Let’s get right into it, shall we?

Mark Your Territory is a new system that lets individuals check-in to foursquare by physically urinating at the actual location.

Social networking has gone too far. Because, you know, it’s just a matter of time before Facebook tries to duplicate this. Then it’ll be everywhere.

Please let this be a hoax. Please.

Link -via NotCot

You might remember Amy Rawson as the creator of the felted Cthulhu Santas we feature during the holidays. Her latest project is the Pee Towel, which arose from her day job as a lab tech. Specifically, from urinalysis.

Part of urinalysis is a microscopic examination, and one of the microscopic elements we look for is crystal formation. Urinary crystals result from a supersaturation of the urine with some particular substance. That substance can precipitate out to form distinctive crystals.

One kind of crystal inspired Rawson to design a fabric featuring her drawings of calcium oxalate, from which she made kitchens towels called Pee Towels! You can get yours in her Etsy shop. Read more about urinalysis and the creativity it inspires at Rawson’s new website. Link

"Signature scent" doesn’t get any more personal than this, folks! If you love to hear the unusual things artists do in the name of art, "urine" for a treat:

Conceptual artist Cherry Tree has a scent of mystery about her. And the smell of urine. Her urine. And it’s intentional.

For the last five years, Tree, who splits time between Missouri and Spain, has been turning her own urine into perfume.

"I am very much into recycling," Tree, born Charity Blansit, told AOL Weird News. "And urine is something I’ve thought needs to be recycled, since it’s something that gets eliminated." [...]

"I was fascinated by how the smell changes depending on what you eat," she said. "For instance, it smells really good after you eat a lot of honey and it smells terrible after eating chicken."

David Moye of AOL News has the full story: Link | Cherry Tree’s blog – via Fark

Craig Turner has a problem with neighborhood cats peeing on his property. They spray the house, doors, car, and worst of all, the air conditioning vents. I would just get a dog (which I did), but Turner constructed a homemade defense that involves cameras, motions sensors, and lots of planning. How successful was it? You’ll have to watch the entire video to find out. Warning: urination. -via Metafilter

I hope that Google Translate is mangling this Chinese news story so much that its actual meaning is completely different that what it appears to be. Or that some reporter is playing a joke akin to April Fools’ Day news articles in the United States.

That caveat (and wishful thinking) aside: it appears to be traditional in Donyang, China to take the urine left in buckets by schoolboys and boil eggs with it. “hawkers to sell the boy down the street selling eggs, street an odor, Dongyang people say that this is a taste of spring.”

Link via Boing Boing | Photo: China Daily

This listing for my urine-free wetsuit is getting a lot of unexpected attention which is nice but I’m feeling I should do something positive with all the ‘f*cking energy man’, so I’ve decided to give 90% of the money it makes to the Red Cross to aid their efforts in Japan. That sounds all ‘oh look at me I’m so nice I’m giving to charity’ doesn’t it… yeah well p*ss off.

But what! There’s more!

Just got off the phone to XCEL wetsuits in Hawaii, who are very kindly donating a BRAND NEW 2011 Drylock wetsuit to the auction, it will remain a 3/2 (summer) but will be available in a range of sizes to suit the winning bidder. So now, in addition to the original p*ss free suit, you’ll also get a brand spanker, but still no bears or doors, just TWO wetsuits free of urine, one old and knackered (m) and one lovely and new (any size).

After that, the auction snowballed. Different companies have added a lot more merchandise, like a watch, boots, surfboard, books, and concert tickets. Morgan created a separate website called bears don’t wear wetsuits to handle questions and correspondence about the auction. As of this writing, the bidding stands at £9,300.00, which is $15K US. Link -via Metafilter

German astronomer Jens Hackmann shot this picture of what is thought to be the last waste water dump from the space shuttle Discovery on March 8 before re-entry. This waste water would, of course, include astronaut urine:

“When observing ISS and space shuttle Discovery with unaided eye, there was nothing special for me,” Hackmann wrote in the caption of his video on YouTube. “But when I examined the video clip I wondered what that tail on Discovery was…Then I read in the internet about other sights.”

