Peeing in the Pool Isn’t Just Gross, It’s Unhealthy

Bad things can happen when you pee in the pool. The pool could turn green, for instance, which is what happened at the Olympics this week. (Just kidding—the green Olympic pool was actually caused by excess hydrogen peroxide.) But like hydrogen peroxide, urine also interacts with chlorine and, while the pool won't turn green, the results are still pretty nasty.

This video by Reactions, a series from the American Chemical Society, explains how organic matter from our bodies such as dirt, sweat, lotion, and urine affect the pool chemicals meant to keep it clean and free of dangerous microorganisms.

Chlorine, sodium hypochlorite, and calcium hypochlorite—the chemicals added to public pools for sanitation—react with water to create a disinfectant called hypochlorous acid. Pools are also kept clean with ultraviolet light, ozone, and bromine, which tackle chemicals that are immune to chlorine.

The problem with these disinfectants is that when they come into contact with organic materials, especially urine, they create unhealthy byproducts called disinfection byproducts, or "DBPs".

Public pools contain a whopping 30 to 80 milliliters of urine per person (gross!), and that urine contains a chemical called urea which reacts with chlorine to create trichloramine. Trichloramine causes the classic pool smell, as well as a burning sensation in the eyes and in some cases asthma—a serious problem, especially for professional athletes who spend much of their time in public pools.

Urine also contains chemicals from new and existing drugs on the market, and scientists don't yet know how these chemicals will interact with those already in the pool.

If this story hasn't completely turned you off from swimming in public pools, remember next time to shower off before and after you dive in. And for everyone's sake, pee in the toilet. Nobody swims in there.

Peeing in the Pool Isn’t Just Gross, It’s Unhealthy

Every Month This Year Has Been the Hottest in Recorded History

Despite the cruise ship that’s now plowing through a melting Arctic, or the wildfires that have consumed parts of North America, and devastating drought that's stricken in East Africa, it can still be easy to ignore sometimes that our climate is rapidly changing. But 2016 has been a remarkable year for record-breaking temperatures, and even in the midst of it, July stands out as the hottest month of all.

On Wednesday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet, since modern record-keeping began in 1880.

JUST IN: #July was hottest month on record for globe - @NOAANCEIclimate #StateOfClimatehttps://t.co/yfJUYpFugi http://pic.twitter.com/wCU2odlLZ2
— NOAA (@NOAA) August 17, 2016

NASA has reached the same conclusion. July smashed all previous records.

July 2016 was absolutely the hottest month since the instrumental records began. http://pic.twitter.com/GQNsvARPDH
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016

Keep in mind that July almost always stands out as the warmest month in a given year, across the planet. “July is, climatologically speaking, the world’s warmest month of the year,” NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo told me in an interview. That’s because the Northern hemisphere “has more landmass, and less ocean” than the South, she continued, and the land heats up more quickly.

But this July was the hottest month recorded on Earth, ever—beating the previous record, which was actually just set the July before.

Image: Ebony-Renee Baker

Temperature records are falling like dominoes, month after month, year after year. Although July stands out, each consecutive month in 2016 has broken its own previous record (May was the hottest May, April the hottest April, etc.) Consider this:

June 2016 was the hottest on record.

So was May.

April smashed previous temperature records.

March did by a long shot.

February and January were the hottest ever.

Image: NOAA

“The streak of consecutive records started in May 2015,” Sanchez-Lugo told me. We’ve now lapped ourselves, and are starting to break records set within this same streak, last year.

According to the NOAA, July was the fifteenth month in a row where the global land and ocean temperature was the highest recorded since 1880. “This marks the longest such streak in NOAA’s 137 years of record keeping,” its report says. (NASA’s analysis varies, but only slightly: It calls July the tenth record-breaking month in a row.)

It seems pretty certain that 2016 will go down in history as the hottest recorded year on Earth, although we’ll have to wait for the data to confirm that. If and when that happens, this will be the third record-breaking year in a row, which would be a new record in itself: Let’s not forget that 2015 set its own annual temperature record, breaking the one set in 2014.

“We should be absolutely concerned,” Sanchez-Lugo said. “We need to look at ways to adapt and mitigate. If we don’t, temperatures will continue to increase.”

Next year is expected to be slightly less intense, with the fierce El Niño we’ve been experiencing now abating. But the truth is that record-breaking temperatures, month after month, year after year, are starting to look less like an exception, more like the norm.

Photo above: Ethiopia has been facing extreme drought related to severe El Niño weather conditions. The European Commission announced humanitarian funding in response.

Every Month This Year Has Been the Hottest in Recorded History

China's Sex Workers Are Ditching Their Pimps for iPhones

When high schooler Kate* was hard up for money, she took a seemingly easy job as a hostess at a nightclub in Mong Kok, Hong Kong’s grittier, neon-soaked red light district. But each night, she walked away with peanuts. So when she met a gangster who said he’d pimp her and make her thousands more—to go on easy dates, and just give the experience of a girlfriend—Kate fell in love with the idea.

He took her to a room and made her do shi gong, a Chinese term for trying out the girl before you sell her. Then, he left Kate in the lurch.

This isn’t the plot of a 70s triad film—it’s just one of many typical examples of why young sex workers in the city are using technology to work for themselves. Soon after Kate ran into trouble at the nightclub—like many other fresh-faced high school girls in Hong Kong today—she discovered online forums to run her own business as a sex worker. On HK Big Man and HK Mensa, where ads are proliferating everyday, so-called “compensated daters” offer their services without the help of a middleman.

