From the Vault: Into the Egg Chamber

it was your idea. Yeah, well I'm not I'm not doubting that, nor am I doubting that it's a fun episode. I just don't remember it at all. All Right, here we go. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to reach into a jar of pickled eggs and and see what we pull out. Yes, that's right, we are venturing into the egg chamber. Uh.

This is going to be kind of a potpourri episode. Uh, kind of a you know, a salad bar episode with with multiple curiosities plucked from the vinegar soaked vat here, and if everyone digs it, perhaps will come back and explore more topics along this line. But basically, yeah, we're talking about eggs, and eggs just in general are pretty amazing,

even in their most mundane form. Factoring you know, into the equation the more familiar examples of reproduction and cuisine, you know, I feel like we need to take a step back and just consider how weird and wonderful they

are there in the organic vessel. A means for biology to leave one being and then develop into another and then burst free of this protective shell or casing that has served as its vehicle the egg and way makes me think of that quote that we've talked about a couple of times that was in Brian Green's book about how when we learned to take the water with us out of the ocean, that's like how organisms move to land, like you know that where water bags slashing around on feet,

and in a way, the egg is sort of the same principle. It takes some of the same sustaining conditions from being within the mother's body, outside of the body where you can eventually hatch out after you mature enough. I like that you brought up the ocean here, because we all of course come from the ocean, that is the the ultimate origin of of life here on Earth.

But but in addition to that, we see of course primordial oceans factoring into various world mythologies, and we also see the idea of an egg featuring prominently in world mythologies as well. We see variations of the world egg in many different myth cycles, including but not limited to Vedic, Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese mythologies, and we can we can easily devote an entire episode just to these varied myths, because they're

all pretty pretty fabulous. The idea of of of the universe or some primordial creator being emerging from this egg uh. In the Greek tradition, it's known as the and it's often depicted as being kind of serpent bound, this orphic

egg from which the primordial fanniase emerges. Isn't it interesting though, the way that the egg is kind of a biological Pandora's box to go to another Greek myth, because you can't always tell from the external morphology of the egg what kind of animal is inside, right right, and certainly in the case so we've We've of course talked about like various brood parasites in the show before, including avian

examples like the cuckoo. Uh and, in which case, you know, the a mother bird may not be able to tell if one of the eggs has been placed into her nest by another species, the speaking of mysterious and and difficult to identify orbs. Uh So, the idea that made us want to do this episode was something that you shared with me last week. It was a news article

about a really interesting fossil find. This was so. The article you shared was a June NPR article by Nell Greenfield Boice, and it tells the story of how a paleontologist from U T. Austin named Julia Clark was visiting a colleague named David Rubyl R. Rogers, who works at Chile's National Museum of Natural History. And this was back in and Ruble R. Rogers apparently wanted Clark's opinion on a very strange fossil in his collection, which had been

found in an Arctico way back in two thousand eleven. Specifically, it was on an island off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula called Seymour Island. And Seymour Island has been a rich site for fossil excavations for more than a hundred years now. I think I've read about fossils being

found there in the eighteen nineties. But Greenfield Voice describes the fossil that these two paleontologists were looking at as more than eleven by seven inches, so it's about twenty nine by twenty centimeters and of pretty much the exact size and appearance of a deflated football, except its stone. Now it's it's petrified, it's fossilized, and Ruble R. Rogers and his colleagues referred to this object as the thing,

so you can see why we were intrigued. Absolutely, And the images that that that accompanied this article of the thing do look very thing ish, uh it is it almost almost looks like it's like a withered face, you know, kind of like the face of the sorting hat or something, or what's that the oogie Boogie creature from the nine Are before Christmas. I was thinking exactly that, and I

think that's a really good point. The comparison to a deflated football or this kind of wrinkly oogie boogeyman face is really good because when you look at this object, even though it is now fully fossilized, is basically it is a mineral product. You can immediately see in its creases and textures the remnants of what must have been some kind of soft, leathery membrane collapsed in on itself. So, yes, it's mysterious, Yes it's creepy. It is definitely a thing.

But what is it? It's just this strange collapsed, deflated orb. Well. Upon further analysis, the researchers here figured out that this was an egg. It's a fossil of a giant soft shelled egg from around sixty eight million years ago, so that this would be just towards the ends of the Cretaceous period, near the KPg boundary that marks the end of the non avian dinosaurs. And the researchers published their

findings in the journal Nature earlier this month. The article was called a giant soft shelled egg from the Late Cretaceous of Antarctica, and this is now the largest soft shelled egg ever known to exist, and it's uh in addition to being the largest soft shelled egg, it's the second largest egg of any kind and known to ever exist, falling only slightly behind the huge eggs of Madagascar's flightless elephant birds, which would extinct sometime in the past few

hundred years. Yeah, we we discussed them a little bit in our MOA episodes, right, But but even that was only a little bit bigger than this egg. And the author's conclude that this was probably the egg of a gigantic marine reptile such as a mosasaur, of which adult remains had been found nearby the same fossil beds. So you find adult mosasaurs nearby there and around the same layer, it seems like this very likely came from a creature

like that. And on the importance of this find, Greenfield voice in her n p R piece, quotes an evolutionary biologist from Princeton University named Mary Caswell Stoddard, who says, quote, a soft shelled fossil egg like this is a rare gym. The lack of soft shelled fossil eggs, which are extremely rare, makes it challenging to flesh out a detailed picture of egg evolution invertebrates. This discovery helps provide one critical piece

of the puzzle. So this is important because it gives us a look at something that we don't often see captured in fossil form, the soft shelled egg, and it helps us get a better picture of how exactly eggs changed and evolved as dinosaurs evolved over time. Oh and real quick, if you if you're out there listening and you're like, okay, mossaur, which one is that put it

in Jurassic Park terms for me? Well, in the movie Jurassic World, that's supposed to be a mosasaur in the big aquatic part of the park, or the one that like eats an executive assistant or something. Yeah. Yeah, the really horrible scene in the film where where it sleeps up and eats this, uh, this I think otherwise innocent character in the film. Yeah, I remember that. That was. Well I'm not going to get off on all my Jurassic World beefs, but that scene felt totally strange. Yeah, yeah,

