Last week, just as I was drifting off to sleep, my dog Rowdy made a weird noise. He was almost barking, but not quite. It startled me awake and, adrenaline slightly pumping, I was more alert when he then did it a second time. It was a weird noise, something like "berf." Like he was trying to bark without opening his mouth. I realized that he wasn't dying, nor had he heard an intruder downstairs. He was barking in his sleep.
Any of you who have pets, dogs especially, have probably noticed something like this. Dogs pretty regularly start twitching their legs while they sleep, or even moving them as if they're running. Our reaction is always "Aww, he's dreaming!" Well, that was my reaction the night of the berfs. But it got me wondering: do we really know if dogs dream? And how much do we know about it if they do?
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I was reading through science news, like you do, when I came across this article about some chemists at UC Irvine who have developed a way to un-boil hard-boiled eggs. The process wasn't developed specifically to turn back the clock on boiled eggs, though, but to "reset" proteins that have been tangled and misfolded through some sort of chemical process so they can be recycled or reused. Medicine, biotech, and food production rely on the steady production of proteins but sometimes the manufacturing goes awry. Currently the only way to reuse the misfolded proteins requires an expensive and time-consuming process. This new one cuts the time and the cost to a small fraction of what it used to be.
And it doesn't really unboil the whole egg, either. It just resets one of the proteins in the egg what to what it was before the heat screwed it all up and solidified the albumen. The protein is lysozyme, which makes up only a few percent of the albumen. The egg isn't completely reset; heck, the egg white isn't even mostly reset, but it's still a really cool proof of concept.
This got me thinking about two things: first, if we're now one step closer to reversing the Maillard reaction and fixing overcooked steaks (probably not) and second, entropy.
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