A 16th-century lawyer, Hippolytus de Marsiliis, noticed how water slowly dripping onto a rock eventually created a hollow in the stone. It got him thinking: What would happen if a human being’s forehead was subjected to the same treatment?
Legend claims it eventually drives the person crazy. For reasons unclear, the procedure came to be known as “Chinese water torture.”
photo { Swimming Pools photographed by J Bennett Fitts | more }
Astronauts drink recycled urine. (…) “The taste is great,” American astronaut Michael Barratt said. (…)
Some people may find the idea of drinking recycled urine distasteful, but it is also done on Earth, but with a lot longer time between urine and tap.
For its advocates, it is a miraculous elixir that has replaced the morning coffee as their first drink of the day; for most other people, it is bodily waste that should strictly confined to the toilet bowl. But is drinking one’s own urine really as good for you as its fans believe? (…)
Contrary to popular perception, urine is not a by-product of the body’s waste disposal system but of blood filtration. Nutrient-filled blood passes through the liver, where toxins are removed and excreted as solid waste. The purified blood then goes through another filtering process via the kidneys, where components for which the body has no immediate use are collected in a sterile, watery solution. For that reason, it is highly sterile, consisting of 95 per cent water and five per cent nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, proteins, antibodies and other beneficial ingredients.
Advocates of auto-urine therapy believe that this combination can help cure everything from the common cold to cancer, boosting energy levels and sexual performance along the way.
{ The Independent | Continue reading }
Why does my urine smell funny after I’ve eaten asparagus?
It is said that in a venerable British men’s club there is a sign reading “DURING THE ASPARAGUS SEASON MEMBERS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO RELIEVE THEMSELVES IN THE HATSTAND.”
illustration { Carlo Giovani }
A new wooden water tank went up last week atop 202 West 40th Street in Manhattan, through the efforts of the Rosenwach Tank Company of Long Island City, Queens. Every building at least 80 feet tall in New York City must have a water reservoir to meet the fire codes, and water tanks are also used to provide water service.
{ NY Times | Continue reading | slide show }
In the 1800s, New York City required that all buildings higher than 6 stories be equipped with a rooftop water tower. This was necessary to prevent the need for excessively high pressures at lower elevations, which could burst pipes.
In modern times, the towers have become fashionable in some circles. As of 2006, the neighborhood of Tribeca requires water towers on all buildings, whether or not they are being used. Two companies in New York build water towers, both of which are family businesses in operation since the 1800s.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
The Rosenwach Tank Company is one of a very few rooftop-tank coopers left in the city. No one has ever come up with a better way of making a rooftop water tank than by girdling a cylinder of wooden staves with metal hoops and adding a conical roof, and New York, which has thousands of cylindrical wooden rooftop water tanks with conical roofs, couldn’t exist without them.
The tanks are here because the water that comes into town through the aqueducts will rise to about the sixth floor without any assistance but has to be pumped to tanks on top of taller buildings to provide water pressure on their upper floors. This scheme provides plenty pressure, because the water arrives at those floors by falling straight down.
Rosenwach has built and installed well over half of the city’s tanks. Many of New York’s Rosenwach tanks were constructed in twenties, under the regime of Julius Rosenwach, the father of Wallace Rosenwach who is the current president. Julius Rosenwach moved the business to Greenpoint (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) from Grand street, Manhattan, fifty-four years ago.
Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic artist who created the four waterfall exhibits on the East River, has said that he wanted people looking at them to reconsider their relationship to the surroundings. Scott Stamford has been doing just that, though not in the way Mr. Eliasson intended.
Mr. Stamford is the manager of the River Café, a popular scenic restaurant on Water Street in Brooklyn, steps away from the waterfall installed under the Brooklyn Bridge. Whenever the wind blew in from the north, which is to say often, the restaurant’s workers, patrons and windows would get covered with a saltwater spray from the waterfall, Mr. Stamford said.
“I consider it a major impact on our ability to make guests happy,” he said of the waterfall.
