Easter Eggs - Periodic Table of Videos

this is this is my Easter nest which I've been lent by a technician Xena and in it we've got two eggs I've got here some weak hydric look dilute hydrochloric acid and let's see what happens and you can see is bubbling and the bubbling is carbon dioxide being released from the calcium carbonate because you're forming calcium chloride and carbon dioxide of course it's got covered in bubbles which keeps the acid away so may go slower than I want but let's see what happens now the other thing I wanted to do and this is quite a daring piece of chemistry for me I want to boil the egg so I've got some water here which I'm heating up you can't find a spoon so we're using the test tube holder and all being well we can let the egg into the water the I forgot to time it so I know know when we started the inside an egg as you know there is the white and the yellow part the yolk and both of them contain the proteins proteins are long chains of smaller molecules joined together so you can imagine you have a chain of these molecules perhaps a hundred units long each of which is the so called amino acid and these are linked together head to tail to form a chain now what is really remarkable about the protein is that this chain folds up in a very special way you see if I take this chain and just drop it on the table and then I do it again it will drop into completely different shapes each time what is remarkable about proteins and people still don't really understand completely is that every time this chain of amino acids folds up in exactly the same shape now what happens when we boil an egg is that the white of the egg which if you break an uncooked egg is sort of semi-transparent and rather sticky the in the medieval times people use this to mix paints and paint it on the walls but if you heat it up like we're boiling the egg what happens is that these chains start unwrapping and linking together so you go from a transparent material to a nice solid white material the white material that's like the weight of the egg which wheat what is it about that linking up that makes it go from transparent to white I think what it is and I'm not absolutely certain is that as they link together they form larger and larger lumps and as the lumps get bigger they become closer in size to the wavelength of light and when you have things that are similar to size the wavelength of light they start scattering it and so it all gets reflected back and looks white and that's probably why it happens it's sort of cooking the egg without really cooking it because we're using strong acid which is beginning to look a bit like my hair isn't it and boiling of course is not the only way of cooking eggs you can cook eggs by subjecting it to really high pressure up to perhaps 20,000 times atmospheric pressure you can do this in special apparatus which has a big piston and compresses the water that the egg is is in and if you compress the water and go up to this high pressure the protein and behaves just as if you're boiling it so you can as it were cook your high in your hard-boiled eggs when they're cold and the advantage is that and as you may know that when you have a hard-boiled egg round the yolk you sometimes get a black line where the compounds the sulfur compounds that make the yolk yellow have decomposed that give us all the bluey black line but if you cook it under high pressure you don't get this nasty black line it looks really nice and yellow so it's had about seven minutes perhaps we give it a little bit longer do you have a heat resistant glove to pick up the boiling water look beautiful thank you thank you I've got the glove because I realized I haven't got anything to pick up the hot water with and let's look at the time we'll switch off the Bunsen burner test tube holders are not really designed for four eggs but here we are what I'm hoping to do is now to saw it in half so we can see what's happened inside it oops I think I think I've been it's not quite pooped that's not bad the white has really gone white from the sort of colorless part of the egg and the yolk has begin began to solidify but it's still a bit gooey if I stick my pen in it you can see it still comes out a bit gooey and the yellow color is due to sulfur compounds in the egg it's not sulphur itself sulfur is yellow but the sulfur gives this color and this is why when eggs go bad rotten eggs they smell so bad because the foul smell from rotten eggs is caused by the formation of hydrogen sulfide h2s just like water but with two hydrogen's and the sulfur instead of two hydrogen's and an oxygen h2s is sulfurous in the same group as water so h2s has some properties that are similar to water but it smells terrible I didn't expect it to give like that some of its got green can you see well I hoped that the egg would just dissolve but without puncturing the the membrane inside so all this stuff would come out I think in my enthusiasm with prodding it I must have punctured the membrane it's quite interesting because I've never seen an egg shell reacting with acid before so I've learned something by doing these experiments even if you haven't all right very good

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 170,390

Rating: 4.8558726 out of 5

Keywords: Easter, Eggs

Id: ZBrYtOa8LD8

Length: 7min 47sec (467 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

Hello, I write from Panama. Here in Latin America acids are used to cook. Ceviche is a special meal of seafood made with lemon, lime or bitter orange. Here, most of the people believe that spice makes the "magic" of cooking raw seameat, but the acid does it.r Also we "cook" quail eggs with lemon, they look like boiled eggs (I suppose because it's a not so strong acid and they are smaller than a chicken ones).r The main issue is that some bugs (bacteria) can live in this kind of environment.