You can't un-ring a bell and you can't un-boil an egg. At least not until now. But researchers at the University of Carlifornia, Irvine, say they've figured a way to return hard-boiled egg whites to something like their clear, original form.

It's not something that has any immediate benefits for home cooks — in fact, it would take a kitchen full of equipment to do it — but it does have important implications for other fields, including food processing and even cancer treatment.

Being able to separate tangled proteins could be a huge boon for scientists. Credit:iStock

"Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg," said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology and biochemistry in a news release. The research was published last week in the journal ChemBioChem.

Weiss and his team cooked an egg at 90 degrees for 20 minutes (probably over-cooked, snooty cooks might say). They then succeeded in taking that hard, plasticky egg white and returning it to a liquid, clear form.