Stories tagged urine
Doing it right now: just not venting yet.
Courtesy NASAFine. Be a jerk about it—apparently there are only two reasons I could be an astronaut. There are definitely plenty of reasons why I should be an astronaut—including, but not limited to, 1) people love astronauts, 2) when aliens come, you’ll want someone on the front lines with gumption and verve, 3) I’ve seen Apollo 13, like, twice, etc—but nobody seems to care about those. No, it’s always “but what are your qualifications? Are you a pilot? An astronomer? How do you handle heavy g-force? Have you a buzz cut?”
Numerous and impressive. No. Not technically. Pretty well, I assume. Not at the moment, no.
But let’s look at the important things: primarily that I have a fully functional renal system, and can pee with the best of them. And that’s an important thing at NASA these days. Or so I hear.
An internal memo from NASA, calling for donations of urine, has been, um, leaked to the public. It seems that during the last ten days of July, NASA will be requiring about 8 gallons of fresh urine a day (the output of about 30 people) for super-secret, awesome space tests. That is to say, to help figure out how to build a better space bathroom.
It turns out that while peeing in space is probably a little tricky (and hilarious), storing and getting rid of that pee is at least equally problematic. The Orion space capsule, which will help ferry astronauts to the moon, will eventually have to vent stored astronaut pee into space. This, amazingly, isn’t as easy as spitting out a mouthful of lemonade—urine has lots of tiny solids suspended in it, and those solids clog up the venting system. And you don’t want clogged vents. Not here, and not in space.
To test the space urinal, NASA needs pee. And, as NASA’s head of life support systems says, you can’t make fake urine.
But I can make the real stuff. And I don’t want to brag, but it’s actually pretty easy for me.
Unfortunately, NASA only wants NASA pee (the original memo was internal, after all). But I’ll be waiting by the phone, ready to do my duty for America. In return, I only ask that a seat be saved for me on the lunar lander.
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A lifetime of work: down the drain.
Courtesy ArtivistSo, I was lying in bed the other day wondering if my life would ever amount to anything.
Now, I can just picture your little mouths mouthing, “But, JGordon! How could you possibly think that about yourself? You have a bachelor’s degree! And you have a job that pays slightly more than minimum wage! And a beard!”
Hush, my Buzzketeers, hush. Sure, all of those things are pretty great, but when I’m gone what will remain of me? Piles of plastic packaging, probably, and maybe the beard. So what? What kind of legacy is that to leave the world? Where is my body of work? My corpus workus, as they say in Latin.
And I got to thinking, on that bleak afternoon. I tried to imagine which of the things I do every day might eventually add up into something special. The task was made difficult by the fact that I do very little every day, except, perhaps, sleep and eat. But… there is something else that I do every day, something I’ve done every day for as long as I can remember: urinate! While that may not seem like much when you think of it on the daily scale, try to imagine a lifetime of urinating – practically oceans of pee, right? Something to be proud of, certainly.
The whole thing was still on my mind as I went to work the next day. Now, it just so happens that the Human Body Gallery at the Science Museum of Minnesota has a fun little display of jugs and cartons representing the amounts of the various bodily effluvia that we produce every day, stuff like snot, and sweat, and… pee. There was something to think about! So, in between smiles and nods, I did some math.
According to the soda bottle full of yellow stuff, we produce between 4 and 8 cups of urine a day (Wikipedia verifies this although it uses that confounded and confounding metric system). I suppose that all depends on the individual person, but being a fairly average guy, I decided to settle on a nice 6 cups of urine per day. I decided, also, that I will live to be 80 years old (for the purposes of this calculation, at least). So, in 80 years there are 29,200 days. No, wait, 29,220 days (or something). At 6 cups a day, we have a lifetime accumulation 175,320 cups of pee. There are 16 cups in a gallon, so we have 10,957.5 gallons of pee. That’s a lot!
But, then again, just how much is 10,957.5 gallons exactly? Well, it would take up about 1465 cubic feet, but what is it in terms I can use? Because we’re talking about lifetime achievements here. How does my 10,957.5 gallons stack up next to, say, an Olympic size swimming pool? Now, filling an Olympic size pool, that would truly be something to be proud of.
Obviously, there are going to be different sizes of Olympic pools, but the word on the street says that they generally hold about 2,500,000 liters. Argh! That metric system again! Let’s see. There are 3.785411784 liters per gallon, so the Olympic pool would hold…
About 660,430 gallons. Oh.
That’s 649,472.5 more gallons than my 10,957.5 gallons, and, to be honest, I probably wouldn’t even have that much if you factor in my childhood (which I’m sure was sub-par when it came to urine production).
What a tremendous letdown.
To fill that Olympic pool I would need 61 lifetimes of peeing, or 60 friends saving their pee for one lifetime, and I don’t think I even know 60 other people, much less 60 other people willing to make that kind of commitment for me.
I was crestfallen. No, strike that, I am crestfallen. What else is there for me? I can’t take up scrapbooking again, not after what happened at the last meeting. What can I do?
And what can you all do? Unless you pee 60 times as much as I do, you’re all in the same rapidly filling boat as me. Start bailing.
I don't give these out to just anyone: Otzi has one just like it. (Photo by Sarodeo on flickr.com)Meng Xianchen and Meng Xianyou, two brothers working in a Chinese coal mine, were trapped underground with no supplies after the mine they were working in collapsed. The mine, located in Beijing’s Fangshan district, was illegal and had no oxygen, ventilation, or emergency exits. Officials called off the rescue effort after only a day, determining that there was no chance that the Meng brothers could have survived, and that further attempts to extract the bodies would only put the rescue workers at risk themselves. Family members placed food offerings at the collapsed entrance to the mine, and burned “ghost money” for the men to use in the afterlife.
