A novel method for boiling eggs (and a talk about egg prices & public science)

in this the year of Our Lord 2025 Italian scientists did the most Italian thing ever and they invented a new way to boil an egg you want to try it let's try it it's called periodic cooking it's by these researchers mostly out of Naples and uh their work is inspired by the whole SED egg thing a sous egg is uh not wrapped in plastic you the egg already comes wrapped a soused egg is when you take an egg and you just drop it in some water with your immersion circular that came with your suid kit

and you hold that water and the egg at a modest temperature for a really long time like 45 minutes at you know 150° fah which would be like 65 C it gets you this really creamy semi-solid yolk the problem is that the white is also semisolid a little bit liquidy which people usually don't like right as the scientists point out here only one of the many kinds of protein that are found in the white will actually uh coagulate at these temperatures the rest will just stay liquid so to get that creamy Yol effect but also

with a solid white they did a whole bunch of like mathematical modeling and other really intense stuff to work out a procedure which is basically uh right there you take the egg you boil it for 2 minutes then you take it out and you transfer it to water that's basically at room temperature a little bit north of room temperature you put it in that water to cool down for 2 minutes then you transfer it back to the boiling water for 2 minutes and then back to the cooler water for 2 minutes and you repeat for

32 total minutes I've done this before with a single egg and a slotted spoon obviously that was incredibly labor intensive if we're going to do this at all we want to do it with a larger volume of eggs so I've got half a dozen eggs here in a SI that I can kind of dip in and out of the two vessels we'll see if that works okay we'll gently submerge our eggs in there okay okay okay I think we're in and then uh the best way to time this is to use a stopwatch with a

Lap timer that you might recognize back from your your high school track days if you did that I'm keeping it covered because I have a really weak gas stove and if I don't keep it covered my water temperature tends to dip below the 100° C that the researchers used for their experiment and to perfect the method so here we are coming up on the the second lap lap 2 minutes okay and we go gently to the nice cool water to cool off for a little while all right next 2minute lap is over hit the lap

button transfer back on over to the hot water and we repeat for 32 total minutes remember what we're doing here is heating the outside of the egg that transfers heat inside the egg but before the very dead center of the egg where the yolk lives gets too hot what we do is we pull the egg out we put it in the comparatively cooler water to cool everything back down again and then we repeat and this way we slowly cook the white without letting too much heat penetrate Into the Dead Center where the Yol is 2

minutes lap all obviously until somebody invents a machine that can follow this exact temperature curve automatically this is not going to be like something that I do every day in order to uh make protein to feed myself no for that I go to a factor sponsor of this video legit especially now that I'm training regularly in the gym again I want my fresh protein and vegetables in my belly at prescribed intervals and I'm not going to cook every one of those meals myself I've have other things to do factor is owned by hellofresh which has

supported the channel for years you know the meals are fresh not Frozen when they arrive at your doorstep and there's no chopping or anything you just heat them up ooh they sent some extras 's got the carrot ginger juice wow wow that's like that's surprisingly delicious the meals are hot in a couple of minutes and no joke I would do a video about whatever method they are using to produce the most consistently juicy chicken breast I have ever had that was not cooked to order and I got my cauliflower rice there the green beans still

have a lot of snap to them shockingly delicious and dietitian approved take all the stress and much of the expense out of feeding yourself like a grown-up every day let Factor handle that at least some of the time they've got vegan meal plans low cal lots of options hit my link in the description or go to factor75.com use my code 50 rusia to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first Factor box that's 50% off with code 50 rusia thank you factor anyway the new mathematically modeled method for producing a perfect boiled egg 2

minutes in each bath and I'm using as much water as possible in both baths especially this one um to uh prevent the eggs from heating this water up too much higher beyond the target temperature right because now the hot eggs uh that energy is being distributed across a whole lot of water molecules because I started with a pretty large thing of water like I said I have eaten one of these new fangled boiled eggs before is it worth it maybe now it is when egg prices have skyrocketed and we should probably be treating our eggs

with a little bit more respect hey why are eggs suddenly so expensive in the United States it's really really important and while we're doing this I think we should talk about that us egg producers have since 2022 uh been dealing with an outbreak of Aven influenza bird flu it's exactly what it sounds like it's really bad among domestic chickens and the chickens that we rais for meat have been affected by bird flu but not nearly as much as the chickens that we raise to lay eggs the egg laying hens hens are kept in uh different

