Every school science class has the project where you need to protect an egg such that when it is dropped off the roof of a building it won’t break. I would assume after all these years that a foolproof solution to this problem would have been designed.
Has someone done that? I’d be interested in seeing a link if you know it exists.
Hundreds of studends have solved that one. IIRC mine was a combination of a cast in place foam holder - I used spray in insulating foam - and an autogyro type rotor. Cambered blades with negative pitch spin from the fall of the eggcopter causing the blades to generate lift and slow it down. Dropped it off a three or four story building several times with no damage to the egg.
or you cound just use a jar of peanut butter
…or bubble wrap… duh!
What we did was similar but instead of dropping it off a building we shot it out of a slingshot made from a football goal and surgical tubing. Our didn’t break at all. My design involved suspending the egg with pantyhose in the center of the bottle. It was then surrounded by cotton and some newspaper. I’m sure dropping it off a building wouldn’t break the egg either.
When I saw the contest, the winner was the lightest craft which kept the egg from breaking. About half of the eggs survived, and the winner was an egg with six small, inflated balloons taped to it.
Wow - when I did this contest, we were only allowed to use wood (1x1xwhatever cm) and woodworking glue. That was it. No balloons, cotton, toilet paper, newspaper, etc. None survived, although our “winner’s” egg only had a crack in it - it hadn’t spilt.
Damn, I never had a science class THAT cool! 
A rather simple method is a paper cone, with the egg taped inside. Drop the cone point down, and the paper will crush on impact, absorbing all the energy. The biggest problem we had was keeping the egg inside the paper cone after impact, it kept rolling out and breaking. More tape fixed that.
curwin, this really isn’t a “question with an answer” type of science experiement. Basically it is an interesting thing for teachers to do with students. Heck, in Ohio we have a Science Olympiad and one of the events (you can win big medals 'n stuff) is the Egg Drop.
The point is not “can it be done” but instead how well can you cosntruct something that falls from the greatest height w/o breaking the egg. Other versions are how small can you make the container, how light, out of the fewest materials and out of set materials.
It’s a game (a learning game), not really a question.
An interesting one I saw has the egg in the middle of jelly inside an inflated condom. 
We did this in Jr High - but our school was only one story tall, so we had to throw the eggs down a hill on campus. I packed mine in a bag of popcorn - real popcorn, not the fake foam stuff. Marshmallows worked too. (After the experiments, some of us had snacks!)
One thing that didn’t work was suspending the egg in Jell-O in a soup can. Oh what a mess that made!
I had one with a little box made out of card paper stuffed with TP, with a paper napkin parachute. That worked pretty well.
The other one was a dual tupperware bowl setup, with the egg floating in salt water, it worked, but violated the rules of the contest.
You’re making me hungry.
We would do this once a year at my elementary school, dropping them off the highest building. There wasn’t really a winner, it was just to see if you could keep yours from breaking.
Mine survived once with lots and lots of padding. I never tried it, but wouldn’t a tightly sealed bowl (as in Tupperware or something) filled with water, with the egg inside it, work? We weren’t allowed to use liquid.
A couple more alternatives are discussed in this thread
Ours was also limited to IIRC 4x3x3inches. We increased the height until it broke or reached 5 stories. Mine made with a 4x3x3inch block of stryofoam cut from some computer packaging that I cut in have and used a file to scrape out a half egg shaped depression in each half. I put in some of the scraps to make sure it fit well and taped it up. Cheap, easy, quick and almost as important, it worked. 
PC
We did this in 6th grade - 3rd story & the teacher heaved it out the window - so no guarantee that wings/rotor/parachute would work.
My dad suggested a styrofoam ball with a hollowed-out center - and then stick LOTS of soda straws in the styrofoam all over - so it looked like a giant porcupine. The straws should accordion & absorb most of the impact.
But I procrastinated & went with a half-assed stack of egg cartons. It broke.
They had a variation of this contest here at my college last year. The egg contraptions were to be dropped from a tall tower (~5 stories) on campus, but the catch was this: The winner was the egg that survived the fall and got to the ground the fastest. It had the engineers and physics majors designing things to actually be shot down from the top of the tower and still survive the impact.
A wrapping of bent plastic straws works to at least 2 stories.