Such water dumps are a usual event, allowing the spaceship to unload its dirty water and urine before returning to Earth. A similar disposal gave skywatchers a nice view during the shuttle Discovery’s STS-128 mission in September, 2009 as well.

Link via Alphecca

Their findings contradict previous research which found people who are forced to “restrain themselves” put more pressure on their brain and found it difficult exerting self-control.

Dr Mirjam Tuk, who led the study, said that the brain’s “control signals” were not task specific but result in an “unintentional increase” in control over other tasks.

“People are more able to control their impulses for short term pleasures and choose more often an option which is more beneficial in the long run,” she said.

“The brain area sending this signal, is activated not only for bladder control, but for all sorts of control.

The psychologists tested their hypothesis by asking two groups of people — one consisting of people who had just drank a large amount of water and one that hadn’t — to make decisions about the future:

They were asked to make eight choices ranging from small, and immediate, rewards to larger, but delayed, ones including choosing to receive either $16 (£10) tomorrow or $30 (£18) in 35 days.

They concluded that people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger rewards later.

Link | Photo by Flickr user mauitimeweekly used under Creative Commons license

Chemistry’s colorful past
by Neil Gussman
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Paintings of alchemists show them holding up flasks. The contents of those flasks are almost always golden in color. That’s because alchemists were obsessed with urine.

Trouble comes to the Alchemist, 17-18th century,17th century Netherlandish. (FA 2000.001.269. Oil on canvas Fisher Collection Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections.) Photo by Will Brown.

And no wonder. The limits of science all through history are set by the limits of instruments. So despite having just five senses for test instruments, the alchemist could use urine to diagnose patients and make scientific discoveries. (He was often the local healer, dentist and bleeder.) At the time when alchemy was the leading edge of chemistry, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the alchemist could observe, sniff, touch and taste this vital fluid to look for clues to the ills his patient suffered.

The Alchemist, 17th century, by Mattheus van Helmont. (Oil on canvas. Fisher Collection, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections. FA 2000.001.277. Another alchemist working in a messy back room. This one holds the specimen at arm’s length, maybe because he is farsighted, or maybe because he decided against the sniff test. Photo by Will Brown.

The Medical Chemist, 18th century, by Franz Christoph Janneck. (Oil on copper. Fisher Collection, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections. FA 2000.001.275.) A shabby and dirty alchemist looking for cues of the maladies of the patient through urinoscopy. Photo by Will Brown.

The Iatrochemist, 17-18th century, by Balthasar van den Bossche. (FA 2000.001.279.Oil on canvas. Fisher Collection, CHF Collections.) Many alchemy paintings hung in the homes of prosperous merchants as a warning to their children: Don’t Be an Alchemist! This painting shows the alchemist as a poor man, working in the back room of a Publick House, using his five senses to analyze an anxious lady’s urine while a dentist works in the background. This scene was almost 200 years before ether, so the alchemist worked in loud and foul conditions. Photo by Will Brown.

Arguably the greatest discovery made by an alchemist was from urine. Sometime around 1669, German alchemist Hennig Brandt distilled buckets of urine and then heated the paste that remained. In addition to creating a horrible smell, he isolated phosphorus. When the secret got out—Brandt’s neighbors certainly knew a lot about his research—alchemists across Europe began collecting urine from public loos in hopes of replicating his results. Alchemy hung on till the 19th century partly because Brandt found the route from piss to phosphorus.

Science, 17-18th century, after Gerard Thomas. (Oil on canvas. Fisher Collection, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections. FA 2000.001.265.) This atypical alchemist works in clean clothes in neat surroundings with servants and a dog at his side, but he is still staring at a beaker of urine. Photo by Will Brown.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Amanda Antonucci, assistant image archivist at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, for help in preparing the historical images displayed here.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Toto’s engineers developed a receptacle inside the basin to collect the urine for sugar content and temperature checks, and an armband to monitor blood pressure. The readout is displayed on a wall-mounted computer screen.

"With the current model, your data is sent automatically to your personal computer, and then you can email it to your doctor," said Suzuki.
"In the next generation model, the data will be sent automatically to family members or doctors via the Internet," she told AFP.

