And the Hello and welcome to the naked scientist Easter special with me Chris Smith and with

Cat Arnie. Coming up a breakthrough in how to unboil an egg. Is a chocolate

teapot really useless? The genetically modified chickens that can't catch bird flu

and why the Easter Bunny might be knocked off his perch by a Tuken.

Plus, we've also got a host of egg experiments that you can do at home.

The Naked Scientist Podcast is powered by UKfast.co.uk.

To start off, one of our producer George's favorite Easter traditions is to draw happy faces on her soft-barred eggs

before ruthlessly decapitating them and dipping toast in their brains.

Yum yum. Now the familiar change that takes place when we boil an egg, that runny white going rubbery and becoming

white.

It occurs because heat causes the proteins that make up the egg white to change their shape or do what we call D nature.

Now University of California Irvine scientist Greg Weiss has found a way to reverse this

process or as he puts it, unboil an egg.

And this could be very useful for mass producing proteins

that we need to study or for medical uses.

We didn't originally set out to unboil eggs.

Originally, I just wanted some way of untangling proteins that get mashed together and folded up.

So I was in the lab one day and we had this new method of yanking on the protein chains and forcing

them into their correct shapes and I realized that no one on the planet would believe

how cool this was until I could demonstrate this on a problem

that everyone acknowledges as hard.

And that suddenly I realized that egg that I had for breakfast would be perfect.

...