For those scientists who study urine the saying is quite literal–pee is a treasure-trove of scientific potential. It can now be used as a source of electric power. Urine-eating bacteria can create a strong enough current to power a cell phone. Medicines derived from urine can help treat infertility and fight symptoms of menopause. Stem cells harvested from urine have been reprogrammed into neurons and even used to grow human teeth.

But a quick look back in history shows that urine has always been important to scientific and industrial advancement, so much so that the ancient Romans not only sold pee collected from public urinals, but those who traded in urine had to pay a ‘urine tax’. The tax was placed on the collection of urine, since the lower classes of society had to urinate into small pots that were then emptied into cesspools. Liquid could then be collected from these cesspools, as well as from the public toilets of the upper classes, and recycled for a number of chemical processes: animal skins could be soaked in urine to remove the hair fibers before tanning, and Roman launderers could use urine as a source of ammonia to bleach and clean wool garments.

Originally published in Smithsonian Magazine.

Other Sources:

The Ancient Standard

Roads and tunnels and bridges and railways and other transport infrastructure are impressive. You could be driving for hours or days across the country or several countries and get the feeling that you will never run out of road. And you probably won’t. By some estimates if you stretch out all the roads on the planet into one long road you’d have a road the length of around 65 million miles. But the earth is a big place.

Our bodies are impressive too.

We all have pathways (capillaries, veins and arteries) that function to circulate blood and nutrients around the body while also ejecting waste. Similar to how a national road infrastructure works if you think about it.

If you were to take all these pathways out of the average human body and attach them end-to-end you would have around 60,000 miles of blood vessels.

The circumference of the Earth is 24,873.6 miles. That means if you were to connect your blood vessels end-to-end they would stretch around the world more than twice.

Source:

Full article published in The Vascular Society for Great Britain and Ireland

When a star reaches the end of its life its core implodes and, due to the force of gravity, what remains is a relatively small cluster of atomic nuclei, commonly referred to by astronomers as a neutron star.

While a fraction of it’s original size this extremely dense cluster of atomic nuclei (which is still comparatively huge from a human perspective – around 10-15 km in radius) is so dense due to the fact that all that previous matter which made up the star has now been condensed into a small cluster. It’s so dense that if you were weigh a portion of it equivalent to a teaspoon-full (flat…not heaped) it would still weigh several million tons.

Suffice to say you’d need a stronger teaspoon.

Originally published on howitworksdaily.com

I know it’s popular to think that you are multi-tasking, but the research is clear that people actually can’t multi-task, with one specific exception.

Research shows that people can attend to only one cognitive task at a time. You can only actually be thinking about one thing at a time. So you can be talking to your friend while trying to calculate a discount while shopping, or you can be playing chess while watching a TV show.

This is what is known as distraction.

To some extent, the researchers accept that there is an exception. Your brain obviously does a lot of things at one time on a neuronic and anatomical level but in our everyday consciousness it is less impressive. Perhaps you can walk or drive (or do something else which is almost second nature and doesn’t require much conscious effort) while talking or texting. However, even this often leads to distraction. That’s why we have laws against texting and driving!

A study at Stanford University demonstrated that multi-tasking doesn’t work. Clifford Nass’s study (published in August of 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), found that when people are asked to deal with multiple streams of information they can’t pay attention to them, can’t remember as well, and don’t switch as well as they would have thought.

So what’s the takeaway? One thing at a time!

For more information on the Stanford study: Stanford Study on Multi-Tasking

On the clown and unicycle research: Ira E. Hyman Jr *, S. Matthew Boss, Breanne M. Wise, Kira E. McKenzie, Jenna M. . “Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone”. Applied Cognitive Psychology, December, 2009.

Article published on Business Insider

Originally published on WhatMakesThemClick.net.

Called Prince Rupert’s drops (different story altogether), the head of these tadpole-shaped pieces of glass are strong. Very strong. So strong in fact if you shoot the head with a bullet it won’t shatter. ,

But it has a fatal weakness. The thinner tail is brittle and easily shattered and due to the composition of the glass, if the tail is shattered the entire structure of the glass drop – including the otherwise superstrong head – will shatter.

Now scientists have discovered why.

Researchers used a microscope to map the stress distribution of the drops, which form when molten glass is dropped into water.

Their study revealed that the head of the drop has a super high surface compressive stress because when the molten glass is dropped into the water the outside layer instantly cools while the inside layer remains molten. When the outer layer cools it contracts while the hot inside layer continues to want to expand but is now encaged in a solid structure. Eventually the inside layer also cools but as the particles are restricted in movement due to the outer shell being solid they can only contract in toward each other, thereby creating a very high tension inside the head – in other words, it gets very hard.

