Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@
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World’s largest bowling alley: the Nagoya Grand Bowl in Japan. It has 156 lanes.
PEE 101
Urine in wastewater contains ammonia (NH3), a compound consisting of one atom of nitrogen and three atoms of hydrogen. And as Dr. Botte confirmed when she subjected urine to electrolysis, it’s a good candidate for hydrogen production because the hydrogen and nitrogen atoms in ammonia are not bound together as tightly as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water are.
Only five percent as much energy is needed to break the ammonia molecules apart, and because each molecule contains three hydrogen atoms, not two as in H2O, more hydrogen is freed each time a molecule is split up. Less energy spent and more atoms freed makes extracting hydrogen from urine much cheaper than extracting it from fresh water—90¢ for the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas vs. $7.10 for hydrogen electrolyzed from water, Botte says. And best of all, fuel cells provide clean energy, because when hydrogen and oxygen are combined to generate electricity, the only “exhaust” created by the process is water (which could be drunk to aid in the production of more urine). No greenhouse gases are released at all.
With an estimated five million tons of ammonia entering the United States waste stream as human and animal urine each year—enough to provide electricity to 900,000 homes—the supply of “raw materials” for hydrogen production is enormous and almost completely untapped. But not for long: Botte sees a day when hydrogen extraction will be a standard function of wastewater treatment plants. “Ammonia,” she says, “is our future fuel.”
COMING SOON
As of the fall of 2009, Botte’s pee-powered “electrolyzer” prototype was about the size of a paperback book and produced less than one watt of power, not even enough to light an incandescent light-bulb. But Botte says the technology is ready to be scaled up to car size. “With the right partnership, I believe we could have pee-powered cars capable of 60 miles per gallon on the road within a year,” she told Wired magazine.
And if her predictions are accurate, cars powered by fuel cells will have pee tanks, just as cars today have gas tanks, because hydrogen is much easier to store as a component of wastewater than in its pure form. Pure hydrogen is a gas; it must be kept extremely cold and stored in pressure tanks to be useful as a fuel. Botte’s design calls for the urine to be converted into hydrogen right inside the automobile, and only as needed, eliminating the cost and difficulty of storing hydrogen in its pure form.
Longest month: October. (Daylight Saving Time makes it 31 days, 1 hr. long.)
But you still won’t be able to pee your way to work, unless you have a medical condition or work really close to home. A healthy adult produces only 1½ quarts of urine a day, not enough to get very far. “I wish we humans produced enough urine to run a whole car,” Botte says. “Maybe we could run some minor applications, like the car stereo or something like that.”
URINE GOOD COMPANY
Here are a few more waste products with the real potential to become the fuels of the future:
• Animal dung. Professor Botte isn’t the only person pondering the power of pee: Scientists at Japan’s Obihiro University have developed a method of obtaining ammonia from animal urine and dung by fermenting it in an oxygen-free environment. As with Botte’s technique, the ammonia is electrolyzed to separate out the hydrogen, which is then fed into fuel cells to produce electricity. The scientists estimate that one day’s “output” of animal waste from a typical Japanese farm will produce enough energy to power a home for three days.
• Disposable diapers. In 2007 the British engineering firm AMEC announced it was building a plant in Quebec, Canada, that will use a heating process called pyrolysis to convert the diapers (and their contents) into a mix of synthetic diesel fuel, methane gas, and “carbon-rich char.” When the plant is up and running it is expected to convert 30,000 tons of dirty diapers—about a quarter of all the diapers used each year in Quebec—into diesel fuel annually.
• “Turkey waste.” For several years a company called Changing World Technologies operated a plant in Carthage, Missouri, that converted the waste from a Butterball Turkey slaughterhouse (beaks, bones, feathers, guts, etc.) into biodiesel. Capacity: 1,200 tons of turkey parts a week. But neighbors complained about the smell (“just like burning meat”), and in 2009 the company closed the plant and filed for bankruptcy.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was directly responsible for getting the Hummer released as a civilian vehicle.