I agreed, But still great dinosaur sequence. I just wish she had been more of a villain or something. But yeah, So, so back to the thing, so that the characteristics of this egg are strange. Instead of the hard calcified shells

that paleontologists used to believe, we're just the norm for dinosaurs. This, along with other recent egg finds, for example, from the genus Protoceratops and the genus um Moossaris, reveals that many dinosaurs and Cretaceous marine reptiles laid eggs that were like this that we're pliable and soft like some turtle species due today. And it looks like it, just it varied

according to different groups of dinosaurs. So you would have therapod dinosaurs like the t rex and they would lay calcified, hard shelled eggs, and you'd have many saua pods or hadrosaurs also laying hard shelled, calcified eggs like the ones you would imagine from birds or many reptiles that live on land today. While you have these their animals like probably mosasaurs, probably Protoceratops, laying softer, leathery or eggs. And so the question is why would the egg shell be

so thin and soft. What's the advantage to that. Well, one possibility is maybe that's just the way things had always been, and they would stay that way unless they were driven by specific environmental pressures to become otherwise, to harden and calcify. The researchers in this other nature paper from this year, the one I mentioned a minute ago. It's called it's just called the first dinosaur egg was soft.

They argued that ancestral dinosaurs probably all laid soft shelled eggs, and then over time, over the millions of years, via convergent evolution, several different groups of later dinosaurs independently evolved the adaptation of hard shelled eggs at least three different times that we know of. So there would have been just been evolutionary pressure for thicker shells on some of these other dinosaurs, but apparently not on this one. Probably

not on this mosasaur creature. Uh so, So, looking specifically at the thing, the authors of that study in Nature posits something really interesting about it. They say at the end of their abstract quote, such a large egg with a relatively thin eggshell may reflect a derived constraints associated with body shape, reproductive investment linked with gigantism and lepido sarian viviparity, in which a vestigial egg is laid and

hatches immediately. So we don't know this for sure, but what they're saying it looks like here is this was very likely a creature that laid an egg, but it was almost a sort of egg assisted live birth. So you would lay lay a soft, thin, pliable egg and then nearly immediately the hatchling would tear out of this egg sac and escape, and then the egg would fall

to the ocean floor and collapse. Yeah. All right, yeah, I think this this is making sense here because uh and you can imagine the world of the mosasaur like like all aquatic uh worlds. You know, it's it's it's probably not a really peaceful place. So that uh, that creature, that that young ling needs to be highly developed and just ready to burst out and go, not to sink to the bottom of the muck. Yeah. And this level of maturity at the time of hatching is a theme

that will come back to a few other times here. Yeah. In fact, our our next example of curious eggs from the natural world gets into this a little bit. I want to talk about the eggs of the volcano birds. Good. So, uh specifically we're going to be talking about the Malayo birds of the You'll find them on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, uh and then there's a smaller island named Bhutan where you'll also find them. Uh And uh Sulawesi is one of the four Greater Sunda Islands, actually the

world's eleventh largest island. I believe listeners might remember us from discussing this in the recent episode about archaeological finds there. It may push back the earliest date for known examples

of hunting scenes and prehistoric art. Oh. Yeah, and there was also a question I think about whether the same cave artwork in Indonesia depicted theory and thropes right, the idea of of UH theeomorphic or animal form humans, and if so, whether that would push back the earliest physical evidence we have of fantasy thinking or supernatural magical thinking in humans. Yeah, so, as far as I know, that's still kind of an open question. More research remains to

be UH conducted. But it's certainly exciting. But also the Malayo bird is rather exciting. I was not familiar with this creature until very recently, but basically it's a it's a chicken sized bird and we had and of course it lays eggs. And one of the important jobs of an egg layer is of course UH to provide for the eggs incubation. Now, in some cases an egg UH may basically be ready to go, like we said, the and it comes out. But then other times the egg needs to uh be cared for, it needs to be

incubated a bit longer. And in many cases, you know, a bird is just going to use their own body to incubate the egg. This is the classic scenario of a chicken, um uh you know land laying on its eggs. The example of penguins keeping their eggs warm, uh you know, by their feet, that sort of thing. It's a good energy move because I mean, you've got extra body heat coming off of you, whether you want that or not.

Why not put it to use exactly? And then it also opens up the door for various uh additional strategies such as again the cuckoo's brood parasites that don't actually incubate the egg further themselves, but have another bird another species do it through a mix of mimicry and or

threats of violence. But then there are also there are sort of environmental engineers animals that use the environment meant that build structures of some kind to help them incubate eggs without having to make a personal time commitment of just sitting on it the whole time. That's right, I mean it's almost it's almost as if the bird would think back, It's like, all right, what am I doing

Here'm providing heat? Where else can I get heat? Um? So, like in Australia, you see the example of the bush turkey, which actually builds a compost pile that incubates the eggs via the heat of microbial decay. Oh yeah, these things are great. I think some listeners in Australia have actually talked to us about them before, regarding them somewhat as pests for making giant mounds in their yard and things

like this. But uh, but yeah, the the bush turkey or brush turkey, these are examples of these megapode birds, uh that that are they're sort of like the beavers of the bird world. Yeah. And uh, you know, if you if anyone out there, if you, if you like like me, if you have a compost, uh, you know, spinner that sort of thing, you'll notice it does heat up in there. You know, there's a lot of acting of it going on inside the compost. When my son was younger, he would call it the hot hot machine.

And indeed that's what the bush turkey has done here, is that it creates its own hot, hot machine to incubate the eggs. Yeah. So it makes a big compost pile out of litter and leaf litter and things like that that I've read. I think sometimes that they can be as big as a car. Like these piles can be huge. Yeah, their size, well, I can see why it could be in some cases considered a pest because it just creates a big old heap. But you know what, if you've got a heap in your yard, don't be ashamed.

