Man cooking urine causes evacuation

[47of74]

Not Florida. Massachusetts.

Urine, not chemicals, forced the evacuation of a dozen units at the Brandywine apartment complex Wednesday night.

Apartment officials called police about an odor coming from one of the 12 units Wednesday afternoon, Assistant Fire Chief Lindsey Stromgren said in an email.

When firefighters entered the apartment, they saw what appeared to be chemicals being mixed or cooked on the stove. The state Hazardous Materials Response team and bomb squad investigated after clearing the building.

But police said Thursday morning the "chemical" was actually distilled urine the tenant was using for medical reasons.

Medical reasons?

[liberal N proud]

1. What's for dinner - Oh just some urine I cooked up

[47of74]

2. chuckle

[Ptah]

3. What's for dinner - urine luck

[RegexReader]

4. and this is one of the reasons

that SETI won't find anything since Terra is blacklisted.

[47of74]

5. No kidding.

They're probably got a tap into Earth's internet and it has to be a source of never ending comedy for them.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Don't knock it - that's how phosphorus was discovered

Hennig Brand discovered the element of phosphorus in 1669. That sounds like quite an achievement, but Brand's life wasn't one that should, necessarily, be emulated. His steps to discovering this element were undignified, to say the least. His first step was marrying well; he was an officer in the army, but his wife had enough money for him to leave. She didn't have enough money overall — at least not according to Brand — and so he used what money she had to try to make more money.
...
As soon as he got his hands on her money, he started his experiments again. Alchemists tried anything, but they generally fixated on certain substances. Terribly rare and precious elements were popular, but so were human fluids. Humans were alchemical factories, turning ordinary substances like meat and grain into all kinds of things. The easiest thing to be got from the body was urine, and Brand, somehow, acquired a lot of it. About 1500 gallons of urine went into his experiment, but it paid off. After a complicated process of boiling and separating and recombining, he utterly failed to come up with gold. He did, however, come up with something he called "cold fire." It glowed, perpetually, in the dark. It was what we now call phosphorus.

Although no direct use was found for cold fire in Brand's life, people were fascinated with it. Brand capitalized on that — probably to his wife's great relief. He sold the secret to anyone who would pay enough, including Wilhelm Leibniz, the inventor of calculus. The buyers sold the secret to others, but it remained valuable and well-kept until 1737, when someone sold it to the Academy of Science in Paris and it was published.

How do you get phosphorus from urine? Boil the urine until it's a "syrup." Heat the syrup until a red oil comes out of it. Grab that oil! Let the rest cool. The substance will cool into two parts, a black upper part and a grainy lower part. Scrape off the lower part and throw it away. Mix the oil back into the black upper part. Heat that for about 16 hours. The oil will come back out, followed by phosphorus fumes. Channel the phosphorus into water to cool it down. Voila.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-make-phosphorus-by-doing-disgusting-things-with-747234135

[MADem]

7. Didn't the Romans collect wee-wee and use it to dryclean togas?

I'll bet everyone smelled just DANDY back then!!!