In peeing water

Pee is one of the first body fluids a kid learns about. Now that you're older, you can understand much more about the amazing yellow stuff called pee. You drink, you pee. But urine is more than just that drink you had a few hours ago.

It is an antisocial act that normally goes under the radar, but many swimmers have long suspected the truth: people are peeing in the pool. Now scientists have been able to confirm the full extent of offending for the first time, after developing a test designed to estimate how much urine has been covertly added to a large volume of water. Regular swimmers with a keen sense of hygiene may wish to stop reading now. The test works by measuring the concentration of an artificial sweetener, acesulfame potassium ACE , that is commonly found in processed food and passes through the body unaltered. After tracking the levels of the sweetener in two public pools in Canada over a three-week period they calculated that swimmers had released 75 litres of urine — enough to fill a medium-sized dustbin — into a large pool about , litres, one-third the size of an Olympic pool and 30 litres into a second pool, around half the size of the first.

If you've been to the beach this summer, chances are you probably had to pee, decided not to get out of the water, and just peed in the ocean. Don't worry, you're not alone. And after doing the deed, you may have had second thoughts because, at some point during your childhood, someone probably told you that pee attracts sharks. And you kind of believed them. We asked David Shiffman, a marine biologist who studies shark feed and conservation also known by his Twitter handle WhySharksMatter , about whether or not sharks are attracted to human urine.

This week, a channel was constructed to gather the water being discharged by the Manneken Pis to redirect it back to the statue. The municipality is now intent on inspecting all the centrally located fountains to avoid similar waste. We should be setting an example, and encouraging everyone in Brussels to pay attention to their water consumption. The Manneken Pis, which attracts tourists in their thousands, is a copy of the original, which is in the nearby city museum. One school of thought is that it refers to the legend that troops loyal to Duke Godfrey III of Leuven put the then two-year-old nobleman in a basket in a tree, from where he urinated on enemy soldiers.