Man. Just. Man.
I don’t know where to start.
When you cook an egg, you expect it to stay cooked. Then you eat it and the world keeps turning. Maybe you devil it. Deviled eggs are good. I like them.
But what you never do is uncook that egg, because that’s a physical impossibility and against the natural order of things and are you telling me Science can do it now? No no no no no. I don’t understand anything anymore. This is like the most unnatural thing I’ve ever encountered in my life. And I spent this morning reading about ladies who like to masturbate on web cams while wearing horse heads. That was less weird than this. (Related: that story is a great read on sexuality in the internet age.)
Okay, back to Science demeaningly jizzing on the face of God. From The Guardian:
[An] international team of researchers have used urea, one of the main components of urine, and a “vortex fluid device” to uncook a hen’s egg.
Ha ha they use piss. No word on if anyone would re-eat it.
The published paper is called “Shear-Stress-Mediated Refolding of Proteins from Aggregates and Inclusion Bodies,” because science makes no freaking sense ever. Here’s more from a less jargon-heavy source, io9:
First, they used a urea substance they synthesized to “chew” away at the solidified egg whites. That substance recreates the protein found in uncooked egg whites, but that only gets you part of the way there. Next, to unwind the proteins at the molecular level, they dump the egg whites into a vortex fluid machine, which works the proteins back into their original, untangled form.
What’s so good about this, aside from humans finally getting to play god with chicken eggs? Back to The Guardian:
The process is a breakthrough because it only takes minutes. Previous methods of refolding proteins can take days and to avoid this scientists rely on expensive production methods. For instance when making cancer antibodies, scientists use expensive hamster ovary cells because they don’t often misfold proteins. Cancerresearchers, the pharmaceutical, agricultural and other industries could also save much of the $160bn they spend on proteins each year.
I’m excited because while it may save lives, it also seems like we are one step closer to killing ourselves by Science.