EGGSPERIMENT!

Your Weekly Round-Up of Eggs in Science, with Dr Ursula Bear

Good point

WE ALL know that eggs are eggshaped, but have we ever stopped to ask why? Scientists at Bristol University have received £2.5million in funding to answer just that question.

“For thousands of years, we have simply accepted that eggs are the shape they are and that’s that,” said project leader Dr Stanley Crumbs. “But we want to investigate why they are egg-shaped. And why do they have one end more pointy than the other, rather than being symmetrical ovoids?”

Initial findings of the research indicate that the answers to these fundamental questions may have something to do with the evolution of the chicken.

“At some point in time, a chicken may have developed a mutation which made it produce pointy-ended eggs rather than round ones,” said Dr Crumbs. “These pointy ended eggs would have opened the chicken’s arse more gradually as they came out and so would have been much easier to lay, thereby conferring an evolutionary advantage on the species.”

“Not its arse, obviously. Its fanny. I think it’s called a cloaca or something,” he added.

Fry Me To The Moon

NASA have just announced plans to send an unmanned craft to Mars, where it will fry an egg. The MarsFryV will blast off from the Kennedy Space centre in early 2025 to begin a 14-month journey to the red planet. After landing on the Martian surface, the probe will deploy a specially designed Calor gas stove, along with a frying pan and a dozen eggs.

Technicians back on earth will then operate the controls remotely and fry a couple of eggs sunny side up.

The project has been designed in preparation for a proposed manned mission which is expected to launch towards the end of the decade. “We’re aiming to have human beings on Mars by 2030, so we have to find out as much about the planet’s surface as we can before going there,” said Mission Control director Eileen Dustsheet.

“When the first of our species sets foot on Martian soil, they will have been eating paste out of a tube for over a year, and they’re going to be desperate for a fry-up,” she told reporters. “As the main ingredient of a fryup, we need to see whether eggs can be successfully cooked on the Martian planetary surface.”

The experiment has been designed to be as foolproof as possible, but there is one potential problem beyond the control of scientists and engineers back at Mission Control.

“Mars is around 140 million miles from Earth, so any radio signal takes about 20 minutes to reach its destination,” said Dustsheet. “If the gas under the pan is a bit too high, it’s going to be twenty minutes before we know about it, and forty minutes before the return signal to turn it down a bit reaches MarsFryV.”

“It’ll be burnt to a bloody crisp by then, and the yolk will be as hard as knockers,” she added.

Harp way there

FOR CENTURIES, hard-boiled eggs have been cut into slices using egg harps, and these devilishly simple devices have remained largely unchanged for centuries.

But back in 2017, Silicon

Valley company TechSlice brought egg harps into the 21st century with the Slicex1, a device incorporating the latest AI technology to slice a boily. The company followed up, releasing the improved Slicex2 and Slicex3 in 2019 and 2021. And this year, they are set to launch their latest model, the Slicex4i.

“The Slicex1 egg harp changed the way we slice hard-boiled eggs,” said Dwight Zuffleburgh, boss of the Silicon Valley tech start-up. “The days of putting a hard-boiled egg in the cradle before pushing down the parallel-wired cutting handle are long gone,” he said.

The Slicex4i will have a host of new features not found on any previous Slicex designs. It will use AI tech, and have over 200Gb more computing power than the Slicex3.

TechSlice have not released the price of the Slicex4i, but say it will be released in the autumn. Although sales have been slow, with only an estimated 35 egg-slicers sold so far, Mr Zuffleburgh is now the richest man in the world, with an estimated personal fortune of more than $2000 billion.