Picture everyone’s surprise, then, when the Meng brothers clawed their way out of the mine five days later, weak and dehydrated, but alive. It seems that Xianchen and Xianyou didn’t give up when they heard the rescue workers stop digging, but instead started digging in the direction of the last sound. They had some small light for the first two days, thanks to their cellphones, but when the batteries died they resorted to listening and feeling around with their fingers. To survive, the brothers... (wait for it)... ate coal and drank their own urine! Oh, and they dug through 66 feet of coal and rock with their picks and hands.
With that, Xianchen and Xianyou have officially dug their way on to my very exclusive list of People Way Way Tougher Than Me. The Meng brothers are now in the good company of Otzi the Iceman, The Mad Monk Rasputin, and Jack Palance (which makes them, I suppose, the only living people officially “Way Way Tougher Than Me”).
Let’s examine the achievement:
The dig - As I said, 66 feet of rock and coal, dug at a 75 degree angle (steep). The shaft was so narrow that only one Meng could dig at a time. They averaged about one yard for every six hours of digging, having to constantly shore up the walls and ceiling of their tunnel to prevent debris from sliding back on them.
Survival - The main problem would be the lack of oxygen, especially in an unventilated illegal mine like theirs. The article I read doesn’t say much about this, but it seems that there was either air trapped in the mine already, or sufficient oxygen filtered down from the blocked opening. Either way, it did the trick. The coal that the miners ate would have had no nutritional value, but it probably gave them a “full” feeling. They get points for eating it, though, and bonus points for being quoted as saying “We ate coal and thought it tasted delicious.” The brothers also used two empty water bottles they found in the mine to save their urine. Almost no one likes drinking urine, but the Mengs did it anyway. Urine drinking can keep a person alive for several extra days if no other liquids are available. I had always assumed that the more times one drank their own urine, the worse it would be. It turns out that the opposite is true - the body absorbs a little bit of the toxins from consumed urine, and so the kidneys have a slightly smaller amount of toxins to filter out into the next batch of urine. Therefore, the urine becomes a little more potable and water-like each time it is consumed, but there’s less of it (as the body absorbs some of the water too). So the problem with drinking one’s own urine is that it can’t be done indefinitely, because eventually one will just run out. Also, one’s body is forced to reabsorb all the toxins it had tried to get rid of. Also, there’s the whole drinking pee issue.
Anyway, it all worked out for the Mengs, who have since declared that their 20 year mining careers are now over. Enjoy your place on the wall of fame, guys. We salute you.
Traffic danger: A scientific solution may be coming to prevent vehicle/deer collisions. Lining high-danger highways with canisters of wolf, coyote or bear urine may keep deer from crossing the roads.With a personal driving record that includes three dead deer from the fenders of my car, I’m all in favor of finding new ways to prevent auto/deer collisions.
That’s why I was glad to read today’s press accounts of a new idea to help reduce highway deer accidents: the use of wolf, coyote or bear urine. That’s one of the new ideas being discussed this week at a summit of law enforcement officials from nine states meeting in the Twin Cities.
How exactly would that work? Canisters with urine would be placed along roadways that have high incidents of deer crashes. The thought is that the deer would be able to smell the urine and turn back on their path as not to get close to a predator.
It’s a very plausible idea in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, where there are healthy populations of the predators. But what about places further south? That’s what members of the law enforcement group want to study. They don’t know if deer will react to the smell of urine from predators they’ve never faced before.
High fliers: These white tails in action show how fast and fleet deer can be out in the forests.Minnesota is also working on a deer control project of its own. Using a dual set of light beams along side roads, the presence of a deer near the road could be sensed and send a signal to lights on deer crossing signs along that road. The lasers would be spaced far enough apart (six inches) so they couldn’t both be set off by smaller animals. The lights on the deer crossing sign would flash for about a minute in the vicinity of where the deer, or other large animal, crossed through the light beams.
At test of that plan will be done over the course of this year near Camden State Park in southwest Minnesota along Hwy. 23. Each year between 40 and 80 deer are killed by vehicles on that stretch of road.
Statewide, there were 4,176 vehicle/deer crashes in Minnesota in 2005 (statistics for 2006 are not yet compiled). Two people died in those crashes.
Other solutions to vehicle/deer crashes are not so popular with the public, including culling deer herds with special hunts.
But what I really want to know, how are they going to collect the predator urine? I, for one, am not going to go around to ask any wolves, coyotes or bears to pee into a little cup.
A scientific solution may be coming to prevent vehicle/deer collisions. Lining high-danger highways with canisters of wolf, coyote or bear urine may keep deer from crossing the roads.
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Urine Power: A credit card-size battery powered by urine. Photograph courtesy Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology
This is another story where I can only imagine what the lab that does this research is like...
Scientists in Singapore have reported that they have invented a small, credit card sized battery that is activated using urine.
The government funded Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology developed the battery for use in medical diagnostic test kits. These test kits are often used to study the chemical composition of a person's urine to detect an illness. Researchers studying ways to make a small, efficient and inexpensive battery to power these test kits realized that the substance being tested - urine - could also be used to provide power for the test kit.
To make the battery, pieces of paper are soaked in a solution of copper chloride and then sandwiched between strips of magnesium and copper. This "sandwich" is then laminated between two sheets of plastic. When a drop of urine is added to the paper through a slit in the plastic, a chemical reaction takes place that produces about 1.5 volts of electricity - about the same as a AA battery - for about 90 minutes.
The research team who developed the battery describes their work in the current issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.
Given the high cost of energy lately, a cheap and plentiful energy source would be welcome. If these batteries could be successfully scaled up they could be used for larger applications, such as laptops, mp3 players or even cars.
Fueling up the car may never be the same.
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