Making a perfect egg while neglecting your houseplants

A scientifically superior boiled egg

Only a short time ago, as a broke graduate student living in Georgia, this Newscriptster considered breakfast out at the local Waffle House to be a splurge. But times have changed; recent egg shortages have forced Waffle House to add a $0.50 per egg surcharge to every order, making an omelet there seem like a true luxury on a grad student’s budget.

So now that eggs are a premium commodity, it only makes sense to strive for the very best cooked eggs one can manage. Thankfully, a new egg recipe just dropped in Communications Engineering, and it promises an “optimal” boiled egg in just 32 short minutes (2025, DOI: 10.1038/s44172-024-00334-w).

The researchers behind the recipe, led by Pellegrino Musto of Italy’s National Research Council and Ernesto Di Maio of the University of Naples Federico II, call the new cooking technique periodic cooking. It involves moving the egg between boiling water and warm water every 2 min until the egg is fully cooked. The technique takes into account that the whites and yolks of an egg cook best at different temperatures: 85 °C and 65 °C, respectively. The periodic cooking process maintains the yolks at a constant 67 °C while the temperature of the white fluctuates between 35 °C and 100 °C, yielding a perfectly done egg.

The periodically cooked eggs have a soft yolk similar to that of eggs prepared via sous vide—cooking them in a 60–70 °C circulating water bath for an hour—but with a firmer white like that from a perfectly executed hard boil. More advanced chemical analysis, including nuclear magnetic resonance, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and texture profile analysis, revealed that the periodically cooked eggs had superior nutrient profiles, and ideal protein denaturation and aggregation compared with sous-vide, soft-boiled, or hard-boiled eggs.

The data may be convincing and the technique expertly designed, but it is unlikely to inspire this Newscriptster to toil away for 32 min for a periodically cooked egg.

Good news for bad plant parents

Despite holding a PhD in plant biology, your humble Newscriptster is mediocre at keeping houseplants alive. All living things have needs, and chief among them is water. But sometimes, to a plant parent, regular watering is just too much of an ask.

Enter the never never plant, scientific name Ctenanthe setosa. This especially hardy member of the prayer plant family is ideal for those disinclined to picking up a watering can a couple times a week. And new research in Physiologia Plantarum shows that flexible water-storing layers of cells underneath the surface of the never never plant’s leaves help keep the plant photosynthetically active even if you forget to water it for 60 days (2025, DOI: 10.1111/ppl.14621).

To investigate the never never plant’s drought hardiness, a research team led by Gergely Nagy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Katalin Solymosi of Eötvös Loránd University used a combination of traditional light microscopy, electron microscopy, and small-angle neutron scattering, in which a beam of neutrons is shot at a subject to measure nanometer-scale structures. The team found that although the plant’s leaves curled and its water-storage cells shrank under drought conditions, the structure of its tiny photosynthetic machinery remained intact and functional.

It’s a marvel of evolution to engineer a plant that looks like it has an insatiable thirst yet will be happy left unattended in your office during a sabbatical. So if you feel compelled to fake a green thumb for your friends and family, you may want to consider cultivating the never never plant. You might find the plant for sale at the garden center of your hardware store, local nursery, or even Etsy, sometimes under the name Grey Star Calathea. But beware of look-alikes and check the scientific name before purchase, as many of the never never plant’s relatives are not as drought hardy.

Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.