The electronic marvel, called the "Intelligence Toilet", is capable of storing the data of up to five different people and retails for 350,000 to 500,000 yen (about 4,100 to 5,850 dollars) in Japan, she said.

Link | Nerve has a few more pics: Link – Thanks Ben!

You pee, I pee, we all pee – but have you ever given thought to what exactly you’re flushing out of your body? In her book That’s Disgusting! An Adult Guide to What’s Gross, Tasteless, Rude, Crude, and Lewd, Greta Garbage explains all sorts of bizarre trivia about urine.

Warning: not for the squeamish. True to the title of her book, Greta Garbage’s book is like a No Holds Barred trivia book about really gross things. You’ve been warned (or if this sort of things interest you, then “urine” for a treat!)

Facts About Urine

Some people are totally fascinated with the useless fact their piss smells different after they eat asparagus. Indeed, one pundit suggested that it's just a matter of time until someone produces a cartoon Asparagusman, whose primary job it is to sniff out people who have just eaten that vegetable.

Technically, the asparagus doesn't make the urine smell, some people just have the fairly useless ability to pick it out. There have been at least three studies determining how many people have this claim to fame, as if it mattered.

Tens of thousands of words have been written on smell hypersensitivity - even Benjamin Franklin, who surely had better things to do, jokingly suggested that a drug be found that could make a fart smell like perfume.

But if you feel you must know more about asparagus and pee-smell, you're probably best off waiting for the cartoon.

Here's a wee bit more about piss. Actually, your urine is odorless until after it comes out of your body. What you smell then is ammonia - yep, the same stuff you clean with.

Asparagus isn't the only thing some people smell in urine. Drinking turpentine is said to make urine smell like a rose, so hundreds of years ago, women would drink turpentine so their piss would smell sweet.

One man claims that large quantities of onions, especially in curried rice, make his piss smell odd, but so far this claim has not been backed up by rigorous testing.

If you really want to know:
• Eating beets can turn your urine red.
• Vitamin B2 makes it bright yellow.
• Certain blue dyes make it blue-green.
• L-dopa makes it dark brown.
• Rhubarb sometimes makes it brownish or pinkish.

What's really important, though, is not color but intensity. A good clue to health is the darkness of the urine hue. Experts say that you should pee pale. (In other words, if you're not getting enough water in your system, your urine will be darker.)

Adult men usually pee in a narrower stream than women do because sex and children can affect the women's tissues there. This unusual fact was used to test virginity centuries ago: If a woman peed like a man, she was thought to be a virgin. (Some idiots in those days also thought they could just look at urine and tell if the woman was intact.)

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Piercing the penis may also affect the stream, since it can cause spraying, split-stream pissing, and so on. Indeed, after piercing, some men have to cover the hole with their hand in order to urinate normally. God knows what anyone next to them in a men's room thinks they're doing.

Urine: Practical Jokes and Assaults

For some people, sticking their hands in water makes them have to pee. Years ago, a man used to wander around beaches in Southern France, looking for sleeping women.
He carried a glass of water with him, and when he found an attractive woman, half asleep, sunbathing, he supposedly put her hand into the glass of water and then watched her pee. Well, it's a good story, anyway.

Remember the story of Sir Walter Raleigh and how he gallantly threw his cape down so Queen Elizabeth could pass by?

There are two things the history book probably didn't tell you about that:
• First, it was probably a puddle of urine, not water;
• Second, what did he do with his cape afterward?

Moo goo pee pan: Last year, after a tenant in Long Island became suspicious that her landlord was entering her apartment when she was gone, she installed a video camera.

She got a clear picture of her landlord, a forty-one-year-old computer programmer, removing a cardboard container of leftover Chinese food from the fridge, peeing in it, and putting it back.

This happened on three occasions in 1998, during which time let's hope she ate out.

Toilet water-literally: A Zimbabwean man was convicted (and sentenced to only a month) for selling perfume that was really his own urine. Fortunately, most women realized when they opened the package at home that it didn't smell like perfume and discarded it.

