Scientists Just Made History's First Unboiled Egg—and It Could Save Lives

Hard-boiling an egg is easy—just throw it in a pot of rapidly boiling water for 15 minutes, and your egg salad is practically good to go.

Soft-boiling an egg gets a lot trickier: One method I’ve come to rely on directs runny-yolk enthusiasts to bring one inch of water to a boil, then shut off the heat, add the egg, cover the pot, and after six minutes throw it in an ice bath to shut down the cooking process.

Un-boiling an egg is near impossible: First you need to go buy a supply of the chemical compound urea to liquefy the material that hardened during the boiling process. Then you need a vortex-fluid device to spin the material at a high-enough speed to untangle the proteins—it’s just a mess.

You should leave that to chemists like Gregory Weiss at the University of California, Irvine, one of the scientists involved in the first-ever successful un-hardening of a hard-boiled egg.

“Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,” he said in a press release from the university. “In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order.”

This goes way beyond turning deviled eggs back into mayonnaise. According to the university, the scientific advancement could “reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production, and other segments of the $160 billion global biotechnology industry.”

"It's not so much that we're interested in processing the eggs; that's just demonstrating how powerful this process is," Weiss said. "The real problem is there are lots of cases of gummy proteins that you spend way too much time scraping off your test tubes, and you want some means of recovering that material. The egg-altering technology means the new process to de-gum those tubes takes minutes instead of days."

Weiss said he doesn’t know how much money the new process could save, but it will definitely save a lot of time. Personally, I’ll stick with making my eggs over easy. 

Original article from TakePart