M&M’s THROWBACK!!!!!!!!1
I bought a baby pack of M&M’s today.
Why?
Because I was feeling nostalgic.
I used to have a very specific way of eating these packs of M&M’s for a good amount of my childhood/teenhood. This is how I would do it: I would dump the whole package out, sort the M&M’s by color, and then order each color’s candies by size from smallest to largest. I would then line up the ordered colors in the order yellow, orange, red, green, blue, brown. Finally, I would take the biggest candy from each color and order them from smallest to largest in a final row.
To eat them, I’d start with the smallest yellow M&M and just go up the lines.
I have no idea why I always used to do it this way, but I felt the urge to replicate this old ritual this afternoon.
So yeah. I know nobody cares, but it’s something I remember doing a lot when I was a kid/tween/teen.
This Week’s Science Blog is Sweet!
Well this is about the coolest study ever.
Windisch, Windisch, and Popescu (a trio of badass Austrian scientists) wrote a paper detailing the best way to enjoy spherical candies like M&Ms and Skittles.
The researchers placed whole and fractured candies into bowls of tap water (tap water has approximately the same pH as saliva) and mechanically agitated the water slightly to mimic movement in the mouth. They videotaped the candies from above to observe their dissolve rates.
As might be expected, they concluded that to maximize the life of the candy, consumers should try to maintain the candy’s spherical shape for as long as possible. Fracturing the shape increases the surface area, causing the pieces to dissolve faster.
But the best part is their conclusion: “Even though we now know how candies dissolve in time we stress that the best thing to do when eating a candy is to forget about these considerations, since they draw your attention away from what candies are made for: enjoyment.”
Read their paper and stats here.
I’ve been waiting years for this
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the statistically perfect pack of M&Ms!
How is it statistically perfect, you ask? Well, if you take a look at Mars’ website, you can find the percentage of all M&Ms that each color represents. 30% of all M&Ms are brown, red and yellow both make up 20%, and orange, green and blue each make up 10%. Therefore, in a bag of 23 M&Ms, we would have seven brown, five red, five yellow, two orange, two green, and two blue. For a perfect example of this, see above photo.
My day has just been made.
(And yes, I know this boosts my dork level to even higher levels; I don’t care!)
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