Egg drop competitions are a staple of high school and college physics classes. The goal is for students to build a device using bubble wrap, straws, or various other materials designed to hold an egg and keep it intact after being dropped from a substantial height—say, ten meters (nearly 33 feet). There's even a "naked egg" version in which a raw egg is dropped into a container below. The competition is intended to teach students about structural mechanics and impact physics, and it is not an easy feat; most of the dropped eggs break.

MIT engineering professor Tal Cohen decided to investigate why the failure rate was so high and reported her team's findings in a paper published in the journal Communications Physics. "The universal convention is that the egg should be in a vertical orie

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