kinds of facilities they they live to be older than the chickens that we raised for meat nobody knows why they're they're more likely to be affected by bird flu but they are we had another spike in the outbreak starting in the last summer late last summer and when a hen house has some bird flu in it you just have to kill all the hens there's no other way to stop it so in the last few months us egg producers have had to put down something like 15% of their egg laying hens so there's fewer eggs

on the market especially in certain areas and uh people panic by when that happens they buy out all the eggs and there's no eggs in the store so the stores raise the the prices to discourage people from clearing out all of the eggs or you could call it price gouging I suppose it's a little bit of both and for some reason states that have laws encouraging uh so-called cagefree egg production have seen uh slightly higher rates of bird flu like in California slightly higher rates of bird flu nobody knows why it may be that those

states are just more on the migratory bird routes where migratory birds are bringing the virus with them what we do know is that uh bird flu can spread to cattle and it has now I've seen a whole lot of like viral rage bait content on the internet where people are blaming the spread of bird flu from birds to cattle on the fact that some cattle in the United States do eat a feed that has chicken litter in it chicken droppings and little bits of feathers and ground up dead chicken and stuff it's one of these

things that like definitely sounds gross just because something sounds gross doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad practice and I don't want to weigh in on that practice right now I will say that normally the kind of chicken litter that they put into animal feed uh is pasteurized and therefore it shouldn't have any germs in it they pasteurize it by uh stacking it where you just take the the litter and you kind of pile it up on itself like a mulch pile so that you know the fermentation all the different exothermic chemical breakdown reactions that happen

inside the pile create heat and that heat kind of spreads through the whole pile it sits at an elevated temperature for a long time it pasteurizes it kills all the germs theoretically we don't know how bird flu got to cattle what we do know is that um the way that bird flu is spreading among cattle is mostly through milk there's a lot of the virus in the milk of an infected cow and it seems to be getting spread from uh via milking equipment right so it's not even really a beef thing in the US right

now it's it's really a dairy thing lap and uh yes people do also get bird flu it's usually workers who are working in close contact with the birds and not using sufficient personal protective gear uh a few dozen cases in the United States in the last year or so and uh one known death bird flu isn't something that like the average person really needs to freak out about yet it's just something where I'm really glad that we have scientists and public health officials keeping their eye on it unfortunately their work is getting much more difficult

these days and we also need to talk about that we have a new uh presidential Administration in the United States right now and that Administration is currently making or uh at least contemplating major major major cuts to uh publicly funded science here in the US now it's important to acknowledge that the president and his advisers have stated reasons for doing this their stated position is that the American Scientific establishment which is significantly funded by taxpayer dollars um doesn't use the taxpayers dollar wisely and also engages in a lot of research that is driven by um

controversial political motives right to that I say yeah maybe I don't know I mean I've known a lot of people in my life in universities and outside of universities and everybody tends to be at least a little bit careless and uh wasteful with somebody else's money I also find that most human beings have a political agenda of some kind but we have to ask ourselves what do we think will make that problem worse or better just like the solution to bad speech is usually more speech the solution to bad science is more science and I

I think we're heading into a world where there's going to be a lot less science and that scares me under the direction of the new Administration the National Institute of Health NIH announced on Friday that they were going to start capping what are called indirect research costs at 15% that is a huge deal and please let me try to explain why okay when you get a grant to do some science from the government they give you some money to go do an experiment or something you're supposed to use all of it for direct costs that's

like the test tubes that you're using and the you know the virus samples that you buy to study the disease that you're studying or whatever it is you do that's the direct cost then they also give you an additional percentage of your Grant above that like 15 20 30 50 60% for what they call indirect costs which is usually like overhead it's the facility it's the lab and all the people who run the lab some Grant applicants only need about 15% for indirect costs because you know it's a small independent lab doing a small little

study they're just isn't that much that they need beyond their own time and effort and their computer but let's just say that you're like a cancer researcher who needs an experimental nuclear reactor to generate like the neutrons that you need in order to do your work you're not going to do that that at a teeny little lab for that you need to go to MIT or to my alma mater Penn State where they have experimental nuclear reactors extraordinarily expensive installations with enormous overhead costs associated with them that's one of the big reasons why people do

their research at a university because they need those kinds of like hardcore facilities resources and that stuff just costs more so indirect cost going to a university will often be 60% not 15 speak of numbers we've hit our 32 minutes and so it's time for these to come on out and actually they need to cool down in uh cool running water this is pretty warm water yeah so universities generally want and get much higher indirect costs for their government uh research grants from NIH now what do they do with that money did like the big-time