Don't be embarrassed. Be proud of your heat pointed out to your neighbors, say, check out that heap. That's really cool. It's hot. It's the hot hot heat. Yeah. Alright, So let's get back to the Malayo bird here um, which which also has a cool pair of solutions to this problem. It depends on one of two options for the incubation of its eggs. Either by burying its eggs in solar heated sands. So there's some hot sand over here, I'll put my eggs in there. Solar power will do the

rest or. And this is the exciting part, burying them in geothermally heated volcanic soils hot sands adjacent to volcanic events. Well, that's a strategy on the edge that that that bird is living on the edge. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's pretty amazing. There's a wonderful some wonderful footage of this as well, and it's just it's almost phoenix like this idea right of of of the the egg being deposited in the of volcanically heated ground and then it emerges.

Um by the way that the maleos egg is roughly watermelon shaped. And I was reading in a two thousand seventeen study from Princeton University that was doing like kind of an overall uh you know, catalog ng of egg sizes and game characteristics. They point out that it is the most elliptical of all Avian eggs. And the idea here is that the bird may have evolved to become a skillful flyer, and it's egg may also have evolved this way to accommodate a streamlined body that is built

for instantaneous flight. Now, wait a minute, would that mean the egg was shaped to accommodate the body of the of the embryo inside it or of the mother that's carrying it before it is laid. Um, my, interpretation. My understanding is that we're dealing more with the chick because the chick when it when it hatches, needs to be ready to go, because the whole idea of letting a volcano incubate your eggs letting a volcano raise your children is that you don't have to do anything. When the

egg hatches, the mother malao is long gone. So yeah, so the the young male the malayo chick, hatches and is on its own and ready to fly almost immediately. And this is actually a very special feature of megapode birds generally, the megapode. I was just wondering, Actually, everybody I've heard pronounced this word says megapodes, But then I was thinking about the antipodies, and I was like, it

isn't megapades but words. But no, I think it's megapoets anyway. Um, but yeah, these other birds, like the bush turkey, are famous for having young that are extremely quick to adapt to life, like immediately after hatching. They can run around, they can hunt, they can fly on a dime. All right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break,

but we'll be right back with more eggs. Thank Alright, we're back, So what's next in the egg chamber here, Joe, Well, Robert, as soon as you suggested the idea of doing an episode on eggs, my mind instantly filled with thoughts of Ridley Scott's Alien because I think, you know, we come back to this text quite a bit, and I think of John Hurt descending into an enclosed pit of these leathery orbs, and then he comes in closer to get a better look at one, and one of the eggs

nearby starts to throb, and it's flaps peel back, and of course we all know what happens next, right, the parasite and just leaps out, attaches itself to its to his face, mobilizes him, and begins putting some kind of alien pupa in his body. So in Alien, we're presented with the vision of a sort of predatory egg or ambush egg, and an egg which opens to unleash a parasite that requires no additional maturation outside the egg before it is lethal. And that made me wonder, is there

anything like a predatory egg in the natural world? Yeah, because this is, of course the most famous example is Alien BC. Versions of this throughout science fiction, influenced by alien, where there's some sort of horrible egg and yeah, you look at it wrong and it will open and get you, or you know, open and dix. It exudes some sort of a parasite that will creep up on you and get you. Yeah. Now I couldn't find anything exactly like alien,

but there are some pretty close parallels. In fact, things we've already talked about a good bit on the podcast, so we're not going to linger on too much, but I want to go in a few directions with this. One is just to talk about an interesting distinction in zoology that we've already been coming up against the border of and that's the relevant distinction between altriciality and precociality and animals. So, think of the hatchlings of a songbird,

like like a sparrow, you know, the passive forms. Here the sparrow, once it emerges from an egg, it is helpless. It could not survive on its own. It lacks the ability to fly, and I'm not sure if it even lacks the ability to walk really, I mean, it can't move around much by itself. It certainly can't forage for itself.

Once it hatches. The sparrow hatchling sits in the nest waiting to be brought food while it matures, and there there are many animals that are like this, you know, upon whether it's hatching from an egg or live birth. Upon being born, they can't really do much for themselves. They certainly can't move around much, and a species like this would be called altricial, meaning it's young or relatively helpless, unable to move around by themselves for a long time

after they're born or hatched. The opposite of altriciality is known as precociality, and this is from the same root word is precocious, a word that often gets applied to like creepily mature human children. Yes, when there's the little boy who speaks like an adult man and you know, quite surely temple is is often an example of this. Uh. A precocial species is one that matures and is able to move around on its own and finn for itself

relatively soon after being born or hatched. I think the most common metric used to measure this distinction is a movement like how much can this animal you know do its own locomotion? And there are some animals that take precociality to the extreme, and these are known as super precocial animals. A very commonly cited example is exactly what we've been talking about already, megapode birds. Of course, the megapodes include the malayo bird that you were just talking about.

They include the mound builder birds like the brush turkeys or the bush turkeys, and obviously not all of them are exactly the same, but megapodes generally, you're going to see that once they hatch, they're able to see. They're not born blind. They can see, they can walk, they can run, they can hunt, they can fly pretty much on the same day that they emerge from their eggs,

and that that's pretty amazing. Yeah, it really throws a lot of our, especially um human centric ideas about about birth and um and and and maturity right out the window totally, because obviously humans are relatively altricial, right um. But by this metric, the xenomorp face hugger from Alien would be an example of super precociality, right. It's taken

to the logical extreme. It's a parasite that that only needs one host and it is ready to attack that hosts literally the moment it emerges from its eggs, so

it's already hunting within seconds of of cracking out. Yeah, and of course we could easily do the whole podcasts about like each each faces in the life cycle of the zeno morph But you know, I was just thinking, it's like, in a way, is the face hugger that emerges from the egg, Like that seems to be like the the actual organism itself, right, Uh, depending on how

you interpret it, Well, yeah, it's interesting. It's it's a it's a creature with a life cycle that's got two completely morphologically different stages that are that are you know, like trophically staggered. So one life cycle gives rise to the next life cycle. But they're not the like, you know, adults do not emerge from the egg. The face hugger emerges from the egg, and then it finds a human.

