Latest news with #eggdrop
Forbes
08-05-2025
- Science
- Forbes
The Best Way To Drop An Egg So It Won't Crack, According To Engineers
Engineers used compression tests to see what it took to crack an egg in either a horizontal or ... More vertical position. A new paper could change the way students tackle the classic egg-drop science challenge. Conventional wisdom suggests an egg is stronger when dropped on a pointed end. A team of researchers put that idea to the test and found something surprising: Eggs are less likely to crack if dropped on their sides. The egg-drop challenge is a rite of passage for many young scientists and engineers. A teacher typically arranges the experiment so that all students drop an egg from the same height, like off the top of a ladder. The students have to devise clever ways to prevent the egg from breaking. That could mean building a cushioned structure, employing bubble wrap or trying out a slowing method like a parachute. Whether you're aiming for shock absorption or another protection method, the orientation of the egg could make a big difference. A team of engineers, including multiple researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a study on egg strength and toughness in the journal Communications Physics. First-year students in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering participate in an egg-drop competition. But MIT engineers began to question the vertical norm for egg orientation. First author Antony Sutanto taking measurements of eggs before performing dynamic egg drop tests. The researchers put eggs through their paces in two different tests. One was a static compression test that applied increasing force to the eggs. The other was a drop test. The compression test delivered some intriguing results. The same amount of force could crack the egg, no matter the orientation. 'However, we noticed a key difference in how much the egg compressed before it broke,' said doctoral candidate Joseph Bonavia in an MIT release on Thursday. 'The horizontal egg compressed more under the same amount of force, meaning it was more compliant.' The egg's ability to absorb more energy in the horizontal position had implications for the drop tests. It seemed to suggest eggs on their sides might perform better under the dynamic circumstances of a drop. The researchers' drop test was more rigorous and repeatable than a typical egg-drop challenge. The team used solenoids and 3D-printed supports to ensure consistency in the drops, which took place from varying heights. In total, 180 eggs went through the drop tests. Half of the eggs dropped vertically from a height of 8 millimeters cracked, but less than 10% of horizontal eggs cracked when dropped from the same height. 'This confirmed what we saw in the static tests,' said MIT undergraduate researcher Avishai Jeselsohn. 'Even though both orientations experienced similar peak forces, the horizontal eggs absorbed energy better and were more resistant to breaking.' So, how did we get so focused on the vertical strength of eggs? 'The authors conclude that the reason behind the common misassumption that an egg dropped vertically is less likely to crack is a confusion between the physical properties stiffness, strength and toughness,' Communications Physics publisher Springer Nature said in a statement. The tendency for cooks to crack eggs on their sides when preparing a meal might also have reinforced the idea that eggs are stronger on their noses—but that's a different type of force than an egg experiences from a drop. High egg prices have been a sore point for consumers due to bird-flu-related shortages. Prices have improved, but eggs are still a precious commodity. A horizontal egg-drop attempt might be your best chance at the egg surviving long enough to make it into the frying pan.
Gizmodo
08-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
The Best Way to Drop an Egg Without Breaking It, According to Science
Here's hoping Humpty Dumpty reads the news. In research out today, scientists have apparently figured out the safest way to drop an egg without it breaking. Researchers at MIT conducted the study, published Thursday in Communications Physics. After nearly 200 experiments, the team determined that dropping an egg horizontally is more likely to keep it intact than a vertical drop—completely contrary to folk wisdom. MIT and many other schools regularly host an 'egg drop challenge' for their students. The goal is simple enough: use some ingenuity and basic materials like toothpicks and twine to construct a contraption that will keep their eggs from breaking once dropped. But according to study researcher and engineer Tal Cohen, both teachers and online sources will often also recommend that the egg stays vertical to further lower the risk of cracking. The underlying assumption behind this advice is that the egg's vertical structure resembles an arch, and arches are very good at redistributing the loads of energy (or force) placed on them. 