Naked Eggs Conclusion

We finished up our Naked Eggs experiment yesterday.

It was very interesting.

For the first step, we put raw eggs in water, orange juice, vinegar, and coke.  We wanted to see which liquid would work the best to dissolve the egg shell.  Of course, the water did nothing.  The coke did very little which surprised a lot of people.  Everyone expected that the coke would be very corrosive because we always hear about all the things that coke can eat through.  The orange juice did begin to dissolve the shell, but it never removed all of the shell.  It was more like a top layer sloughed off, but the shell was still present and hard.  The vinegar was a great success.  As soon as we put the egg in the vinegar bubbles formed around the egg.  Within 30 minutes the first layer of egg shell was floating on top of the vinegar.  After the first day the shell was mostly gone and the egg was very soft.  After the second day the shell was completely gone and the membrane was translucent enough to see the yolk moving around in the egg.

The second phase of the project involved testing the theory that the naked egg would bounce when dropped.  We didn't have quite as much success with this part.  The egg only bounced once and then broke.  I think that part of the problem was the surface that we bounced the egg on.  The surface was rough and I think that part of it caught the egg and caused it to pop.  If we had had a smooth surface we might have had more success.  In the picture below you can see the "skin" of the egg and the yolk after it broke.

 

The third step in our experiment was to take a naked egg and see if we could remove all the water from it.  Our instructions said that we needed to take an egg that we had removed the shell from using vinegar and place it in corn syrup.  Due to osmosis the water in the egg moved across the membrane into the corn syrup.  After the corn syrup became diluted, I removed the corn syrup and replaced it with fresh.  After about 1 day we removed the egg from the corn syrup and observed that it had become very dehydrated.  Only the yolk and white remained in the egg and the skin was wrinkled. 

 

The picture below shows an egg with it's shell still on, a naked egg, and a naked egg with the water removed.  Notice that the naked egg is swollen, due to absorbing some of the vinegar.

 



We had a lot of fun with this experiment.  Adults and children both seemed to enjoy watching the eggs change and touching the naked egg to feel how squishy it was. 

We have several more experiments on tap for this summer, so stop on by!