It implants in the human the I guess there's a pupa that just states there and then that becomes the adult. So yeah, depending on how you look at it, the face hugger could be considered like the the the purest form of the organism before it ends up taking on properties of the the host organism. Oh, I see Yeah, yeah, yeah,

but by that count as well. I've also seen interpretations that the say, well, the face hugger is essentially like a mobile sex organ like, it's not it's it's not the organism itself, it is a precursor to it um. And then ultimately the whole life cycle is so suitably alien that it doesn't completely line up with with even some of the elaborate life cycles that we see here

on Earth, and we do have some really elaborate ones. Yeah, And I would say of all the life cycles that we see on Earth, I think probably the one that the alien creature is the closest to is something we've actually talked about a good bit on the show before. So we're not going to rehash everything here, but just

real quickly. Parasitoid wasps um so parasitoid wasps you know, there are different well actually you could just say parasitoids in general, but the parasitoid wasp the hymenoptera in parasitoids are a really good example where what they will often do is they will find a host organism such as a tarantula or something like that they will immobilize it, so they injected with a parallel rising venom, seal it up some way with their eggs, either the eggs planted

on it or near it, and then when the eggs hatch, they consume this animal, this like spider or whatever it is, alive from the inside out as they mature towards their adult stage. I mean, that's that's pretty dang close to exactly what goes on with the enomorph right. Oh yeah, And in many cases it's even more amazing than that, because you get into these examples of the of the of the parasitoid wasp altering the behavior of the host organism.

It gets uh yeah, it's certainly a case where nature um at least equals but I think probably exceeds, uh just the complexity of the xenomoreph scenario, or at least in this case. Yeah, I guess it's a it's a cliche for us at this point, but nature is stranger than fiction. You can't make this stuff up. Yeah, But to explore some more new territory, I was wondering about

the idea of being attacked by an egg itself. Is there such a thing as a real like predatory egg, not just what comes out of the egg and I couldn't find anything directly like this, Like you know, I was looking for something like a you know, an animal that like mimics an egg, like an egg mimic decoy that attacks I don't know when you come up on it or something. I couldn't find anything exactly like that. If if you know of examples out there that I

couldn't find, please email make us aware. But you mean like a creature that pretends to be an egg and then would prey upon something that eats eggs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Do what do you know of something like that? Um? No, I don't know. I think there's some sort of robot in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, right, don't they have some robots that look like eggs? I don't know, but if they were turtle eggs, they may

very well be soft and leathery shelled instead of hard shelled. Oh. We have just received an update from our producer Seth, who has been uh digging into old episodes of Teenage Muting Ninja Turtles, and he informs us that I am thinking of the mouse or robots which are not I think supposed to be eggs, but do look sort of egg like, So it's just kind of a coincidence of their design. Yeah. I think Seth told us recently that he's made it to season forty six of the Team

Ninja Turtles cartoon. So so best of luck to a Seth on your on your turtle journey. Um, but but I want to bring it back. Okay, So, in terms of being injured or attacked by an egg itself, I did find something. It wasn't active deliberate violence by an egg,

but I did find something here. So I was reading an article in the New York Times from December seen by very Nique Greenwood, which was based in part on a series of findings by a couple of acoustics experts named Anthony Nash and Lauren von Blonde, who at the time worked at an acoustics firm that was called Charles M. Salter and Associates. Now, what would acoustics experts have to

do with eggs? Well, their research, which was presented in our December at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in New Orleans, concerned the physical properties, especially the loudness, of exploding eggs. Now we're again, we're just talking about regular chicken eggs here, no gegaresque, insect trapped mine eggs or anything like that. Uh Nash and von Blonde had been

hired as expert witnesses for the defense in a recent lawsuit. Unfortunately, I don't think the real names of the plaintiff, for the defendant, or the location wherever published. I think that stuff remains confidential, so we only know about it from their research and the reporting on that research where the details were anonymized. Uh And I think the case was eventually settled out of court, so it may remain a mystery forever, but in broad anonymous outline the alleged facts

of the case. Whereas follows, plaintiff walks into a restaurant, he orders a hard boiled egg. I'm assuming he ordered some other stuff too. That would be a pretty strange thing to order to restaurant by itself, but the egg is the important part here. They bring him his hard

boiled egg. He bites into the egg. Upon being pierced by the plaintiff's teeth, the egg explodes, as in, it literally explodes, resulting in what the plane have claimed were severe burns and actual hearing damage from the volume of the explosion. Now, when I first read that, I was like, what could could that be real? I'm having a hard time imagining it that that really happened. But you can

use the old YouTube and see for yourself. Unless there are a bunch of like coordinated egg explosion hoaxers all doing homebrew video manipulation or special effects, exploding eggs are absolutely a thing, uh, and they they can actually be done very easily if you involve one crucial piece of technology,

and that is the microwave oven. But of course, yeah, so perhaps you yourself have at some point tried to cook a whole intact egg shell on inside a microwave, and if so, I would not be surprised if you have detonated an egg bomb yourself in this way. Microwaving a whole egg often results in a big pop and a gooey mess, but sometimes a microwaved egg, especially a microwave reheating of a previously hard boiled egg, can result

in an egg that holds together through the cooking. So you can microwave it for however long you take it out of the microwave, But if you disturb it in just the wrong way, say by piercing it, with a fork or with your teeth. It suddenly explodes with a with a pop, a real like loud sound like a firecracker. An egg hot egg pieces go everywhere. And we know

this is possible just from publicly available video evidence. People are you know, messing around with this in their houses all the time, apparently, But how often does this happen, what are the physics underlying it, and how dangerous is it? Yeah, because I mean, obviously it makes sense that an egg could pop. You know, you could have us you're built up in there. In fact, really we use an egg

cooker in the house a lot. And they had that spike in the middle that you're supposed to use to to to make a hole in the shell of the egg before you cook it, which you know, I always assumed was to keep it from bursting or or even exploding. Now, I was surprised about the idea that it could allegedly cause hearing damage. The idea of a bursting egg, I would imagine it would be just kind of a you know,

a popping situation. Right. The hearing damage was alleged by the plaintiff, and we'll we'll try to get to the bottom of that. But um, so what was what did their research consists of when they're looking into this national Von Bland's research first tested actual eggs using the same reheating method that was supposedly employed by the restaurant that was the defendant in the lawsuit. So you would take a previously hard boiled egg and you'd reheat it by

microwaving it for three minutes in a water bath. Now, the researchers here did mint that after several explosions coated the inside of the microwave with egg gunk, they realized they needed some kind of permeable containment device, so they came up with the addition of like a nylon stocking

type casement for the egg. But with this in place, they repeated the experiment with about a hundred eggs, taking the temperature of the water bath and taking the temperature of the egg itself each time by piercing it with a meat thermometer. And when the eggs were done microwaving they did the piercing, they would take it out, put it on the floor and stabbed the probe of the meat thermometer in to take the internal temperature and to see if piercing the egg would cause it to explode.

