Everything is connected. That’s what you might start thinking after reading this fascinating story about why eggshells are chipping more. During the avian flu, many farmers lost a lot of their chicken population and so hens are being kept “in production” for longer. Usually, a chicken makes it until about age 2 but today there are older hens around 3 years old laying eggs too. And that makes the eggshells thinner which causes more shell bits when you crack them.
Here’s why this is interesting: I actually noticed this … and I didn’t. It was the sort of thing that we encounter often, where a part of our brain registers something new and different but then the other part of our brain tells us it doesn’t matter and we should move on. That’s a hard habit to break.
But that’s kind of the point. Every small detail we notice might have a fascinating backstory behind it. What if we assumed it did? Maybe we would dismiss less things as insignificant and notice more of these details. And maybe that could help us understand more about the world too.
