Skanky Vamp
Sniffin' the Slayer
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From Techly
A couple of Aussie boffins have won the top 2015 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry for their work on discovering a means to unboil an egg.
Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston, who were both at the University of Western Australia when conducting their egg research, discovered that by using a vortex fluid device they could untangle the proteins that become intertwined when an egg is boiled.
“In the experiment we used the device to untangle the egg proteins to return them to their previous state and the results were surprising,” said Ormonde. “We were intrigued to see how our processing method altered the protein structures, and it came as a big surprise when we saw the vortex fluid device had successfully unboiled the egg.”
The Ig Nobel Prize is an award created by the the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, which aims to reward “research that makes people laugh and then think”. So while it may seem as though unboiling an egg is simply a novel bit of science without any real-world application, the results could have important implications.
Primarily, the research is now being used to develop cancer treatments, with the UWA explaining they are aiming to harness “the energies within the vortex to create nano-drugs with properties normally too small to be created using traditional methods.”
As such, while the Ig Nobels don’t take themselves too seriously, the scientific community does, with the winners being presented with their award by Nobel laureates at Harvard in the United States.
“This work was my first scientific publication and a hugely exciting project to work on,” Ormonde said. “Plus, it’s not every day that you’re asked to go all the way Harvard and receive an award in a room full of Nobel laureates.”
A couple of Aussie boffins have won the top 2015 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry for their work on discovering a means to unboil an egg.
Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston, who were both at the University of Western Australia when conducting their egg research, discovered that by using a vortex fluid device they could untangle the proteins that become intertwined when an egg is boiled.
“In the experiment we used the device to untangle the egg proteins to return them to their previous state and the results were surprising,” said Ormonde. “We were intrigued to see how our processing method altered the protein structures, and it came as a big surprise when we saw the vortex fluid device had successfully unboiled the egg.”
The Ig Nobel Prize is an award created by the the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, which aims to reward “research that makes people laugh and then think”. So while it may seem as though unboiling an egg is simply a novel bit of science without any real-world application, the results could have important implications.
Primarily, the research is now being used to develop cancer treatments, with the UWA explaining they are aiming to harness “the energies within the vortex to create nano-drugs with properties normally too small to be created using traditional methods.”
As such, while the Ig Nobels don’t take themselves too seriously, the scientific community does, with the winners being presented with their award by Nobel laureates at Harvard in the United States.
“This work was my first scientific publication and a hugely exciting project to work on,” Ormonde said. “Plus, it’s not every day that you’re asked to go all the way Harvard and receive an award in a room full of Nobel laureates.”
