In the last blog post we covered how to make a naked egg. Now we are going to turn the naked eggs you produced into a science project based on the principle of osmosis. Hopefully more than one of the six eggs you started out with survived the process and became a naked egg. If not, you can always do the experiment again.

To start this science project you need  a couple of naked eggs ready to use. You will also need separate containers for the eggs which can hold some liquid along with the eggs. You can  use coffee mugs for the purpose. Now take one shell-less naked egg and cover it with water. Take the other egg and cover it with corn syrup. Place the mugs into fridge for 24 hours.

When you take the eggs out of the corn syrup and water respectively you will find a difference between the two naked eggs. The egg that sat all day in water will be plump and firm, while the one which was in corn syrup will be shriveled and flabby. Why did this happen? The eggs in question have a semi permeable membrane, which means that small molecules can go through the membrane and large ones can not.

The egg white in the naked egg is 90% water and so when the egg is kept in water nothing much happens to it. However the corn syrup is just 25 per cent water and has large molecules which can not move past the egg membrane. So to balance out the different concentrations of water in the solution the water inside the egg white moves out making the egg shrivel. Get more experiments here.