However, crack the tail and the entire lattice instantly collapses as the energy generated from the disrupted molecules in the shattered tail travel up the body of the drop of glass through a central nerve path eventually reaching the head and exploding.

Talk about a Shakespearean fatal flaw.

Sources:

Scientists solve 400-year-old mystery of Prince Rupert’s drops (Phys.org)

Business Insider

You’ve probably been there. You’re sitting in the window seat and your plane is taxiing toward the runway and on the way there are signs by the sides of the lanes with letters and numbers which you have not idea what mean.

Then you turn in to the runway and (although you may not be able to see this depending on where in the place you are sitting) and at the start of the runway there giant white numbers and letters painted across its surface.

This is the runway heading or, simply put, the name of that specific runway.

The runway heading consists of two numbers between 1 and 36. This means the heading is based on the compass directions with 360 representing north, 90 – east, 180 – south, 270 – west, 360. The numbers are rounded to the nearest ten to make it simpler and the last digit dropped so that there are always only two. If the number consists of one digit, 0 (zero) is written in front of it to make it a two-digit one.

At the end of the heading number there is a letter, L, R (or where there are three runways, C). These stand for Left runway, Right runway or Centre runway.

Every runway has two ends. so most runways have two separate numbers depending on whether planes are taking off or landing.

So if the in-flight magazine isn’t doing it for you, see if you can figure out in direction you’re taking off next time you fly.

Source: BAA Flight School

Squeamish about anything touching your eye? If so, you may not want to read on.

Isaac Newton is know for his findings in the field of mass and gravity. But his curiosity did not stop there. One of the things he was interested in was how ‘colour’ exists in nature and, more specifically, how it is interpreted by the human eye. To try to answer this question, he stuck a sewing needle with a blunt point and inserted this into his eye socket (he didn’t pierce the actual eye!). This distortion of the eyeball resulted in him seeing blurred spots due to the pressure exerted by the squashed eyeball onto parts of the retina.

In doing this, Newton was able to ascertain how the retina functioned in respect of refracting and reflecting light rays entering the eye. This finding helped pave the way for the creation of first camera, adopting a similar optical system.

Sources:

Nature

Alfredo A. Sadun in Quora.

Nobody knows for sure who came up with the concept but Benjamin Franklin appeared to have first mentioned it in 1784, when he suggested a national change in sleeping schedules so that the early morning daylight wouldn’t be “wasted” by people sleeping later. By getting up earlier, people could make more use of the sunlight and, it was hoped, this would boost overall productivity and ultimately the national economy. There was apparently no consideration of the health impacts of sleep deprivation.

The resetting of clocks to achieve this was not widely adopted until much later however. In World War I troops from several countries were ordered to get up an hour earlier to so as to save on fuel for powering artificial lights once the sun had set. This was before night-vision goggles.

Source: NASA

It’s just a wall. A big one. But a wall on which even Donald Trump would have been proud to have his name emblazoned.

The Great Wall of China is not one of the wonders of the world for nothing. It’s sheer scale and the effectiveness of its snaking design made it the perfect military defence bastion against the invading Mongols.

Although we still today marvel at the sheer audacity and brilliance of such a feat of engineering, more so considering the comparatively primitive tools and technology available at the time, there is one key ingredient in the basic construction material that is key to the secret of its longevity.

Rice. That’s right. Plain old simple rice. The same rice we eat today which happened to be plentiful (and therefore cheap and accessible) in China at the time.

Workers mixed lime and sticky rice to create a glutinous paste that they used as a mortar between the bricks. Researchers have recently discovered that mortar with sticky rice had smaller calcium carbonate crystals than mortar without it, creating a more compact structure and causing the crystals to stick together. Mortar with sticky rice is also less permeable to water and more resistant to the stresses of changing weather than standard mortar.

Indeed, renovations of historic masonry structures in China today still use the sticky-rice recipe.

Source: sciencedaily.com

For journal reference, see here.

A flea can accelerate from stationary to reach heights of about eight centimetres in one millisecond. It’s rate of acceleration is faster than a space shuttle!

The flea’s secret is a stretchy rubber-like protein which allows it to store and release energy like a spring. This enables its hind legs to snap when pushing the flea upward with a force sp strong that the flea experiences 100 G. a space shuttle peaks at around 5 G.

Source: Commonplace Fun Facts