University Fat Cats just kind of line their own feather beds with that money well uh as someone who's had a number of uh bad run-ins with University administrators in my career I can tell you I'm sympath to that interpretation but I don't really think that that's what's going on um I used to have to participate in an annual Grant review process as part of my old job at a university and let me tell you it's like pulling teeth it's like having the most intimate parts of your body exam anded you have to account for every

single scent that you have spent also universities generally are already subsidizing the research that goes on there to the tune of billions and billions of dollars that's on top of the money that the government is giving them through these indirect uh cost grants so yeah as of this week new and existing NIH grants the indirect costs are capped at 15% this is going to absolutely decimate the scientific research system that we take for granted here in the United States the system that has produced the science that underlies all of the Technologies the miraculous technologies that

we take for granted every day this is where that came from now it's also been reported that the new Administration plans to lay off about half of the people who work at the National Science Foundation and to cut the budget there by about 2/3 now let's say that you're a person who thinks that health science is compromised that like big Pharma does not want to cure our diseases anymore they just want to get us hooked on expensive pills for the rest of our lives you know what I'm kind of sympathetic to that worldview too I

think there's a lot of legitimate complaint there however this move of defunding public science in the US this is going to make that problem so much worse not better cuz these are the grants that pay for like basic research if you've got an idea for a pill that's going to make billions of dollars you don't need a government grant for that you go to a government grant when like you just want to try to understand something about how these different subatomic particles interact and you don't know if it's going to you know lead to a

revolutionary new technology or anything you just want to try to understand it a little bit better that's what government science is really valuable for especially the kind that goes to universities because the universities have the like particle accelerators and stuff that are necessary to do that kind of research and yeah it costs money more than 15% I mean think of all the brilliant scientists who fled Central Europe in the 1930s when they and their work became political Ally unpopular countries like the United States took them in in droves and we gave them grants and they

produced science that gave us like the internet and nuclear power and all kinds of incredible things Nations that invest in science invest in their future so if you like me and my videos my guess is you're a curious person who likes the fact that there are scientists working on your behalf to learn about your world for you here's something that I need you to do I'm asking you to a favor free- old buddy goose and listen if you are um someone who voted for the current Administration in the United States I need you most of

all because your voice is going to be heard louder than anybody else's if you need it there's a link in the description where you can find out how to call your representatives in Congress call them leave a message and if you're a Republican and or a trump voter please do tell them that and tell them that you know I support the president and I support him doing this I support him doing that I just don't want to cut science I think that we need to keep investing in science as a nation to invest in our

ourselves tell your representatives that you support publicly funded science because publicly funded science is at the foundations of American Prosperity today as we know it I really really am not eager to get this explicitly political in a video here on my channel the fact that I'm doing it should I hoped communicate to you how seriously I take this and how important I think this is I don't want to do this I'm doing it anyway because I think that we got to all right let's go ahead and uh crack and peel these eggs which I'm not

very good at oh go Birds by the way I wore this during the Super Bowl instead of my Chris Jones shirt and I think that's why the Eagles beat the Chiefs let's go ahead and cut this baby see what that yolk looks like oh all right I think I overcooked it a little bit this time but it's still got that nice kind of jelly like texture in it right now if you think that you don't like plain boiled eggs I would suggest that maybe the reason is that you haven't uh put crunchy salt on them

you got to put crunchy salt on there and uh it is a better way to cook an egg I'm not going to lie call your congressmen and your Senators especially if you're a Republican or a trump voter they're going to listen to you more say that you ride for science oh hey update as of uh editing time a federal judge in Boston has temporarily paused this decrease in the uh indirect cost rate cap and I don't know if the Trump Administration is going to abide by that ruling they have not abided by other rulings and

that's a thing that's going on right now yes Adam also has concerns about other things that the Trump Administration is doing I'm choosing to focus on funding for science right now because I think that that's something that our entire Community here can get behind and uh politics necessarily involves acting on whatever Common Ground you can find with the other people who share your world with you and we don't generally get to choose who we share our world with unless we're willing to uh commit mass murder and I think you would agree that we should all

try to minimize that and hey look if you're on my side here and you want to try to preserve funding for science please be careful about how you engage in the comments on this one let's not needlessly alienate people who could join us in this particular effort do you want to be right or do you want to fix the problem