Should We Be a Little Afraid to Urinate?

Abstract

In this chapter, I describe how a serendipitous observation made by an undergrad student in Cuba is turned into systematic experimentation, even resulting in a collaboration between Cuban and US scientists. He noticed that when water is poured from an upper to a lower container, and there are mate tea leaves floating on the liquid surface of the latter, some of the leaves can “climb up the falling stream”, then contaminating the upper container. We found out that the effect is caused by the upward forces developed due to the difference in surface tensions between the upper and lower containers, caused by the floating particles. This finding may have implications in industrial and laboratory processes.

Whatever a scientist is doing—reading, cooking, talking, playing—

science thoughts are always there at the edge of the mind.

They are the way the world is taken in;

all that is seen is filtered through an ever present scientific musing.

Vivian Gornick

in “Women in science—then and now” (The Feminist Press at the city of New York, 2009)