The restaurant’s trees and plants also suffered damage from the saltwater, as a sign at the restaurant bluntly states. On a circular brick driveway in front of the restaurant, the trees are empty of leaves, as are the trees closest to the waterfall in the nearby garden. On the restaurant’s outdoor deck, many of the ferns, begonias and other plants had to be replaced. In recent months, a number of customers waiting for a table outside the restaurant were seen leaving after getting wet.
“You can taste the salt,” said Nicole Zoppi, 25, the restaurant’s reservation manager. “At times, it’s like it’s raining. People will come out to get into their car and it’s covered with a thick film of salt.”
The waterfalls exhibit — four giant water-pumping contraptions made of construction scaffolding that collectively churned 35,000 gallons of East River water each minute — draws to a close Monday after a 15-week run that began June 26.
The waterfalls took a team of nearly 200 designers, engineers and construction experts to build, at a cost of $15.5 million.
Most people may drink only two litres of water a day, but they consume about 3,000 if the water that goes into their food is taken into account. The rich gulp down far more, since they tend to eat more meat, which takes far more water to produce than grains. So as the world’s population grows and incomes rise, farmers will—if they use today’s methods—need a great deal more water to keep everyone fed: 2,000 more cubic kilometres a year by 2030, according to the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a research centre, or over a quarter more than they use today. Yet in many farming regions, water is scarce and likely to get scarcer as global warming worsens. The world is facing not so much a food crisis as a water crisis, argues Colin Chartres, IWMI’s director-general.
US coffee-shop chain Starbucks has defended itself against claims of a serious waste of water by leaving taps running in its stores all day.
illustration { Icon Lab }
The experiment involved 5 monkeys, a cage, a banana, a ladder and a water hose.
The 5 monkeys would be locked in a cage, after which a banana was hung from the ceiling with, fortunately for the monkeys (or so it seemed…), a ladder placed right underneath it.
Of course, immediately, one of the monkeys would race towards the ladder, intending to climb it and grab the banana. However, as soon as he would start to climb, the sadist (euphemistically called “scientist”) would spray the monkey with ice-cold water. (…) When a second monkey was about to climb the ladder, the sadist would, again, spray the monkey with ice-cold water, and apply the same treatment to its four fellow inmates; likewise for the third climber and (…) the fourth one. Then they would have learned their lesson: they were not going to climb the ladder again – banana or no banana.
In order to gain further pleasure or, I guess, prolong the experiment, the sadist outside the cage would then replace one of the monkeys with a new one. As can be expected, the new guy would spot the banana, think “why don’t these idiots go get it?!” and start climbing the ladder. Then, however, it got interesting: the other four monkeys, familiar with the cold-water treatment, would run towards the new guy – and beat him up. The new guy, blissfully unaware of the cold-water history, would get the message: no climbing up the ladder in this cage – banana or no banana.
When the beast outside the cage would replace a second monkey with a new one, the events would repeat themselves – monkey runs towards the ladder; other monkeys beat him up; new monkey does not attempt to climb again – with one notable detail: the first new monkey, who had never received the cold-water treatment himself (and didn’t even know anything about it), would, with equal vigour and enthusiasm, join in the beating of the new guy on the block.
When the researcher replaced a third monkey, the same thing happened; likewise for the fourth until, eventually, all the monkeys had been replaced and none of the ones in the cage had any experience or knowledge of the cold-water treatment.
Then, a new monkey was introduced into the cage. It ran toward the ladder only to get beaten up by the others. Yet, this monkey turned around and asked “why do you beat me up when I try to get the banana?” The other four monkeys stopped, looked at each other slightly puzzled and, finally, shrugged their shoulders: “Don’t know. But that’s the way we do things around here”…
photo { Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton }
Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”
photo { Neilsonnn }
The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.
But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown that both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.
Experts who study bottled water as a cultural phenomenon say differences between the two are largely marketing inventions.
There is abundant irony in such marketing: The supply of clean drinking water across America and in many other countries is an underappreciated scientific and technological achievement that in many ways rivals putting a man on the moon. Trillions of dollars have been spent to get clean drinking water to people at virtually no cost — and it is people in precisely these countries who seem willing to pay premiums of 1,000 percent to 10,000 percent for bottled water.
related { Which industry makes the most misleading ads? }
