Why Pee is Cool - entry #6 - "Pee, Our Connection with the Earth's Metabolic Cycle"

Here, in the final PeePeePost, is where we bring all we have learned together and find out how the act of peeing unites us with our planet.

sciseekclaimtoken-4eab48c19bc77 Any form of life that we know of needs two basic things.  The first is matter, as life has to be made of something.  The second is energy, so life can do something with that matter (e.g., move around, reproduce, watch trailer park boys).  Most life on earth gets its energy from the sun.  All life on earth gets its matter from...from earth, duh!

As we learned in the last PeePost, the atoms in your body are no different from the atoms in rocks/oceans/air/etc.  Additionally, the composition of our bodies is close-ish to that of the earth's crust!!

Graph of abundances of chemical elements in the earths' upper continental crust.  We are made mostly of the really abundant stuff in the upper left (e.g., oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc.)

Because of those two facts, I like to think of any kind of earth life as little tiny earth particles--walking, talking, peeing, sometimes neighborly little chunks of the earth's crust.

Humans are earth particles.

Why Pee is Cool - entry #4 - "PeePee Portal to Phosphorus" or "What the Alchemists Did Right"

Travel with me back in time, when humans were first beginning to wonder things like "What the hell is the world around me made of anyhow!?"  Picture yourself as an ancient alchemist, repeatedly trying in vain to figure out a way to turn anything into gold.  You pretty much suck at doing science, but as a result of all your fool-hearty work you do know how to do things like mix, heat, and distill stuff.  The first problem you face as an alchemist is that you need some substance to do experiments on.

Pee

"Barely Bad Bananas" or "Where Does Background Radiation Come From???"

The totally normal banana that this totally normal monkey is eating is radioactive, but so is the monkey!

Radioactive Monkey Eating Radioactive Banana, from Arne Bevaart

What is Nuclear Radiation and How Can It Hurt Me?

People get really freaked out about nuclear radiation.

Dude with Awesome Beard, Freaking Out

Since we are all really freaked out by the ongoing trouble with Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant and the hazards posed to the Japanese population by escaped nuclear radiation, let's figure out what nuclear radiation is, and let's begin by talking about radiation in general.  The word radiation is used to describe any type of particle or wave that is moving through space really fast, which encompasses lots of things.  The kind of radiation that will be most familiar to you is LIGHT, which is a kind of electromagnetic radiation.

Electromagnetic Radiation, so-named because it consists of electric and magnetic waves that fly through space together.