this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Is this to measure calories? We did something similar in elementary school, our teacher would light a piece of snack on hanging above an aluminium dish, and we would count for how long it burned. Then we looked at the packaging and the snacks with more calories burned the longest.
If I recall my undergrad thermodynamics class correctly, you can calculate the calories in food by burning, but in an experiment like this too much of the heat would escape to the surroundings to be usefully measured. Usually they use something like a bomb calorimeter to make sure all the heat is captured and measured.