EAT MY…
Who says you can’t eat bottles, boats, or shoe cream?
BILLBOARD! On Easter Day 2007, British candy retailer Thorntons unveiled an unusual billboard in the Covent Garden district of London. The 14-by-9-foot advertisement was made entirely out of chocolate—10 large chocolate bunnies, 72 giant chocolate eggs, and 128 chocolate panels, for a total of 860 pounds of chocolate. It was eaten by passersby in less than three hours.
SHOE CREAM! If you’re ever stranded in the desert with nothing but a jar of shoe cream, pray it’s this kind. In 2009 London-based Po-Zu, a retailer specializing in environmentally friendly products, introduced PO-ZU Shoe Cream. It’s made from organic coconut oil, and, if your shoes don’t need shining, you can use it as lip balm, hair conditioner—or even cooking oil. “You can even spread it on your toast,” Po-Zu says on its website.
MONA LISA! In October 2008, to mark the 100th anniversary of Tavr, a meat processing company headquartered in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, Russian artists completed reproductions of six classic paintings using only frames, canvas…and sausage. The works exhibited included Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and Picasso’s Girl on a Ball. And they really looked like the originals. “The biggest trouble,” said artist Aleksandr Solomko, “was getting the sausages to stick to the canvas.” (They used flavorless gelatin for glue.) Visitors were encouraged to use toothpicks to pick pieces of the “paintings” off the canvases and eat them, which they happily did.
QR CODE! QR codes are similar to the bar codes used to digitally encode prices on store products, but look like random patterns of square dots and blank spots. They’re very popular in Japan, where advertisements using QR codes can be found in magazines, on billboards, even on buses. The codes can be read by most Japanese cell-phone cameras, which then provide links to websites where consumers can get more information about the products. In 2010 Montreal-based Clever Cupcakes decided to make the technology tastier—and began offering cupcakes topped with QR codes made of sugar. And they work: If you hold your cell phone to the cupcake, you’re directed to the website of the Montreal Science Center, which helped promote the digitally enhanced cakes. Then…enjoy the cupcake!
BOAT! In 2008 the town of Eyemouth, Scotland, held a toy-boatbuilding contest. The winner: the one that stayed afloat the longest. The catch: All boats had to be made entirely from edible materials. Entrants included a boat made of apples, marshmallows, and strawberries; a trimaran of red pepper, carrot, and licorice root; and a canoe made from an eggplant, with two eggs as cargo. The boats were launched into the waves at Eyemouth Beach. Several hours later, a boat made from sheets of lasagna was declared the most seaworthy, and a sailboat made of chocolate cake won the prize for best overall. (Neither, however, was eaten afterward.)
SAKE BOTTLE! In 2009 officials in the town of Takahama on Honshu Island, Japan, announced the establishment of the “Committee to Reinstate the Sake Bottle Squid.” They were referring to Ika Tokkuri, traditional Japanese sake bottles made from the skins of squid that are stuffed with rice, molded into bottle form, and allowed to dry. Not only are they edible after use—but it gives the sake a tantalizing bit of squid flavoring. (Mmmm!) The bottles can be used five or six times before eating.
LP! Peter Lardong lost his job at a brewery in Berlin, Germany, in the 1980s, and during his time off decided to make some LPs (as in long-playing records)…out of food. He tried, usually with butter, ice cream, cola, beer, and even sausages, but “none of these things quite
made it.” Then he tried chocolate: He made a mold of a record, melted chocolate, poured it into the mold, put it in the refrigerator overnight, and in the morning—voilà! The chocolate record actually played. Lardong now sells his chocolate LPs for about $6 apiece, and a Japanese company recently expressed interest in purchasing the patent.
“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.” —Rumi
In Canada, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are called “Reese” Peanut Butter Cups.
