Fun with eggs!

I thought I'd blogged about this (note to self: New Year's resolution - I will blog more regularly), but I can't seem to find it listed anywhere.

Ben and I have been looking (once again) at osmosis. We came across this on a TV programme recently and decided to have a go with our last couple of eggs from Georgie and Gina (they've now gone into egg hibernation). We started by putting the eggs into vinegar. The acid, as I'm sure you know, eats away the shell and they end up very rubbery. We did this before and thought we'd be able to bounce them, luckily we tried this out in the sink - it bounced a tiny bit and then burst. You need to hard boil them first before taking off the shells if you feel you'll get the urge to have a bounce. Having said this, the next part of the experiment won't work with hard boiled eggs!

Once we had our rubbery eggs, we placed one in a cup of water and the other in a cheapo brand tub of syrup.

We waited and watched the osmosis work. The egg in water sucked up more water and became a little larger in size. However, the egg in syrup (syrup having less water content than the egg) sucked the water out of the egg and shivelled it up leaving a puddle of surface water in the tub. Weird! The prove to Ben that osmosis really does work, we placed the shrivelled egg back into a cup of water and waited for it to get its moisture back and swell again. Fascinating stuff.