What You Did Not Know

The headline reads: Water Everywhere, None To Drink? NASA May Have Answer It is purified urine, of course. Not only is Marshall Space Flight Center now testing a unit to recycle this valuable liquid on the space station, but trailer-mounted units could soon be headed to Iraq and larger ones to southeast Asia. The latter is important because recent tsunamis "polluted" many streams in the watershed with ocean salt. Since this has been discussed and prototyped for several decades now, the only real news may be NASA's intention to deploy the current technology.

What many of you probably did not know, however (and I learned firsthand working for a large pharmaceutical manufacturer) is that urine collected from the Japanese army in the 60s and at least during the 70s was considered the purest, most economical source of pharmaceutical grade urea on the planet. That's right, after processing, it went into lots of pills sold everywhere in U.S. pharmacies. All medically appropriate and with no cause for alarm whatever outside of religious fanaticism perhaps. You may wonder why the Japanese army was so pure? Homogeneous people with its well-disciplined army on a strict diet (at least back then). Kanpai!