The 3D-Printed Egg That Hatched 26 Chicks
from scratch: to make or build something completely from the beginning, without using anything ready-made.
Twenty-six baby chickens just hatched from eggs that were printed on a 3D printer. A company called Colossal Biosciences made the artificial shells from scratch in a lab. They used a special silicone skin that lets oxygen pass through, just like a real eggshell.
Here is how it worked. A chicken laid a normal egg. About a day and a half later, the team carefully moved the tiny embryo out of the natural shell and into the artificial one. Eighteen days later, the chicks pecked their way out.
But chickens are not the real goal. Colossal is famous for trying to bring extinct animals back to life. They study old DNA from animals that have gone extinct. Then they modify the DNA of a close living relative to look and behave like the lost animal. They have already done this with the dire wolf, and they are working on the woolly mammoth.
Next, they want the giant moa. The moa was a huge flightless bird from New Zealand, about 12 feet tall. Hunters killed the last moa around 600 years ago. Moa eggs were about 80 times bigger than chicken eggs. No bird alive today is large enough to carry one. So scientists need to build a giant egg from scratch in the lab.
But there is also a bigger danger. If people start to believe we can always bring extinct animals back, they may stop caring about the ones we still have. Extinction starts to feel less final, and maybe less important.
Sample sentences
After the fire destroyed her bakery, she had to rebuild the whole business from scratch.
My grandmother never buys cake mix. She makes every birthday cake from scratch.
The team threw away the old design and started from scratch the next morning.
Origin
The phrase comes from sports. In old foot races, the “scratch” was a line scratched into the ground at the starting point. To start “from scratch” meant beginning at that line, with no head start. Today it covers everything from baking a cake to launching a business.
