Where no urine sample has gone before…
I always love the odd and unusual stories that you get on news websites, and the jackpot is often found in the science section. In the same week that the Ig-Nobel awards were announced (the Nobel prizes for weird and wonderful scientific research) comes the news that researchers in the Netherlands have found a microbe that can turn human urine into rocket fuel. Pretty cool, eh? What would be even cooler is if they could find a way for us to just piss in our cars instead of having to fill them up at the petrol; imagine how much money we would save on nationwide fuels if we could bypass the pumps and simply power our own vehicles? I just haven’t quite figured out the logistics for female drivers…
Anyway, the original research may be cool and kooky, and has garnered the researchers and their paper lots of headlines, but when you read into it further, the discovery isn’t quite as impressive or as useful as it might first appear. For a start, they have only theoretically “proven” that the microbe has the power to turn the ammonia in urine into the hydrazine molecules that make up rocket fuel. They are planning a practical demonstration of their discovery once they have the funding, but even then the number of hydrazine molecules that can be produced from the ammonia in one person’s urine is so small that it would take something like the whole world’s annual supply in order to power one trip to the moon!
Unsurprisingly, NASA had been monitoring the work of the Dutch scientists when they first got wind of the idea, but have since lost interest as the application seems to have no practical uses. Like a lot of scientific research, it is only of interest to those taking part in and those of us who find their results mildly amusing.
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