New York's "what's that smell?" season has officially begun.

— Paul Werdel (@prwerdel) May 30, 2013

[Spoiler: It's piss.]

"It’s around the third beer when it hits you. Your bladder feels full and you gotta go — like, now. You head to the restroom, and as you leave, your friend jokes that you're risking 'breaking the seal': You urinate once while drinking and after that, you’ll have to get up every five minutes to pee. It's an urban myth that even urologists wonder about, as it turns out. " — Is 'breaking the seal' a real thing?

"You're going to pee purple, you're going to poo purple."

"Now we have Ryan Braun's experience with the 'system,' and nobody can be surprised that his urine was badly handled. And, by the way, let's stop calling it 'the sample,' too, OK? That's misdirection by euphemism, and it works to hide the personal violation that mandatory drug testing truly is. Ryan Braun had to give baseball some urine, and the baseball official tasked with handling Ryan Braun's urine kept Ryan Braun's urine in his freezer for 44 hours, which is a long time to keep someone else's urine, to my way of thinking."

"Many believe that in the future collecting samples of saliva, urine or blood could be performed using a cheap, USB-stick-sized throwaway device called a lab-on-a-chip. The user would inject a droplet of the fluid in the chip, and micropumps inside it would send the fluid to internal vessels containing reagents that extract target disease biomarker molecules. The whole device would then be sent to a lab for analysis. But Hyun Gyu Park and Byoung Yeon Won at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology in Daejeon think touchscreens could improve the process by letting your phone replace the lab work. Park suggests the lab-on-a-chip could present a tiny droplet [...]

Go ahead and pee in that pool. You probably won't get caught, and it FEELS SO GOOD.

For a long time, scientists have wondered why male capuchin monkeys pee on their hands and rub their urine all over their fur. The answer is not that they have been stung by jellyfish. Rather, as a team of primatologists led by Dr. Kimberly Phillips of Texas's Trinity University has discovered, they do it because the smell of their urine attracts female capuchins for them to do sex to. (Which is really what you have suspected all along, right?)

You can tell spring has arrived because it's a whole new season for explainers about why asparagus makes your pee smell that way.

I will not attempt to come up with a better title for an article about how scientists are making brain cells out of urine than Scientific American did here, with "Brain Cells Made From Urine."

"While it did not exhaustively look into the reasons behind why people think they can urinate in a public pool, the survey suggests that it is easy and anonymous." —Also, "Human Slurry" would be a good name for a band.

"Women in the northern German town of Lüchow have expressed their dissatisfaction with the design of two urinals in the men's toilet of a museum dedicated to the Rolling Stones. They are shaped like red lips, similar to the legendary logo of the band, but they look more feminine, and they lack tongues. Local activist Roda Armbruster wants the urinals removed. 'That's discrimination against women,' she told regional broadcaster NDR. 'Why does it have to be a woman's mouth? If it had been based on the emblem of the Stones with the tongue, it would have been OK. But the tongue's been left out and they really looks like [...]

"Punters who were having a quiet drink at their local were left dumbstruck when a bull came crashing into the bar. The rampaging farm animal sent bar stools flying, wrecked a pool table and butted holes into the walls after it escaped from a nearby cattle auction. As a final assault on the bar, the beast then urinated on the floor."

"It’s really an unfortunate incident that probably could have been avoided if he had just chosen a bush," says Portland, OR, police spokeman Pete Simpson. He is referring to 21-year-old Joshua Seater's decision to urinate into a local reservoir. "By daylight, the Water Bureau decided to drain eight-million gallons of water to the tune of $32,700 tax payer dollars." (The reservoir supplies residents with drinking water.) It is unclear what punishment, if any, Seater will face, but I'm pretty sure no one will ever pee in this reservoir again. No way. People are gonna do things that are MUCH WORSE.

"Essentially, the SEGA Toirettsu uses the man’s pee trajectory and strength to play games that are displayed at eye level. These games include putting out fires and erasing graffiti with a hose."

"With the warmer weather coming, Caribou Baby’s owner Adriane Stare — who held her bare-bottomed baby Loren atop a cloth diaper as she whispered 'sissss' to him to cue a pee during the discussion — told the group she’d soon open the center's backyard to let babies roam diaper-free outside."

"It smells up the block. It's been noticeably worse since the arena opened. It was just totally disgusting. In New York City you don't accept that kind of uncivilized behavior." —A Brooklyn resident who seems, let's say, a little naive on what kind of uncivilized behavior New York City will accept, is one of the many people registering his displeasure over the fact that "patrons at the newly opened Barclays Center are using local sidewalks as urinals, even peeing on a community garden across from the new arena."

Yes, urine!

As far as occupational hazards go there are far worse ones than my personal burden of being the guy who sees a news item about a Sega videogame for the bathroom that is operated by the force of one's micturition and shaking his head in the knowledge that the story is over a year old. So I won't be so quick to dismiss it, especially when one of the games is described thus:

'Battle! Milk From Nose' is a multiplayer game where you compete against the person who last used the urinal. The strength of your urine streams are compared, and translated into milk spraying out [...]

Time wonders: Is it okay to text while eating?

But maybe they should be asking a different question. .bbpBox83743794327060480 {background:url(http://a0.twimg.com/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #C0DEED;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

Men hv gotten dumber since smartphone introduction. One resto owner says he now has mats under toilets 4 men who miss the bowl while txtingless than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® Favorite Retweet Replydana cowinfwscout

Curious as to why asparagus makes your pee smell all weird? Wonder no longer.