Sometimes, science manages to do things that should logically be impossible. Like when we first managed to capture lightning from the sky, or created antimatter in metal tubes underground.
Or in this case, when we figured out how to unboil eggs.
University of California
Yes, you read that right. Scientists at the University of California Irvine have worked out how to reverse the boiling of an egg without magic or completely defying the logic of science.
When you boil an egg, what's basically happening is that the proteins in it unfold and then crumple themselves into a tangled and more disorderly form. What the researchers have figured out then is how to pull these protein tangles apart and refold them into their original shapes.
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The study's co-authors Professor Gregory Weiss and undergraduate Steve Kudlacek started with an egg white that had been boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius until it had become the tangled white mess you'd recognize. They then added another compound that are away at the egg white, liquefying it. After that came a specially-designed vortex fluid device they designed, which helped shape the proteins in the egg white back to their original forms.
Just the capability to do this itself is astounding, but there's another benefit to figuring out this process. And that's for drug manufacturing. When scientists are creating new drugs, the proteins they're experimenting with often misfold into unusable shapes. At that stage they would normally have to be discarded and the proteins reclaimed. But with this new technique, they could just start over with the same samples. Not only does this saving a lot of money, it also only takes a few minutes.
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It also majorly benefits the food industry. Correctly folded proteins in the form of enzymes are also essential for turning milk into cheese, flour and yeast into bread and grape juice into wine. When manufacturers of these products are sent incorrectly folded proteins, they don't work in their process. So they're forced to discard them, creating far too much food waste.
With instead a cheaper process to reverse this, food waste at the industrial level will dip drastically.