That YouTube channel is really great. Their older videos have a lot of lasers but they have expanded into many other subjects. I found them when searching about magnetohydrodynamics on YT. Highly recommended. I generally prefer consuming text but never have an issue sitting through their 30 minute long videos.
Recently they had a video about making very high performance thermal paste and were selling it, but three weeks later it still hasn't shipped and my email a week ago is unanswered. A shame, because their videos are still really great - I wanted to support them financially because the stuff they do is not cheap. But I guess selling a higher quality product for cheaper than the competitors isn't really a great monetization strategy. Meanwhile I had to settle for worse product at a higher price for my high power led project :(
Somehow I knew it was going to be Tech Ingredients based on the confluence of topics. At least now i know he's human haha.
(highly recommend the channel, shows you how to make everything from brilliantly colored smoke bombs to banana brandy to plasma tubes and peltier refrigerators in a fairly precise and clinical manner)
Very pretty but the intro looks like syrup and not chocolate which is what this post is about. I know that your link promises chocolate later but that's no good here 8)
There's a patent for casting holograms on chocolate by the same process. (Holograms rely on the same constructive interference effect as diffraction gratings). You need enough sugar in the mix to produce a hard shiny surface to the chocolate.
You can also cut a record on chocolate, but you don't get more than a couple of plays before the needle wears away the grooves.
It was Scientific American. When I was an unemployed pre-internet late-teen, I went through my local library's entire collection, right back to the first Mathematical Games column, and photocopied everything I found interesting. That was one of the articles I snagged.
I did successfully make some iridescent chocolate after that, with a diffraction grating I bought from Edmunds Scientific as a mould.
By the by, you may be interested in this: https://www.litiholo.com/ I'm probably going to buy one at some point.
Title should include the tweet's author, that would have made me click a Twitter link without hesitation. I loved Samy Kamkar's work already but didn't know he also did hacked food!
Is the charge here really proportional to the crime? As frustrating as it might be to MySpace, it's fairly benign, and it highlighted a vulnerability that could have been far, far worse. Surely those three years without Internet would have been better spent highlighting more vulnerabilities, with the threat of jail time if harm is done again.
Years ago, I read an article (perhaps in Scientific American?) about some scientists who had created holograms on the surface of chocolate. Their plans to commercialize it never materialized, and I haven't been able to find the article again.
I still remember one of the suggested uses of the hologram: to show an image of the filling.
One of the possible issues is that the chocolate contracts when cooling down, possibly changing or damaging the diffraction imprint.
Chocolate making is a whole art (and technique) onto itself. Producing fine chocolate requires advanced machines (at least for 19th/20th century standards).
I'm not sure what you consider to be "advanced", but you can get surprisingly really far with just machines that can fit on your kitchen countertop and still produce some pretty high quality flavorful chocolate. In fact, the main equipment that you need to purchase is a tabletop melanger, which is required to refine the chocolate. (Nowadays, you can purchase melangers specced for refining chocolate for 24-72 hours, but perhaps 5-10 years ago, many people were abusing melangers (wet grinders) designed to make dosa batter in 30 minutes.)
For the whole process, pretty much all you need is:
1. an oven to roast cocoa beans (though you probably want a tabletop coffee roaster for reliable results)
2. a rolling pin to break apart roasted beans into nibs and husk (this does get old pretty fast after 5 batches of chocolate, so people recommend moving onto another kitchen countertop device, the Champion Juicer)
3. a hair dryer to separate husk from nibs
4. a melanger, as mentioned above, to refine the nibs (with any desired additives like sugar and milk powder) for 24-72 hours
5. a couple of bowls and a good thermometer for tempering
6. (optional) plastic molds for shaping your chocolate.
I was mostly referring to the presses that separate the cocoa butter from the rest. It's not an easy process (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzcN3cbikzA ). Though as I pointed out, it's probably 19th/20th century technology.
Ah yes, those have also made their way onto kitchen countertops (e.g. the NutriChef Oil Press), but I'd agree that they'd be in the "advanced machinery" category.
Most small batch chocolate makers don't bother with pressing their own cocoa butter because of the scale required to make it worth it. There's only so much cocoa butter you can press from beans, and then you need to figure out what to do with the remaining cocoa solids. (As an exception, Goodnow Farms is one that did invest in one for, I think, $50000; they sell the cocoa solids to restaurant chefs.) As a result, most of this is still in the industrial realm, even if the tech itself isn't particularly new (it hasn't changed much beyond what's in the linked video).
Can someone explain the science behind this process? It looks really cool but I don't understand how this is achieved. He puts the chocolate into a vacuum chamber and molds it with something? Or is it the vacuum itself that adds the effect without the chocolate being merged with anything?
Diffraction gratings are composed of a series of ridges spaced very closely and regularly, and this physical shape is transferred to the chocolate through the molding process. Light bouncing off of the different ridges creates an interference pattern which varies for different wavelengths of light, creating a rainbow effect.
Google for a "reflective diffraction grating". If you shape the surface a certain way - grooves with a size near the visible wavelength, AFAI understand - you can get the reflected light to interfere with itself. The imperfections which vary the groove size then result in this rainbow effect.
