What helps chicks get out of there shells
Answers
It’s a tough question to crack. Eggshells are thought to change as the chick grows inside. As the creature develops, parts of the inner eggshell dissolve and the fuzzy little bird incorporates some of that calcium into its bones. But it remained unclear how this process influenced egg shell microstructure.
“Everybody thinks eggshells are fragile—[when] we’re careful, we ‘walk on eggshells’—but in fact, for their thinness they are extremely strong, harder than some metals,” coauthor Marc McKee of McGill tells Davis. “We are really understanding now at the almost molecular scale how an eggshell is assembled and how it dissolves.”
The osteopontin likely disrupts the orderly formation of calcium crystals in the shell, creating a stronger shell. At the nanoscale, the introduction of the protein prevents the formation of a smooth, uniform crystal structure. Instead, it causes the structure to be more erratic, which strengthens the outer shell. That’s the reason why a crack in an egg forms a zig-zag pattern instead of breaking open cleanly—the break has to find weak spots on its way through the scrambled crystal structure.
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