And what they found was that some eggs did nothing, some exploded inside the microwave while cooking. But of the one hundred eggs roughly, they found about one third survived the reheating itself, only to explode on the outside of the microwave once poked with the thermometer. So I think it's pretty conclusive the explosion thing, whether you like, rupturing a microwave heated hard boiled egg, absolutely can cause it to blow up. That just happens, and it looks like

it happens roughly about one third of the time. But of the ones that did explode, the loudness of the explosion at its peak was between eighty six and a hundred and thirty three decibles at a distance of twelve inches from the egg, and Nash compared this too at

the upper end the hundred and thirty three disciples. He compared it to the loudness of something like a chainsaw, which is, you know, loud, but not usually a source of hearing damage on a on a short time of exposure on its own, and based on this reasoning, Nash claimed that actual hearing damage from an exploding egg was

not impossible, but that it was unlikely. Though at the same time, I think it is worth noting that these scientists were hired by the defense in the trial to be expert witnesses for that side, so not not impugning their reputation, but it is worth noting the interests involved. Yeah, so we might need to take this particular eggs to with a grain of salt, maybe a little pepper, a

little mustard if wely some gherkins. Definitely so. But realistically, I guess it sounds like it would be loud enough that if you just heard exploding eggs all day, it could hurt your hearing. But maybe not just one going off. That could be the case. Then again, I mean we

don't know for sure. I mean, like it's possitively that they didn't rule out the possibility that there could there could be hearing damage in some kind of outside case here, but the standard, the average loudness of the explosion they thought probably would not hurt your ears if it just happened one time. But then but that's not to say this is fine. I mean, you would not want to

bite into one of these eggs. I think burns are obviously why that could happen, and just generally, anything exploding inside your mouth, I'd imagine even could just probably startle you enough that you might get whiplash or something like that. I mean, that's biting into something that explodes as a horrifying idea. Yeah, and I do want to drive home here.

If you're out there and you're listening to this, and maybe you're stuck in your house and you're a little bit bored, do not experiment with exploding eggs just you know, have an egg for breakfast maybe and think about this, But you don't try and make eggs explode just because you heard about it on this show, right, uh and and and so there's a more interesting question, though we still haven't solved, which is why would the eggs explode

at all? You can kind of imagine, like, okay, the heating, the build up of pressure and steam as could cause it to explode while it's cooking inside the microwave. Why is it that there's this pattern where about a third of the eggs that they tested out here didn't explode while cooking, but did explode once you poked them with something.

That's right, Yeah, it would seem like they would reach the because again coming back to my experience using an egg cooker, is Okay, we poked the hole on the top of the egg with the spike so that it doesn't rupture, I guess, and then some of the time, uh, you see, egg content has been pushed up through the hole that we created, and other times it is not. So maybe and I've never analyzed it enough to say that it's happening a third at the time or whatnot.

But maybe that's that's what we're talking about here. The same situation could be now So. One thing found by Nash and von Blonde was that when they measured the temperature of the water bath that the egg was sitting in while it was microwaved, and then compared that to the temperature inside the egg, specifically of the yolk, there was a big difference. Of course, the water bath was limited to two d and twelve degrees fahrenheit or one

hundred degrees celsius. This is the boiling point of water. We know that, you know, at that temperature, water doesn't really heat up beyond that because it equalizes with the you know, with the vapor pressure around it. So so additional energy put into it goes into boiling off more and more of the water into steam. But the yolk was significantly hotter than the boiling point of water. It was there was an average of twenty two degrees fahrenheit

of difference between the water and the yolk. And yet the yolk has a significant amount of water in it. By some estimates, that chicken egg yolk is it's something like fifty water, Okay, now, yeah, yeah, well, of course in addition to lots of proteins and fats and stuff. And so Nash's hypothesis about the explosion is that the microwave process, microwaving process somehow superheats little pockets of water

inside the egg yolk beyond the boiling point of water. Now, there can be a couple of ways that water becomes superheated and then flashes suddenly into steam. One way is when water is heated in a microwave with an absence of what are called nucleation points. Nucleation sites are just little places where bubbles can form naturally that allow the

water to begin to convert into steam. Uh. And this is why you might have been advised to put a little wooden coffee stir or something like that in a mug of water if you're heating it in the microwave. There have been occasions where people have gotten burns by microwaving water, especially in very smooth, clean containers. And I've read also especially when you repeatedly microwave the same container

of water without like stirring it or touching it. There can be cases where the water just gets hotter and hotter, but it can't boil because there are no sites where this hot mass of water is able to start forming bubbles. And in these cases, the water can become hotter than its boiling point, but it looks perfectly calm until it's disturbed in some way that suddenly does provide nucleation points. Uh. This could include jostling the container, inserting a spoon or

sugar or something like that. The superheated water can then quite suddenly flash into steam and explode. But another way that water can become superheated and flash suddenly into steam is changes in pressure. Uh. You know, remember the principles illustrated by a pressure cooker. The normal boiling point of water is determined by atmospheric pressure, so you can actually change the boiling point of water just by going up

or down in altitude. If you go higher in altitude up a mountain, water converts into vapor easier at a lower temperature, and this lowers the boiling point of water, so a boiling pot of water on top of a mountain will be cooler than a boiling point of water

at sea level. In fact, there are even stories, I think we've talked about these in a previous episode, uh, stories of people trying to cook at super high altitudes and being unable to do it, Like mountain climbers on Everest have sometimes found that you cannot, for example, boil potatoes effectively at the top of Everest because at some point you get so high up and the pressure is so low that the boiling point of water gets so low that a pot of water on a burner literally

