Category: Health and Medicine

There is an old WebMD item about why your urine smells funny after eating asparagus. I only bring it up because the stalky delicacy is once again in season; delicious they are too from our local farm shop. Anyway, the WebMD item mentions that it’s the presence of a sulfur compound known as mercaptan in the asparagus (also found in rotten eggs, garlic, onions and skunk scent) that leads to the smell.

The article says, and I quote: “When your digestive tract breaks down this substance, by-products are released that cause the funny scent. The process is so quick that your urine can develop the distinctive smell within 15 to 30 minutes of eating asparagus.”

I’m not sure they’ve got that entirely straight though, it is definitely a sulfur compound being metabolised that releases the methanethiol giving urine the smell, and most researchers would suggest the amino acid methionine is the source. If it weren’t we’d also talk about asparagus poo as well as pee as the breakdown product would be present in both.

I wrote a report for the Royal Society about one of its discussion meeting on emerging viral infections some time ago, so it’s quite interesting to see that visitors who hit the Sciencebase site via Google are still reaching the site searching for causes of viral infections. I suspect the visitors are after solutions to their own diseases…the main cause of viral infection, I felt like saying in facetious mode, is a virus…

The journal Chemical Communications forever trying to publicise its papers, recently highlighted a “hot” paper about removing harmful bacteria from an airstream using a titania photocatalyst. That’s all well and good but “LJ”, who wrote the highlight, seems to imply that the inspiration for this works comes in the wake of the SARS outbreak. To quote: “The recent SARS outbreak has triggered concern over airborne bacteria and the diseases they can cause.”

Well, forgive me, but isn’t SARS a virus? The researchers themselves mention Legionella and the virus SARS but LJ presumably felt Legionnaire’s disease was not topical enough to catch the eye of any science writers prowling the Chem Commun hot papers page. Well, LJ, I’m afraid your mention of SARS caught my eye, but for all the wrong reasons.

Regular Google visitor with clumsy typing skills? Watch that you don’t hit the “k” before the “l” when entering the search engine name into your browser address bar, you could be in for a nasty shock. Googkle.com was registered by some phishy customers and if you were dumb enough to visit their site you would be bombarded with trojan sites and all sorts of malware, according to Icelandic computer security company F-secure. Gooogle.com on the other hand will bring you to the Google homepage while Gooooogle.com will send you to a casino site. But, who types in Google.com anyway, don’t most users these days have it bookmarked or run the Google toolbar to access the search engine?

Yahoo has added an intriguing feature to its Messenger software that will have bosses up in arms but allow malingerers and timewasters to save their skin. Stealth settings, Yahoo claims, will allow users to hide their online status from their boss, for instance, but remain visible and so chattable to their friends. It all sounds like good clean fun, to be honest, they should call it skive and hide. One thing that struck me though…how many bosses use Yahoo Messenger anyway? Haven’t those in higher places been persuaded to run Skype these days?