Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Better Tomatoes Via a Fertilizer of...Human Urine? at Popular Science.

Apparently, human urine works remarkably well as a fertilizer for tomatoes, according to a new study out of Finland.

Plants fertilized with a mixture of stored human urine and wood ash produced 4.2 times more fruit than plants without the pee, the study found. The urine-fertilized tomatoes had more beta-carotene than unfertilized ones, and much more protein than traditionally fertilized plants.

And the tomatoes were just as good as those grown with traditional fertilizer, according to a panel of 20 brave tasters.

This really isn't grosser than fertilizing with cow manure. Storing your urine and the aroma of the tomato patch aren't exactly appealing, though.

Photo / University of Washington
Engineers Babak Parviz and Brian Otis and their students demonstrate how a device can be plugged into a tree for power.

Electrical circuit runs entirely off power in trees.

You've heard about flower power. What about tree power? It turns out that it's there, in small but measurable quantities. There's enough power in trees for University of Washington researchers to run an electronic circuit, according to results to be published in an upcoming issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Transactions on Nanotechnology.

Commenters rightly wonder how tapping this juice affects the tree, which presumably needs it, too.

Adult fat cells easily become multi-purpose stem cells: Stanford research

Get out your liposuction wands, everybody: that fat you've been carrying on your hips, thighs and belly can be transformed with relative ease into cells that may one day be capable of repairing a wide range of your damaged or diseased tissues, according to a new report by Stanford University researchers.

Stem cells found in fat deposits, it turns out, are more primitive than are many adult stem cells harvested from tissues such as skin and blood: with comparatively less effort than is required to make, for instance, a stem cell derived from skin return to an undifferentiated cell form, fat cells can be reprogrammed to become muscle, neuron and stomach lining cells, finds a new study slated for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I don't think I'll run a photo of human fat with this one.

Teenager invents £23 solar panel that could be solution to developing world's energy needs ... made from human hair. My colleague Tim Barmann, who sent this along, notes,

But many commenters are casting doubt on the claim, such as this one posted Wednesday on Slashdot: "Scams are older than the human species. The world doesn't get weirder, although I wonder if it gets more gullible... I think there is a 9V battery in that contraption, going by voltage reader."