Sunday Sketches - The Athenaeum

Der Erlkönig by Melanie Clouthier-Coleman

Science Fact of the Week

Scientists found a way to UNBOIL an egg !!!

What seemed impossible all this while, scientists found a way to do it. As bizarre as it may sound but scientists have found a way to unboil an egg which doesn’t even defy basic laws of Science.

In the process of boiling an egg, the proteins unfold and then refold in a more disordered and tangled form. In this new research by the scientist at the University of California, they found a way to pull apart the proteins that are cooked in the egg whites and let them refold in their original shape. This defies the second law of thermodynamics which basically states that the degree of entropy (disorder) in a system of the universe will always increase. According to this law once you scramble an egg it’s impossible to separate the yolk from an egg from the whites since it went from a less ordered state to a more ordered state. In this case, it doesn’t obey the law since the unboiled egg is more ordered than a boiled egg so the entropy should be decreasing ( ideally) but in this case, when it was being boiled, heat decreases the entropy though the entropy of the universe still increases.

This finding can also reduce cancer treatment and food production costs.

Author: Tanvi Dabas

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