Sometimes the best way to get people fired up about a cause—be it environmental, political, or anything else—is to get them angry. But instead of trying to piss citizens off, a Brazilian environmental group is trying to get the country’s residents to, well, urinate in the shower.
The group says that if a single household flushed the toilet just one fewer times a day, it would save a whopping 1,157 gallons of water each year. The organization has even come out with a video touting the idea. Urine is sterile, so peeing in the shower is harmless (except if someone has a disease that can be transmitted through their pee, such as hepatitis).
• Tires made with orange oil instead of petroleum are in the making! Perhaps they’ll exude a light citrus scent on the highway.
• A badger intoxicated from a binge on overripe (and therefore alcoholic) cherries disrupted traffic in Berlin when he parked himself in the middle of the road. Apparently the little guy got pretty belligerent, too: “Having failed to scare the animal away, officers eventually chased it from the road with a broom,” according to Reuters.
• The owners of a runaway dog are pretty pissed off. They’re following the canine’s example in the hopes of bringing the pup back: Spraying their own urine around their neighborhood. Let’s hope they don’t try using, er, option number two.
• The zoo-against-zoo fight in Germany over celebrity polar bear Knut is finally settled…to the tune of $600,000.
• Cell phones: They’re not just for talking anymore, and some of the pictures people take with them are surprisingly high-quality. Check out these awesome cell phone pics sent in by readers to the New York Times.
The Endeavor shuttle shot into space last week carrying loads of fancy equipment for the International Space Station. Among the new gadgets to be installed is a water recovery system that promises to recycle 93 percent of astronaut urine, sweat, exhaled water vapor, and other waste water back into drinkable water. The whole shebang cost about $250 million to develop, but that’s still cheaper than having to send periodic shuttles to the station to deliver fresh water.
Of course, the question on everyone’s mind is, what does it taste like?
New York Times reporter John Schwartz took it upon himself to find out. He went to the Kennedy Space center where NASA officials offered him a bottle of water made from a 2005 prototype of the system. (The scientists generously “donated” their own liquids for the test run.) The label on the bottle read, “We use only the finest ingredients! Urine, Perspiration, Food Vapors, Bath Water, Simulated Animal Waste, and a touch of Iodine. No Carbs or Calories Added.”
When life gives you 20 million pigs’ worth of urine, make pig-piss-flavored cigarettes. Or, if you’re not a smoker, use the pig pee to make plastic dinnerware and fuel your car, or smooth it over your body for soft, supple hair and skin. Agroplast, a Denmark-based company, hopes to use its country’s surfeit of pig waste—the cause of contaminated ground water, dying plants, noxious air, and pissed-off neighbors—to make useful household products, from plastics to hair conditioner.
Sometimes the best way to get people fired up about a cause—be it environmental, political, or anything else—is to get them angry. But instead of trying to piss citizens off, a Brazilian environmental group is trying to get the country’s residents to, well, urinate in the shower.
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The Endeavor shuttle 
When life gives you 20 million pigs’ worth of urine, make pig-piss-flavored cigarettes. Or, if you’re not a smoker, use the pig pee to make plastic dinnerware and 