'After a number of times doing this competition, we started to question the common notion. We weren't convinced that the static explanation, which applies to an arch, translates to the case of dynamic impact,' Cohen, an associate professor in the Sustainable Materials and Infrastructure department at MIT, told Gizmodo. Cohen and her team took some of the eggs left behind at the end of a recent MIT challenge to test their hunch in the lab, but their initial experiments were inconclusive. So they decided to start a formal and more extensive project. In total, they dropped 180 eggs either vertically or horizontally onto a hard surface. The eggs were dropped in rounds of 60 each at three different heights: 8, 9, and 10 millimeters (basically between 0.32 and 0.39 inches). And overall, the vertically dropped eggs fared worse. More than half of the vertical eggs broke when dropped 8 millimeters, for instance, compared to less than 10% of horizontal eggs. Further tests also showed that the horizontally dropped eggs could compress more before breaking than the vertically dropped ones. The findings might not be world-changing, but they illustrate how our conventional wisdom can sometimes lead us astray, even the kind that's taught in science classrooms. 'People tend to have better intuition for stiffness and strength, which are important in statics. It is common that they refer intuitively to the redistribution of a load along the arch. However, when dynamics are involved, toughness is also an important quantity,' Cohen said. 'For example, consider two balls; one made of glass, and the other of rubber. The glass ball is stiffer and may have higher strength, but when dropped from a height, the glass ball is also more likely to break, while the rubber ball can deform to absorb the kinetic energy, without breaking.' Cohen notes that there are plenty of things in both nature and engineering like eggs that have thin shells protecting their inner contents. So their research here could very well help 'influence how people think about these structures as well,' she said. Personally, I'm just glad I'll have another reason to be mad at myself when I inevitably drop my next egg onto the kitchen floor while cooking—I should have remembered to keep it horizontal!
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Science
- New York Times
The Best Way to Drop an Egg
The egg drop challenge is an annual rite of passage for many students learning about physics: Swaddle an egg in cotton balls and masking tape or other materials, and then drop it off the roof of your school. Anyone who has participated in this exercise knows how difficult it is to engineer a structure that will save the egg from a messy end. (It certainly was not my bespoke foam core creation in middle school.) Once the eggs are broken, teachers may reveal insights into the physics of impact, including the claim that eggs sitting vertically crack less often than eggs sitting horizontally. But is that really true? After running egg drop challenges for university freshman, Tal Cohen, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began to wonder whether that assertion really fit the picture of a falling egg. 'It's based on the static behavior of an egg,' she said. 'Dynamic impact is quite different.' To assess whether she was telling students the right story, she headed to the lab, eggs in tow, and performed some tests. What she found suggested the truth was more complicated, and in a paper out Thursday in the journal Communications Physics, she and her colleagues report that eggs lying horizontally are actually less likely to crack. To perform their experiments, the researchers first headed to Costco and picked up more than 200 eggs (this at a moment in 2023 when eggs were cheaper than today). Then the team crushed some in a device that allowed them to record the force required to crack the shells. They found that eggshells cracked under about the same force regardless of whether they were lying down or sitting up in the device. They then actually dropped the eggs. For experimental purposes, they dropped them from tiny heights — just eight millimeters or so. That was so they could see a variety of outcomes. If they dropped the eggs from bigger heights, all of them broke regardless of orientation. An important difference between the positions was observed. Eggs dropped so they landed on their sides were substantially less likely to crack. When they hit, the shell was able to compress, absorbing some of the blow. Eggs dropped on their ends, where the shell is stiffer, did not show such flexibility. There's an analogy to be drawn to the human body, said Joseph E. Bonavia, an M.I.T. graduate student in engineering and an author of the paper. 'If you are falling from a height, you don't want to lock your knees. You'll break your bones,' he said. 'You want to bend your knees — that's what the egg is doing.' The way we cook eggs may have contributed to the widespread misunderstanding that the side of the egg is most fragile, said Brendan M. Unikewicz, also an M.I.T. graduate student and another author of the paper. That's because we usually crack eggs in half at the midpoint. Breaking the horizontal side results in long cracks that can split the shell in half cleanly, while cracking eggs on their tips, as these experiments showed, results in the shell collapsing inward — not, in other words, the optimal outcome for making an omelet. Indeed, the experiments reveal that our intuition about what happens in real-life scenarios where an object is falling cannot always be relied upon, Dr. Cohen said. This is why it is important for engineers and students of engineering to remain open to challenging conventional wisdom, she said. Did anyone eat the eggs? By university policy, humans are not allowed to consume experimental materials after they've entered the lab. But Dr. Cohen's dog, under no such prohibition, had some hearty meals.