UNCLE JOHN’S
PAGE OF LISTS
Some random bits from the BRI’s bottomless trivia files.
THE NATIONAL SAFETY COUNCIL’S 6 MOST LIKELY WAYS TO DIE
1. Heart disease (Odds: 1 in 6)
2. Cancer (1 in 7)
3. Stroke (1 in 28)
4. Car accident (1 in 85)
5. Intentional self-harm (1 in 115)
6. Accidental poisoning (1 in 139)
WORLD’S 3 MOST POPULAR SPECTATOR SPORTS
1. Soccer
2. Cricket
3. Volleyball
4 BEERS FROM TV CARTOONS
1. Pawtucket Patriot Ale (Family Guy)
2. Duff (The Simpsons)
3. Alamo (King of the Hill)
4. Bendërbrau (Futurama)
ONLY 9 MEN TO APPEAR ON THE COVER OF PLAYBOY (SO FAR)
1. Peter Sellers
2. Burt Reynolds
3. Steve Martin
4. Donald Trump
5. Dan Aykroyd
6. Jerry Seinfeld
7. Leslie Nielsen
8. Gene Simmons
9. Seth Rogen
THE 6 RICHEST U.S. PRESIDENTS (ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION)
1. John F. Kennedy ($1 billion)
2. George Washington ($525 million)
3. Thomas Jefferson ($212 million)
4. Teddy Roosevelt ($125 million)
5. Andrew Jackson ($119 million)
6. James Madison ($101 million)
THE 3 MOST PERFORMED HIGH SCHOOL PLAYS
1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)
2. Rumors (Neil Simon)
3. The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
6 OFFICIAL LANGUAGES OF THE U.N.
1. Chinese
2. Russian
3. Spanish
4. English
5. French
6. Arabic
5 PLACES THAT ARE OPEN ON CHRISTMAS
1. John Deere World Headquarters
2. Greater Vancouver Zoo
3. Disney World
4. The theaters of Branson, Missouri
5. Yellowstone National Park
Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna was Marilyn Monroe’s therapist.
SALEM WITCH TRIALS:
THE FUNGUS THEORY
More than three centuries after the end of the Salem witch trials, they continue to defy explanation. In the mid-1970s, a college undergraduate developed a new theory. Does it hold water? Read on and decide for yourself.
SEASON OF THE WITCH
In the bleak winter of 1692, the people of Salem, Massachusetts, hunkered down in their cabins and waited for spring. It was a grim time: There was no fresh food or vegetables, just dried meat and roots to eat. Their mainstay was the coarse bread they baked from the rye grain harvested in the fall.
Shortly after the New Year, the madness began. Elizabeth Parris, 9-year-old daughter of the local preacher, and her cousin, 11-year-old Abigail Williams, suffered from violent fits and convulsions. They lapsed into incoherent rants, had hallucinations, complained of crawly sensations on their skin, and often retreated into dull-eyed trances. Their desperate families turned to the local doctor, who could find nothing physically wrong with them. At his wit’s end, he decided there was only one reasonable explanation: witchcraft.
BLAME GAME
Word spread like wildfire through the village: An evil being was hexing the children. Soon, more “victims” appeared, most of them girls under the age of 20. The terrified villagers started pointing fingers of blame, first at an old slave named Tituba, who belonged to the Reverend Parris, then to old women like Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn. The arrests began on February 29; the trials soon followed. That June, 60-year-old Bridget Bishop was the first to be declared guilty of witchcraft and the first to hang. By September, 140 “witches” had been arrested and 19 had been executed. Many of the accused barely escaped the gallows by running into the woods and hiding. Then, sometime over the summer, the demonic fits stopped—and the frenzy of accusation and counter-accusation stopped with them. As passions cooled, the villagers tried to put their community back together again.
At one point in British history, you could be hanged for “impersonating an Egyptian.”
