Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff Works dot com where smart Happens, brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them, because with every purchase, Visa prevents, detects, and resolves online fraud safe secure Visa. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question. How do pop rocks candies work? It's definitely a technology candy. Nothing in nature works like
pop rocks do, so how do they work? One of the funny things about pop rocks is that they're patented. That means you can go and read the patent and see exactly how they work. Here's the basic idea. Hard candy like a lollipop, is made from sugar, corn syrup, water and flavoring. You heat the ingredients together and boil the mixture to drive off all the water. Then you let the temperature rise. What you're left with is a pure sugar syrup at about three undred degrees fahrenheit. When
it cools, you have hard candy. To make pop rocks, the hot sugar mixture is allowed to mix with carbon dioxide gas at about six hundred pounds per square inch inside a pressurized container, the carbon dioxide gas forms tiny six P s I bubbles in the candy. Once it cools, you release the pressure in the candy shatters, but the pieces still contain the high pressure bubbles. Look at a piece of pop Rocks candy with a magnifying glass and
you can see those little bubbles. When you put the candy in your mouth, it melts just like any hard candy wood, and it releases the bubbles. What you're hearing and feeling is the six d p s i carbon dioxide gas being released from each bubble. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com