The scientists used egg whites to create an aerogel, a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many types of applications, including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation.
The idea came to Craig Arnold, vice dean of innovation at Princeton, who was working on developing new materials for engineering applications, during a faculty meeting.
“I was sitting there, staring at the bread in my sandwich,” he said. “And I thought to myself, this is exactly the kind of structure that we need.”
Arnold asked his lab group to make different bread recipes mixed with carbon to see if they could recreate the aerogel structure he was looking for. None of them worked quite right initially, so the team kept eliminating ingredients until only egg whites remained.
“We started with a more complex system,” Arnold said, “and we just kept reducing, reducing, reducing, until we got down to the core of what it was. It was the proteins in...