HWN Suggests

You can train yourself to pee less often — and 8 other surprising facts about urine

Everybody pees. But that doesn't mean everybody has a perfect grasp of how, exactly, it works. There are many mystifying aspects of urination — starting with what color your urine should be, how long you can safely hold it for, and if "breaking the seal" is a real thing.

At least 5 different parts of your brain are involved in peeing. As your blood gets pumped through your kidneys, the organs collect excess water. At the same time, they also filter out a few different types of waste: a molecule called urea (made up nitrogen, a byproduct of your cells' metabolism), chloride, sodium, potassium, and creatinine.

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Articles of Interest

Can You Be Scared Enough To Pee Your Pants?

Some people urinate when they’re frightened. Other people can’t urinate when they’re nervous. What’s going on?

Does it matter if you sit or stand to pee? And what about peeing in the shower?

What is the best way to urinate? Does that apply to women? We research the bladder and lower urinary tract. Here’s what the evidence says.

How Many Times You Should Be Peeing Every Day

Plus, the truth about holding it in longer than you need to.

How Paris’ Open-Air Urinals Changed a City—and Helped Dismantle the Nazi Regime

During World War II, the stalls served as rendezvous points for French Resistance fighters.

Is It Bad to Squat When You Pee?

Disgusting bar bathrooms have trained you to only squat, never sit, while peeing. But this might just be a toilet habit that you should break.

Meet the Peecyclers. Their Idea to Help Farmers Is No. 1.

A shortage of chemical fertilizer, worsened by the war in Ukraine, has growers desperate. It just so happens that human urine has the very nutrients that crops need.

New Law of Urination: Mammals Take 20 Seconds to Pee

Call it the other Golden Rule: Scientists have found that all mammals weighing more than 2.2 pounds (a kilogram) empty their full bladders in about 20 seconds.

Pee power

“URINE and faeces to you”, explains a dodgy sewer-manager in one of Reginald Hill’s crime novels, “is bread and butter to me.” And he is not the only one. The BioEnergy Team, led by Ioannis Ieropoulos of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) in Britain, are hoping to profit from working with the stuff too. They have developed a new technique to turn urine into electrical power—or “urine-tricity” as they call it.

Peeing to participate

Passing a drug test has become a standard hurdle for participating in American society, even when you're 12.

So apparently there's a 'peeing technique' that could let out half a litre extra of urine and properly empty your bladder, meaning you won't need to pee all the damn time

Um, I think I've been peeing wrong my whole life.

The Shape of the Urine Stream — From Biophysics to Diagnostics

We develop a new computational model of capillary-waves in free-jet flows, and apply this to the problem of urological diagnosis in this first ever study of the biophysics behind the characteristic shape of the urine stream as it exits the urethral meatus.

There’s an Actual Scientific Reason Not to Pee in the Pool

When urine mixes with chlorine, potentially harmful substances can result.

We found a way to turn urine into solid fertiliser – it could make farming more sustainable

Most of the nutrients we consume in food are passed in our urine, because our bodies already have enough. But instead of being recaptured, these nutrients are flushed, diluted, and sent to wastewater treatment plants where they’re scrubbed out, leaving effluents that can be safely released into the environment.

When Is Peeing Too Often the Sign of a Problem?

It might have been the third time you stopped at a gas station during a two-hour drive to your parents’ place. Or maybe it was the fourth time during the flight you turned to the increasingly annoyed woman in the aisle row and asked her to put down her paperback, get up, and let you through. Or perhaps it was when you couldn’t hold it during the the Wakanda battle in Avengers: Infinity War and ducked out to the theater bathroom. At some point, you may have wondered: When does peeing often become become not just an annoyance but a sign of a medical problem?

Why Archaeologists Are Studying 10,000-Year-Old Urine

The history of animal domestication might be recorded in ancient pee.

Why do I need to pee more in the cold?

If we become cold very quickly, the body protects our internal organs in a number of ways. One is “cold-induced diuresis”, or an increase in urine excretion in response to the cold.

Resources

StatPearls

Urination or micturition removes metabolic products and toxic wastes filtered from the kidneys and is a vital function of the human body. The micturition reflex requires a complex network of signals between the nervous system and the urinary tract system. Urine storage and emptying are highly dependent on these pathways.