just can't get hot enough to cook potatoes, and a reasonable amount of time your your water is boiling, but it's just not very hot. Conversely, if you increase the pressure on a cooking vessel by healing it tight with the lid and safety gasket and all that, you can actually raise the boiling point of water, allowing water to get a lot hotter than it ever would in a pot on the stove where it can just evaporate normally, and this cooks your food faster. This is the principle

behind a pressure cooker. Modern pressure cookers tend to be very safe by design, but they years ago, pressure cookers used to have a reputation for exploding. This was the thing people were afraid about, and there are cases of this happening. You can see why they could be dangerous in principle, because it's contents under pressure, and it's a bunch of superheated water. If suddenly exposed to reduced pressure, that water would try to convert from liquid water into

steam really suddenly in a kind of explosive instant. Yeah. I remember growing up and hearing about like the canning process in which one would put uh you know, their jars into a pressure cooker to to sterilize them. I remember there being accounts of this which sounded dang triss.

It sounded explosive to me. Um, I don't know to what extent there was actually, Yeah, some sort of cautionary tail involved in the telling of it, But but I got the sense that the cooking with a with a pressure cooker had had some sort of inherent danger to it. I mean, there are natural dangers of like burns and stuff if you don't have a modern pressure cooker with

good safety features. But I think modern pressure cookers, like if it's made by a reputable company and all that, it's going to have safety features in place that make it pretty darn safety use. Oh yeah, like like, yeah, we use one all the time for various uh you know, rice dishes and whatnot. Great for lentils. Yeah. But anyway, So so back to the pressure issue. I think this is what Anthony Nash is sort of hypothesizing is happening

inside the yolk of an exploding egg. While an egg is being microwaved, It's got this protein matrix inside the yolk that becomes hotter than the boiling point of water, and this protein matrix is holding all these little pockets of water trapped inside. These pockets of water become superheated beyond the boiling point of water, and when the egg is pierced, these little pockets of superheated liquid water can suddenly boil. They flash into steam very rapidly, causing the

egg to explode in the process. Now, I don't know if Nash's hypothesis about the cause of the exploding eggs is correct. I can't judge for sure, but it seems pretty plausible to me. Uh And I think it's a pretty clear indication that microwaving hard boiled eggs is not a very good idea. You know, if you've got cold, hard boiled eggs, why not just eat them cold or

make egg salad? Yeah, yeah, don't risk the explosion. You know. However, all this talk, okay, we're talking about the pressure inside the egg and changes to to to the pressure and atmospheric pressure. It does make me wonder, Okay, could you have a scenario where you say, venturing aboard a drylic spaceship and dur encountering the eggs of another species? Who knows, like under what atmospheric conditions they were originally um lane

point yeah yeah. And and then and then what happened, you know, where they put on a ship with an entirely different pressure and then maybe that pressure went away, maybe the people now discovering it bring it back to their ship and there's a different uh air pressure scenario going on. Could you end up with an explosive alien egg along those lines. I'm gonna rule it physically plausible but unproven. Okay, alright, Well, on that note, we're going to take one more break, but when we come back,

we have a couple of more eggs for you. Alright, we're back, Robert. Is it time to pet the furry egg? Yes, let us consider the furry egg. So, uh, my, my family, like a lot of households out there, recently enjoyed viewing the excellent series The Mandalorian, which features everything I love about Star Wars, including some really cool creatures and one of the most important in the series. This is creature

that that p up called a mud horn. And it's this a large mammalian creature, or assume we assume it to be mammalian. Uh. That looks a lot like a wooly rhino. It's like an alien take on a wooly rhino. And as its name implies, it makes its home in the mud. Here it lays a very unique furry egg. Uh. And this, by the way, is on the world our Volla seven end. And it's here that Jawa's consider it a delicacy. So of course our main character ends up being sent on a quest to obtain the furry egg. Okay,

I still haven't seen this, but this sounds good. Yeah, well you're in for a treat with this one. I know, Baby Yoda. So we've got we've got furry eggs and baby Yoda. What are they just trying to like cute you to death? Well, I mean, I think cute is an important part of Star Wars. You gotta have a cute element in there. And I think I think anyone who, um, who disagrees with me on that is wrong. There's there's

got to be something cute in there. And uh, and so you got you gotta go, you got your furry egg here. Um. But the furry egg is I think really something to ponder though, because in many ways it seems paradoxical and suitably alien. Right, because eggs we tend to just assume, you know, eggs are the domain of scale and feather, right, not the domain of fur. Sure, fur is typically the domain of mammals. But of course the mammalian world is not entirely devoid of egg layers,

because of course we have the monotreams. Yeah, now monitreams are when we're talking about monotreams, we're talking about I think what five species around still today, One of course, is the platypus which were largely going to leave alone to its monstrous pools in this episode, because I'd like to come back and really dive into the platypus uh and focus on it because it is a true monster. Uh.

And then it's wonderful. But then we have I think four different species of a kidnea to consider as well. So Monotreams are thought to have diverged from other mammals roughly a hundred and nine million years ago. There's still a lot we don't know about them and their connections to other mammals. But but among their most notable features

is their egg laying. Oh and incidentally, uh, the name at kidna we get that from the Greek mythological figure a Kidna, who is sometimes described as the mother of monsters, and who is often depicted as having like a half snake half human body. Therefore, she embodies both mammalian and serpentine aspects. I'm just trying to remember. Why did the word a kidna make me think of vampires? Is the they're like a a kidna vampire in the Witcher Games

or something? I don't know. I don't know, I've never played the Witcher Games, but I mean a kidnas a wonderful name for a monstrous enemy. So I think I'm brushing up against a sound alike here. But but a kidna in the mythological context is is cool enough on her own right? And uh And when we look to the organisms that we have dubbed a kidnas, they're really fascinating as well. Less frightening and monsters perhaps, but just

weird and at times adorable. So I was reading a few different sources on this, one of which is as an excellent little article from the New York Times in two thousand nine titled Brainy, A kidnap proves looks aren't everything, And the author Natalie Angier, has this wonderful little paragraph describing their reproduction quote reproductively, Monotreams are like a VCR

DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology. In transition, they lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so called puggles that hatch with milk drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink. WHOA, man, I'm still reeling from that VCR DVD unit comparison. It makes me think this should have been the subject of a Fast and the Furious movie, Like they're trying to

hijack a truck full of a kidna. They're they're they're they're weird looking creative. For first of all, that that that iron and rich milk. That's I'm assuming coming largely from their diet of ants and termites, So they're voracious ant and termite eaters. And yeah, they're just really look up a picture of one, because they're they're really neat. They have this this specialized snout clearly uh evolved to enable them to pursue their their main prey. And then

they have these just pudgy, spiny bodies. They're they're absolutely weird and adorable looking. And if you look up images of of of a of an a kidna, puggle of a of a baby a kidnah, it is just even weirder and more cuddly. They're like little um little bean bags with with snouts. I believe the adults are spiny, aren't they are? The are the young also spiny? Know that well is well discuss the young are born or rather hatch without spines and then developed them later. But Yeah,

the adults definitely have spines for their protection. Now to come back to the pink milk it, I was looking at a two thousand and eight Harvard University study that the claims that the achidna might have simply evolved away from suckling due the due to the demands of its specialized mouth parts and its specialized diet. So not necessarily a case here where the achidna is like, um, you know, you know, predates suckling, but rather might have evolved away

from suckling as a means of carrying out its diet. Yeah, maybe a mouth made for devouring ants is not ideal for this way of getting milk. Yeah, exactly, more for lapping. So so let's talk about the eggs a little bit. So, the eggs of an a kidna, I want to be clear, are not furry. Um. The achidna is of course covered with with spines, but also coarse hair, so this is

still not a case of a furry egg. The egg is leathery and twenty two days after conception it is deposited directly into the female's pouch, and after ten days of gestation in the pouch, the puggle bust through uh, that leathery shell with a reptile like egg tooth, and then remains in the pouch for another forty five to fifty five days, continuing to develop in major ways, such as growing out those defensive spines and if you, I highly encourage everyone to look up video footage of this.

I found a great a kidnapped hatching video that's easily found on YouTube from I want to say it's from the seventies or maybe the fifties. I can't can't recall. It's it's over footage, but you get to see one of these little puggles, and it's pointed out that the puggle is so uh, you know, immature, so translucent, so helpless that after it has stuffed itself with milk, you can see the milk inside of it through its translucent

pink body. WHOA. That makes me think of the honey pot ants where you can Yeah, yeah, it does look a lot like that, you know. It's it's just so immature and helpless at that point. It's uh uh it's I was thinking it's kind of like a translucent gush or candy, you know, with a kid in the milk in the health wait didn't we also compare the honeypot ants to gushers. I guess we did. We just we just got gushers on the brain here. I don't even know if they still make gushers, but god, that is

the most malevolent candy of all time. I don't know, now that I'm thinking about it. What do you think gushers? Um? You know they they have that kind of popping liquid filled. Maybe they're supposed to be like eggs. You know, children want to gobble up the eggs of some strange, purplely fruit scented creature, and that's what gushers are for. I

don't want to know what happens if you microwave a gusher. No, I'm sure it's been done to certainly do not try it on our account though if even hasn't been done. Don't ever microwave anything because you heard us talking about something the blanket statement, All all liability erased. Yes, follow the instructions for heating anything in the microwave. Okay, So

back to mono trains. So there were once hundreds of mono train species, and the largest that we know of was one that is known is zack Losis Haketti and it would have been about a meter long and a wait, about thirty k so about three point two ft long and weighing sixty six pounds. Um. I've seen some images here. I included one in our document Joe. You can see about how big this would have been. It would have been like, I don't know, what would you say, like

a like a very large plump dog. Yeah, that sounds about right, A spiny bulldog. Again, not a furry egg, but in a way close to a furry egg. But but I will add that there is perhaps another possibility for furry egg hunting in nature. A certain moths are often described as being furry. Granted, we're dealing with something different than what you would encounter on your pet dog or your pet cat. But these moths, such as the gypsy moth, will actually cover their eggs with a coating

that contains that quote unquote fur. So you know that might be one way to tackle the problem. I suppose the idea of an egg naturally being insulated with a layer of hair isn't completely crazy, but I don't think we see it, and and most examples we see entail a stronger alliance on the parent's body or efforts by the parent to secret the egg away in a warm place. All right, and for our final egg exploration or exploration. Uh. Here today, I thought we might consider the idea of

the god in his egg. Okay, let's do it. So we we've mentioned this entity on the show before, uh and Joe, you might even remember it. Uh. I think I think we came up in one of our episodes. The Egyptian Book of the Dead speaks of this is, of course a translation quote that August God who is in his egg a terrifying entity said to rule over the realm of of exc within the Egyptian underworld. It's a It's described as a yellow realm that is hidden from the gods and subject to the powers of the

eye that captures. And so there's an invocation for the traveler into the afterlife. Uh. I would say, hail to you, you, August God, who are in your egg. I have come to you to be in your sweets, so that I may go in and out of Xy, that its doors may be open to me, that I may breathe the air in it, and that I may have power through its offerings. Okay, so you've gotta prostrate yourself before the egg. Yeah, yeah,

this weird. And something about this idea again, it comes back to this paradox of that is often inherent in the egg. You know, what is the egg, things that emerge out of the egg. But here especially the paradox of a thing that is post egg and pre egg at once, the thing that never emerged from its egg and yet is a complete being in some form, like it is a god, but it has not hatched, and it somehow has the powers of an entity that is um you know that that is that is you know,

fully powerful. Yeah, I mean the egg is in many ways the archetype of potential. Yeah. So again the agus Gott in his egg terrifying, weird, almost impossible to behold. But it also does bring to mind. I don't know if you remember this character, but there's a character named Sheldon who was featured on in Jim Davis's U. S Acres cartoon, and this showed up on Garfield and Friends. Rachel and I were just talking about US Acres the

