Does sugar beet and sugar cane produce the same sugar?

On the subject of sugars, it's easy to believe that granulated white and caster sugar are made from the same thing, just ground to different fineness', as they taste and feel the same. Is icing sugar made from the same original sugar? I'm assuming it is, and if it is, why does making the sugar really fine (i.e. making icing sugar) make it taste very different to other sugars?

Whenever I drink Gatorade my teeth feel gritty whenever I grind them together. Can someone explain this?

I had what might be called a lively discussion with a friend last night. He's a martial arts enthusiast, and was telling me how ingesting excess sugar can cause your body to store it as fat. I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm struggling to see how a saccharide can be turned into a triglyceride. I know about glycogen as a storage mechanism for glucose, but this isn't a fat. I know about Glucagon splitting triglycerides, but this isn't a carbohydrate. Can someone please help us out here - what is the biological pathway that turns a carbohydrate into a fat in the body, if indeed it happens at all?

Thanks,

Peter Finan

I have recently been living in Guyana's rainforest, and have consumed a large number of magoes. Now, I always assumed that a ripe mango would contain more calories than a green one. They certainly taste a lot sweeter. Is this actually the case? And i so, how does the mago aquire this additional energy if they are picked whilst still green and allowed to ripen afterwards?

We recently had a new kitchen installed at home, included was a glass topped halogen hob. Soon after - and much to her disappointment - my mother split some sugar on the hot hob while making jam. As the manual said, the hob was allowed to cool off before cleaning; however when it came to cleaning off the hardened sugar globules they took some glass away with them, leaving a sprinkling of pits in the surface.

No abrasives were used in cleaning, just hob cleaner and a sponge, what happened?

Back in school we were told how you can seperate salt and (powdered) pepper using static electricity. Someone asked if there was a way to seperate salt and sugar. The teacher didn't know. Since then, no one I asked has come up with anything better than sorting the crystals by shape under a microscope. Melting temperatures are very different, of course, but sugar caremelises before melting decently. Both are soluble in water. But maybe there still is a way? What about solubility in organic liquids?