Emily's Science Lab - Bouncy Egg Experiment - Vinegar and Egg Easter Science!

Have you ever wondered, what is in an eggshell? Well, today we are learning about all of that and more with my naked egg experiment. Hi everyone, I'm Emily Calandrelli, MIT engineer and host of Emily's Wonder Lab. And on my channel, we learn about all things space and science. So grab some eggs and some vinegar and let's get cracking. Did you know that eggshells are made up of the same thing that most seashells are made of? Most strong seashells are made up of something called calcium carbonate. And that's the same thing that's an eggshell. In this experiment, we are removing the eggshell from an egg. Here's what you need. A raw egg, not a boiled egg, a raw egg, vinegar, a spoon, and a large glass. You just want it to be able to fit your egg and some vinegar around it. So what you want to do is pour your vinegar in your glass to about three quarters the way up. You want it to be able to cover your egg. And we are going to very carefully, remember, this is a raw egg. We are going to very carefully drop our egg in the vinegar. Now, here's the important part. Put your spoon right on top of your egg. It doesn't seem important now, but I promise you it will. Now let's get close to the egg. Tell me what you observe. What are you seeing here? If you get really close to the shell, you will see bubbles, tiny little bubbles covering the entire eggshell. What's happening here? What's causing those bubbles? Is there something inside the egg that's coming out? No. This is the vinegar reacting with the calcium carbonate in the eggshell. So vinegar, or acetic acid, its chemical name, is reacting with the calcium carbonate. What is it doing? It's dissolving it. And it's creating carbon dioxide in the process. So our vinegar is going to do all of the work for us to remove that eggshell. Now what we're going to do is wait 24 to 48 hours. Over the course of a few hours, it'll become much more obvious why you need a spoon holding your egg down. Because these bubbles are becoming bigger and they're making your egg more buoyant. They're making your egg less dense. So it wants to float up. So it's not quite there yet, but it'll happen soon. And your egg will want to float up to the surface. And if any part of the egg is not covered in vinegar, that part of the shell won't dissolve. So you want the entire egg submerged in your vinegar. Now, after 24 hours, your egg will look like this. So let's go ahead and look at our naked egg. It's in the process. It feels so weird. You guys are going to love this one. It feels so weird. So look, the eggshell is mostly dissolved. And look what I can do here. I can remove some of it with my fingers right now, revealing the membranes underneath. And you'll notice the egg yolk and the egg white aren't coming out. Why is that? It's because underneath an eggshell, there's an outer membrane and an inner membrane holding all of that gunk inside the egg. So that's not going to fall out. We're just removing the shell. We're not removing the membranes. So this is in the process of becoming a naked egg. And you can remove some of the outer shell with your fingers here, but it's not done yet. So we're going to leave this one in for another 24 hours. And then after 48 hours, it'll look like this. Look at this guy. Oh my gosh. So so much of that shell has now been dissolved. There's still parts of the shell that's not dissolved right here. Let's see if we can remove that with our fingers. What you want to do is just gently run this under a stream of water and take your thumb and rub off the rest of that calcium carbonate. You can see it getting smaller and smaller and smaller with my thumb here. And it feels really sandy underneath your thumb. You can sort of feel it breaking apart as you do this. It looks like this part of our egg may not have been completely submerged in vinegar, so it's still a little hard. If you just leave it in vinegar for a little while longer, that will finally go away. But look at the rest of our egg. Look how weird that is. And watch this. It's squishy. Isn't that so cool? Those are the membranes holding all of the egg yolk and the egg white right inside. Look at this compared to a regular egg. It got bigger. What happened here? Well, in vinegar you have acetic acid, but you also have a ton of water. A higher concentration of water, in fact, than what is in a normal raw egg. And what happens then? Well, then you have osmosis. Osmosis is when water molecules want to transfer from an area of high concentration of water molecules to an area of low concentration of water molecules to just even things out, to meet equilibrium. So in our membrane here, our outer and inner membrane, it's something known as semi-permeable, which means that water molecules, because they're so teeny and small, can seep through. And so what we have here is kind of like if you had a party with two rooms of water molecules, and in the middle, you had a revolving door. And one party, you have a ton of water molecules. It's so fun. It's a rager. It's really great. And in the other room, it's kind of boring. There's only a couple of people there. Well, water molecules, they're so fair and so nice and so kind. And so a lot of the water molecules in the rager, they go through the revolving door, and they even things out to go into the other room. They move on in and move on in and move on in until things are equal. That's what happened with our egg. The water molecules from the vinegar marched right through our revolving door, the semi-permeable membrane of the egg, into our egg, making it bigger. And that's the power of osmosis. Now, what we can do here is try to bounce our egg. Are you brave enough? Oh, look! The rest of my eggshell fell off. That's amazing. OK. So what you can do is test how strong a naked egg is. Because the semi-permeable membrane is tough. But how tough? Is it tough enough to fall from an inch? Three, two, one. Yup. Let's look at that again. This is a real egg. This is a raw egg. This is amazing. Whoa! That's a close one. It's a little slippery. The final thing that you can do, if you want, is see how high you can bounce your naked egg. Two inches? Three inches? OK, OK. Four inches? Oh, this is gonna be easy. OK. Oh my gosh, you guys. These are so much stronger than you think. No way. Are you kidding me? Six inches. Seven? No. Not seven. Oh my god. Eight? Are you kidding me? Nine? No way, nine. No way, no. Ah! Oh my god. How are you doing this? Ten, ten, ten, ten, ten. And that is what happens when you bounce a rubber egg a little too high. Look, you can see the membranes here. Oh, look. Oh my gosh, wait. That's incredible. OK, look. So you can see the regular egg right here with the egg white and the yolk. But look at all of this. Do you see what that is? That is the extra water that came into our egg from the vinegar. How cool is that? Oh, wow. I haven't seen that before. That's really cool. And we can see our membrane here. Look at this egg membrane. So stinking cool. Thanks for making a naked egg with me. If you like this one, be sure to check out my best-selling Stay Curious and Keep Exploring books for 99 more science experiments. I'm Emily Calandrelli. Subscribe for all things science and space. And remember, stay curious and keep exploring. I'll see you next time. Oh! Emily's Science Lab.