So to all those materials science/chocoholics out there, you’ll want to check out this video from Johns Hopkins University about the hidden world of chocolate.

Students at the university are learning about the science that lies within chocolate, using a scanning electron microscope to zoom in at magnifications of 400 to 5,000 times to get an up-close-and-personal look at what makes up the delicious material’s molecular landscape. The course is designed to give students their first taste of materials science.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University; YouTube