The Great Exhibition Road Festival is a free annual celebration of science and the arts each summer in South Kensington.
Come visit our Candy Chemistry booth in the Family Fun Zone at the Great Exhibition Road Festival!
Join researchers from Imperial’s Departments of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Computing to explore molecular structure using colourful edible models. Use marshmallows, toothpicks and multicoloured gummies to build molecular structures, then rotate them and see if you can make two structures that are mirror images of each other.
Discover why understanding molecular structure is essential and how AI helps scientists predict and design molecules that shape the world around us.
Just like our left and right hands, molecules may exist in left-handed and right-handed forms that look similar but behave very differently. Changing a molecule’s “handedness” (or chirality) can completely alter its properties, from fragrance to pharmaceutical activity.