Before the Chicken...

Ok, birds are alot of fun - to watch, to feed, and to learn about.  Even chickens.  Even before they are chickens.  Before the chicken, we find the egg.  And within the egg, we find... its nucleus.

Its funny if you watch Nacho Libre alot...

Anyway - a friend asked about measuring the heartbeat / pulse of a chick embryo while still in the egg.  There are several ways to do it and the simplest would be using infrared light to detect the bird's pulse - just like the little finger sensors we use for people.

I just happened to have an IR LED array, and with a handful of feed we distracted the hens long enough to get an egg.  Easy!

Using a digital camera, here is the IR image we see.  Not sure if the camera isn't sensitive enough to the IR light, or if the shell is too thick.  Maybe more power to the LEDs?

 Next we tried the battery from the backhoe to boost the IR power...

Dazzling!  Very cool to see the IR playing with the camera...

 But alas, not any better resolution into the egg with the camera.  Next we tried a 300 lumen flashlight - now we can see inside... but on this egg there isn't much to see.  Unfertilized but not 'uninteresting'.

We'll keep experimenting with this.  I have some other IR sensors to try that we use to measure light values underwater, so we'll see if the IR detector can see a pulse easier than the CCD camera.

The hens are still busy, so we can get more eggs, too...