A chicken egg is one big cell. Place an egg in a vinegar solution for 48 hours. This will dissolve the shell and reveal the semi-permeable cell membrane that contains the raw egg. The egg will also have grown in size as vinegar contains a lot of water, which will have passed into the egg by osmosis. Now place the same egg in corn syrup for 12 hours and it will shrink. This is because the egg will lose water to the syrup, again through osmosis. Weighing the eggs after each experiment will give clearer data to compare.
People who play sports at a high level of intensity burn up energy and perspire a lot. This fluid loss has traditionally been replaced by drinking a lot of water. Like the chicken egg, each of our red blood cells has a semipermeable membrane and drinking large volumes of water can result in a rise in plasma volume and a fall in mineral salt and sugar concentration, making the blood more diluted. Isotonic sports drinks contain special formulations of salts and carbohydrates similar in concentration to the body's own fluids for a more rapid and balanced recovery.
A frog can suffer osmotic shock if it is placed in water that has a different concentration of solvents than the pond that is its natural environment. This is because a frog's skin is a semipermeable membrane and there is a balance of solvents between the pond water and the water in the frog. If the frog is placed in distilled water, for example, solvents can pass out of the frog by osmotic pressure. The frog will die, and when it does, unlike dead mammals or birds, which float, because it has a semi-permeable skin, it will sink.
Inverse Osmosis water purifiers were invented by NASA in the 1950s. Such an apparatus purifies salt water by applying a pressure in excess of the osmotic pressure, driving the solvent through the semipermeable membrane separating out the salt ions. It is a physical process in which water passes through a semipermeable membrane with the object of filtering out the contaminants. The result is clean drinking water, that is low in salts and comparable to bottled water.