But one woman, who filed the complaint, applied it, took one whiff, and realized that what was on her wrists was more like Channel #1 than Channel #5.

A twelve-year-old boy removed the water from his teacher's water bottle and peed in it. Apparently the water didn’t taste funny to her, because she drank 8 to 10 ounces of it without ill effects. She only learned the truth because the boy bragged to his friends about what he had done.

She later sued the school, claiming the incident permanently damaged her ability to pee, and teach.

Waldorf Hysteria: In a very strange incident at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, a fifty-year-old New Jersey fashion consultant claimed a naked woman trying to enter her hotel room awakened her in the middle of the night.

Even odder, she said the woman (somehow) supposedly urinated on her door when she couldn't get in.

She sued the hotel-not for that, but for the food poisoning she claimed she got from the basket of fruit the hotel gave her to apologize for the alleged bizarre incident.

Moral of the story: Ignore people who piss at your door, and never eat free fruit.

A joke to play with urine is to freeze a small amount of pee in a shallow dish, take it out, and then slip the "pee puck" into the mail slot on someone's door, tossing it in as far away from the door as possible.

When the frozen urine melts, the person will find a mysterious puddle near the door, and forever wonder how in hell it got there when no one seems to have entered the house.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

The Anatomical Chart Company sells authentic urine specimen bottles to give as house gifts, so recipients can serve their guests wine like urine. (It could have been worse; they could have served Gallo.)

Uses for Urine

To us, a piss is just a piss, but historically, urine has been used in many unusual ways. For example, urine has been incorporated into wedding ceremonies. At weddings in North Africa, for ceremonial purposes, the bride's urine was sprinkled on the guests after the wedding. (Perhaps as a symbol of the sort of treatment the groom should come to expect.)

"You may now piss the bride": Sometimes, even in "civilized" countries like England and Ireland, the guests drink the bride's urine.

Because of its antiseptic properties, urine was once used to wash wounds on the battlefield. Centuries ago, when someone's nose was cut off during a duel, the surgeon peed on it to clean it before it was stitched back on.

Urine has been used to make tweeds. According to Almanac of the Gross, Harris Tweed is still made today in Scotland the way it was made for hundreds of years. From yarn dyed with lichen - that has been soaked in human urine.

Urine was used as an eyewash - recommended in the thirteenth century by Pope John XXI, no less! And one pharaoh claimed he got his eye cured with the urine of a woman - whom he later thanked by marrying.

A squirt a day keeps the dentist at bay: Long ago, urine was often used as toothpaste. It was believed that brushing one's teeth with urine would make the teeth whiter. It may have actually worked, too, because ammonia is a product of stale urine.

Urine has also been used as a mouthwash. Bad enough to swish it around in one's mouth, but it was said to be most effective if kept in the mouth for long periods of time.

Urine may also repel cats and dogs. (Not to mention brothers, sisters, boyfriends, girlfriends, and strangers.) In a bizarre letter to the editor of the New England Medical Journal, a doctor wrote that two of his patients who had applied urine around the edges of their gardens had successfully kept neighboring dogs and cats from entering them.

One man had poured sterile urine out of a vessel; the other had urinated every few steps until he had accomplished his goal. Not satisfied with merely freaking out his neighbors, he insisted on telling everyone about it.

A few other recorded uses for urine:
• To get rid of acne.
• To wash linens. The Romans used to do this.
• To tan leather.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Uncivil war: Richard Zachs, in History Laid Bare, reveals that urine was distilled into nitre for gunpowder during the Civil War. It seems that Confederate wagons went down the streets so women could donate the pee from their chamberpots. This inspired an amusing poem by an Alabama soldier, part of which went as follows:

We thought the girls had work enough making shirts and kissing
But you have put the pretty dears to patriotic pissing.
…But 'tis an awful idea…gunpowdery and cranky,
That when a lady lifts her skirts, she's killing off a Yankee!

This inspired a retaliatory verse from a Northerner:

... And vice versa, what would make a Yankee soldier madder
Than dodging bullets fired from a pretty woman's bladder?
They say there was a subtle smell that lingered in the powder
And as the smoke grew thicker and the din of battle louder
There was found to this compound one serious objection
No soldier boy did sniff the stuff without having an erection!