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
What happened to make these otherwise dour Puritans turn on each other with such a destructive frenzy? Over the centuries several theories have been put forth, from the Freudian—that the witch hunt was the result of hysterical tension resulting from centuries of sexual repression—to the exploitive—that it was fabricated as an excuse for a land grab (the farms and homes of all of the victims and many of the accused were confiscated and redistributed to other members of the community). But researchers had never been able to find real evidence to support these theories. Then in the 1970s, a college student in California made a deduction that seemed to explain everything.
In 1976 Linnda Caporael, a psychology major at U.C. Santa Barbara, was told to choose a subject for a term paper in her American History course. Having just seen a production of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (a fictional account of the Salem trials), she decided to write about the witch hunt. “As I began researching,” she later recalled, “I had one of those ‘a-ha!’ experiences.” The author of one of her sources said he remained at a loss to explain the hallucinations of the villagers of Salem. “It was the word ‘hallucinations’ that made everything click,” said Caporael. Years before, she’d read of a case of ergot poisoning in France where the victims had suffered from hallucinations, and she thought there might be a connection.
THE FUNGUS AMONG US
Ergot is a fungus that infects rye, a grain more commonly used in past centuries to bake bread than it is today. One of the byproducts present in ergot-infected rye is ergotamine, which is related to LSD. Toxicologists have known for years that eating bread baked with ergot-contaminated rye can trigger convulsions, delusions, creepy-crawly sensations of the skin, vomiting…and hallucinations. And historians were already aware that the illness caused by ergot poisoning (known as St. Anthony’s Fire) was behind several incidents of mass insanity in medieval Europe. Caporael wondered if the same conditions might have been present in Salem.
Frank Sinatra once said rock ’n’ roll was only played by “cretinous goons.”
They were. Ergot needs warm, damp weather to grow, and those conditions were rife in the fields around Salem in 1691. Rye was the primary grain grown, so there was plenty of it to be infected. Caporael also discovered that most of the accusers lived on the west side of the village, where the fields were chronically marshy, making them a perfect breeding ground for the fungus. The crop harvested in the fall of 1691 would’ve been baked and eaten during the following winter, which was when the fits of madness began. However, the next summer was unusually dry, which could explain the sudden stop to the bewitchments. No ergot, no madness.
SHE RESTS HER CASE
Caporael continued to research her theory as she pursued her Ph.D., publishing her findings in 1976 in the journal Science, which brought her support from the scientific community and attention from the news media. Caporael has been careful to say that her theory only accounts for the initial cause of the Salem witch hunts. As the frenzy grew in scope and consequence, she’s convinced that the actual sequence of events probably included not only real moments of mass hysteria but also some overacting on the part of the accusers (motivated as much by fear of being accused themselves as by any actual malice toward the accused).
OTHER POSSIBILITIES
Caporael’s theory remains one of the most convincing explanations for what started the madness that tore apart the village of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692…but there are others.
• Encephalitis Lethargica. Historian Laurie Win Carlson compared the symptoms of the accused in Salem (violent fits, trance or coma-like states) with those experienced by victims of an outbreak of Encephalitis Lethargica, an acute inflammation of the brain, between 1915 and 1926. The trials were likely “a response to unexplained physical and neurological behaviors resulting from an epidemic of encephalitis,” she says.
• Jimson Weed. This toxic weed, sometimes called devil’s trumpet or locoweed, grows wild in Massachusetts. Ingesting it can cause hallucinations, delirium, and bizarre behavior.
2010 study: 33% of U.S. workers are chronically overworked. (10% are unemployed.)
ONCE UPON A TIME…
What’s the most important part of a good story? The first line—a great one will leave you anxious to read more. Here are some great opening lines from famous books.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
—George Orwell, 1984
“All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.”
—Leo Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien,
The Hobbit
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice
“Once upon a time there was…‘A king!’ my young readers will instantly exclaim. No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.”
—Carlo Collodi,
Pinocchio