other day. I don't remember why it came up, but we we both remember having this feeling where you'd be watching Garfield and then it would go to this other thing this farm thing, and I remember having this feeling like when is this going to start making sense? And I don't think it ever did. Yeah, you would, you would get Garfield, and you would then you would get us Acres, and then you would get a little more Garfield. It was what I like that I think they called

like an ad a format um. But but us Acres had a whole host of characters, you know, your typical farm characters. But one of them, the one that really made it memorable, was that you had Sheldon, who was a chicken that was still in its egg. It was just an egg, like a walking egg, an egg with two chicken legs emerging from it. And there are other

takes on this out there. There's a wonderful children's book by Many Gray titled egg Drop, and it features an egg that wants to fly, and I don't recall it actually has legs, but it certainly has like a will of its own, and it wants to do things, and it thinks it can do things that a a hatched chicken, a fully developed chicken, should be capable off. That's a

funny symbol. I mean it. Uh. We all have the experience in childhood of wanting to do the things that adults do, not understanding why I can't do that yet, And in a lot of cases the reason is intellectual and emotional maturity. You don't have that like level of like brain responsibility yet to be an adult. But the egg is a different thing, right, because it doesn't have

limbs and it can't move around on its own. Yeah, exactly, And that's that's roughly kind of the idea that that many Gray explores in this this excellent book, which also, by the way, has some principles of aerodynamics involved in it. So I wouldn't say that it's the science book, but it has a little science sprinkled in it, and it has wonderful illustrations. Now the for for our purposes. Though, in the natural world, the prospect of an animal simply

never leaving its egg is certainly fascinating. It's it's paradoxical to a magical degree. It's kind of like the aura bora serpent consuming its own tail. Right. But while we don't see examples in the in the natural world where an egg lasts forever like the egg is the final form, we do see examples where the egg phase lasts for a pretty long time. Oh yeah, I guess I've never asked this specific question before. What what is the longest

egg incubation period in in nature? Yeah, Like, just to come back to Alien, right, there's that The open question in that movie is like how long have these eggs been here? You know, sort of applies like thousands of years or something. Yeah, long enough for for the for the engineer up there on the the seat thing to to rotten and become a mummy. But but yeah, when we look to the natural world, where there's some pretty

startling um examples. Probably the most startling that I ran across is the deep sea octopus Granella dn boro pacifica. And it has been observed to brood its eggs for four point five years or fifty three months. Wow. And to put that in in a proper frame of reference, that's compared to the typical one to three month brooding

time for shallower water octopus species. That's unbelievable. I mean, so an egg can't defend itself, So that would mean an egg has to either just survive on its own or be protected for for four and a half years before it can hatch and at least have like escape behaviors exactly. And and that's exactly. And what we see with the octopus is a mother caring for the eggs,

looking after the eggs. And and of course one of the curious wrinkles here is that typically the mother does not eat during this period like she has she has deposited the eggs and now her only purpose in life is to protect them and to ultimately die protecting them. Like she's not gonna she's not going to eat, they're going to hatch, and then when they're gone, she's going

to die. So with the deep sea octovists, this four point five year brooding period in which she looks after them, this is apparently the longest brooding period of any known animal. I was reading about this in a study by Robinson at All published in p. Los One in two thousand fourteen. And uh and they go into greater detail on this. You can find the whole study online. But the two key factors they say here are low temperature because of

course it's the deep sea. And then this would means slower metabolism that we see other examples of this in other organisms in terms of just you know, slow metabolism and and low temperature but then also key here is the selective advantage of producing highly developed catch links. So it comes back to the idea that once they're they're they hatch, they're ready to go, they're well cooked, ready

to move. The clutch size of the deep sea octopus is is quite small compared to other octopus species, So there's ultimately this focus on quality over quantity, instead of it being a situation where like, let's get some baby octopi out there, a lot of them are gonna get eaten, but some of them will slip by. Now, this is instead let's focus on a smaller bunch of of octopus young uh, that all have a very strong fighting chance.

And while this might be a familiar tactic too, you know people thinking about mammals and birds and stuff, this is the less common choice for organisms that live in the ocean, right, I mean marine organisms are very often just sort of spamming with eggs. I mean like there there's tons of production of offspring with very little investment

in each individual one. Yeah, it's usually um, you know, generally, when we're talking about about the cases that buck the trend, we're of course dealing with something like like a whale uh, you know, amalion species that return to the water, or we're dealing with, you know, really interesting examples from the shark world. But this is the octopus. So the reach of searchers stress though that this is a pretty abundant deep sea species. So it's not like we've necessarily found

a true rarity in the natural order of things. It just seems like a rarity because we don't understand deep sea ecology well enough. Interesting, And and the other side of it that they point out is again, octopus mothers generally don't eat during their brooding, so it's it would seem to be the case that this mother does not eat for four point five years um and and this is not completely understood, but basically it seems like it's going to come back to the slower metabolism of deep

sea creatures. Ye, so what you load up on a bunch of body fat or stored energy before this brooding period and then in the extreme coal old and dark I would imagine it's probably not moving a whole lot during this period. You just sort of like take your metabolism way way down so you can stay in it for the long haul without continuous reinvestments of chemical energy. Yeah,

absolutely so. It's not quite the God in his egg, but it is interesting to see like an example of like what remains an egg the longest under natural conditions on our planet. I did not know about this octopus and this is absolutely majestic. Yeah. I mean, the occopus world, as we see time and time again on the show, is just full of wonders, and there's still so much we have to learn about them. Yeah, i'd imagine, especially

with these really deep ones. Yeah. All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and uh seal the egg chamber shut for this episode. But like I said, there are a lot of eggs out there in the natural world, a lot of unique um egg forms, a lot of unique egg laying strategies. We would love to come back and explore more of these. You have, everyone out there's interested. If you're interested, let us know. If you have your own experiences with eggs of varying species, uh, feel free

to write in and tell us about it. Or likewise, if it's just a really cool example of eggs in the natural world or something from science fiction that you think we should know about that we could really pick up and run with, then let us know about that as well. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcast and wherever that happens to be. Just make sure you rate, review

and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, to tell us your stories about eggs, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind It's

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