Urine Drinking

I.P. Freely: Urine is actually quite clean - 96 percent of it is water anyway - and there are no bacteria in it until it's out of your body. But although it's sterile, drinking it may carry a risk of transmission of the HIV virus, so it may therefore not be safe to drink someone else's urine.

Some also believe that drinking urine could strain your kidneys, since urine contains salts that your body is trying to get rid of. They suggest that if you're going to drink urine, you also drink lots of water as well. But if you're going to drink lots of water, why bother drinking urine?

Still, urine is currently considered a power drink that's free and has been recommended by several sources:

• Mahatma Gandhi, who drank it regularly.
• Euro-Peeins and English folks like the actress Sarah Miles, who helped make it popular.
• Elvis Presley's mother used to pee into a jar, and then put the pee in her beer with an eyedropper, believing it would confer health benefits on her, even if it wasn't all shook up.
• Pat Boone admitted on The Daily Show that he had tried it.
• Newsweek magazine ran a story about urine drinking.
• Environmental advocates occasionally publicly endorse it, advocating it as the ultimate in recycling.
• Kevin Costner drank it in Waterworld, whose title had nothing to do with that part of the movie.
• The leak(er) shall inherit the earth: The Bible says in Proverbs 5:15, "Drink waters out of thine won cistern." (It could have been worse. It could have said, "Drink water out of thine own sister.")

Don't say cheese: Occasionally other stories of historical urine drinking pop up. For example, a man in Germany was tried years ago for putting the urine of young girls into cheese to improve its taste.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Gee whiz. Is there a doctor in the outhouse? At an Auto-Urine Therapy conference in India in the late 1990's, 600 delegates from seventeen nations discussed the medical benefits of drinking their own urine.

Probably a nice bunch of people there, but would you really want to go to their cocktail parties?

The article above is reprinted with permission from That's Disgusting : An Adult Guide to What's Gross, Tasteless, Rude, Crude, and Lewd by Greta Garbage, published by Ten Speed Press.

Believe it or not, this is actually the "milder" subject that's suitable for printing on Neatorama. Greta's book is jam-packed with endlessly en"gross"ing (see what I did there?) info about things that are revolting.

Link: Amazon | Interview with Greta Garbate

Only male gardeners are participating, in part because of some dubious claims regarding gender-based differences in urine:  “There are obvious logistical benefits to limiting it to male members of the team, but also male pee is preferable to women’s, as the male stuff is apparently less acidic.”

A secondary benefit is anticipated in terms of water conservation:

“An average flush of the lavatory can use anything from four and a half to nine litres of water each time, but what people may not realise is that this water is treated to the same standard as drinking water and shouldn’t be wasted.”  Urinating outdoors or in the shower is advocated by environmental activists, including Cameron Diaz, as a way of tacking climate change by saving water and energy.

They are tentatively encouraging the public to follow their lead: ““Adding a little pee just helps get it all going; it’s totally safe and a bit of fun too.”

Links for the Telegraph and the BBC (where there is an explanatory video).

Gerardine Botte, an Ohio University professor, sees the liquid as a solution thanks to the particular composition of its major component, urea. Its make-up, a 2-to-1 ratio of hydrogen and nitrogen, is convenient because hydrogen can be extracted from nitrogen using much less electricity than that needed to, say, pull apart hydrogen and oxygen. (It’s a matter of 0.037 Volts versus 1.23 Volts, if you really need to know.)

Botte has recently come up with a nickel-based electrode that can do just that: dip the electrode into urine, apply electrical current, and voila, hydrogen is released. While the research is still in an initial phase, it’s possible that urine could power cars, homes, and various devices in as near of a future as six months from now.

Link

The Nopopo batteries use a combination of magnesium and carbon that can be mixed with a variety of fluids (including urine) to produce a charge. These batteries only last around 500mAh, which is far less than your average alkaline AA battery, but at least you won’t have to kill the earth to recharge them.

Link – via Shiny Shiny

Previously on Neatorama: Urine-Powered Battery