Bowie Lam Po-yee, who runs an organization called Teen’s Key that provides outreach for these girls, says that it’s common for one girl to find an ad she likes, and then copy it—with just minor adjustments. Then, girls leave their contact information and negotiate where they’ll meet and how much they’ll charge. It’s easier to evade the cops that way: they’re less likely to be caught for solicitation if they’ve checked a client out to see if he’s legitimate. Police can be obvious as to their identity when it comes to brokering a deal over a chat app.

“With these online forums, it’s a bit unique in Hong Kong because these are only young girls,” Lam says. “They don’t actually recognize themselves as sex workers—they think at first it’s a one-time or two-time thing, and that it’s convenient.”

Mong Kok, Hong Kong. Photo: Paul Wong/Shutterstock

Lam estimates that there are some 2,500 compensated daters in the city, drawing on the organization’s records during outreach work. The police have been slow to catch on to these girls now that they’ve taken refuge online—from July 2015 until July this year, the force has only seen 12 cases of compensated dating. So long as they’re not soliciting clients in public spaces, they’re not breaking the law in Hong Kong.

For Kate, internet forums jumpstarted her career as a compensated dater after her frightening stint at the nightclub. She copied an ad from a forum that she thought fit her—she only changed her name, age, body measurements, and contact information. The next step is contacting the compensated dater from her post on the forum: girls mostly use WhatsApp and a Chinese chat app called WeChat to negotiate with their clients over the phone, specifying services, price, and location.

With this continued boom in Hong Kong’s digital age, compensated daters are enjoying certain benefits of being their own bosses—namely, they’re no longer subjected to the sexual and physical abuse from gangster agents. Also, they don’t have to give away money for an agent fee, which means they’re making more. Forums and chat apps, for the most part, are putting the power back in the hands of the sex workers.

“Now, compensated daters are freelance and it’s rare these days to have a triad agent,” says Patrick Wong Chun-chin, a former senior superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. “It’s no longer like in the past, having men escort women; it’s not that common anymore for men to control women as prostitutes in Hong Kong.”

Wong, also the co-founder of a private security company called Centinel, says that iPhones are killing Hong Kong’s once ubiquitous, rowdy karaoke brothels. “Fifteen years ago, these were the places that attracted gangsters and triads—but with the change in today’s communication model, this type of thing is diminishing.”

He says that compensated daters are clever when it comes to the language they use on their posts to a forum—girls will engage clients by writing that they’re “available to make friends,” and they don’t introduce sexual services until the private conversation through a chat app.

“Compensated daters are freelance and it’s rare these days to have a triad agent”

Laura*, who still works as a compensated dater, is a perfect example of this newfound power. The Macau native ditched her agent quickly after realizing that she could negotiate on her own through a forum and WhatsApp. She’s since developed what she calls a “menu” for clients, which, for example, says she’ll have sex twice in one hour for an extra $130 tacked on—and she doesn’t have to give any of that money away.

Laura also says that the internet gives her a trump card that other sex workers don’t have in Hong Kong—the right to reject clients. Because she can be choosy when talking to guys over chat apps, she has certain rules she sticks by: check for a nice and calm demeanor, always make sure he wants to use a condom, and usually go for a guy over 30. For the women in Hong Kong’s one-room brothels though—mostly prostitutes who emigrate from the Chinese mainland—where a client just shows up, she says the sex workers don’t have the luxury of choice. “Those girls have to do everything,” Laura says.

Independence doesn’t always mean safety, though: While Laura has evaded any brushes with violence, Kate’s been raped by a client. As for the legality of the online forums, Lam says the police have closed them before—only to see a new one open just weeks later.

Meanwhile, agents haven’t yet completely disappeared from the scene in Hong Kong—mostly, because some girls, especially the studious ones, have difficulty balancing their time. For compensated daters who want to stay in high school and find themselves swamped with their studies—typically a high load in Hong Kong and China—they’ll find an agent to help arrange their appointments with clients, Lam says. A small few will also still hire an agent out of fear that their clients might turn out to be dangerous; they can call their agent for protection.

And interestingly enough, some girls just end up pimping each other. “They don’t actually realize it’s actually illegal to set up their friends with clients and take a finder’s fee,” says Lam.

*Not their real names.

China's Sex Workers Are Ditching Their Pimps for iPhones

McDonald's Offers Activity-Tracking Wearables with Their 500 Calorie Happy Meals

McDonald's is now asking kids to work off the iconic Happy Meals they serve.

In an effort to stay competitive with other fast food chains, and publicly establish a commitment to healthy consumers, American and Canadian McDonald's outlets are giving away activity trackers with Happy Meals, and marketing them in light of the Olympics.

"Keep up with your friends and your favorite athletes," McDonald's urges kids.

Like a Fitbit for kids, the McDonald's activity tracking wearables come in all different color wristbands and measure either speed or steps taken."Physical activity is important to everyone of all ages. We very much support children's wellbeing," Michelle McIlmoyle, McDonald's Canada senior marketing manager, said. "Whether it's our sponsorship of the minor hockey program...in local markets or within our Happy Meals, our objective is always to provide a balance."

Sure, with a 539-calorie Happy Meal for a 60-pound kid, they'll need that balance between intake and calories burn. For an 8-year-old to burn the number of calories in a Happy Meal, they would need to walk for about 300 minutes.

But are the McDonald's wearables, or any activity tracking device for that matter, accurate enough to even help with that kind of calculation? It's likely that these devices—now a $1.5 billion industry—are less precise than we'd hope. Different activity trackers result in different step counts at the end of the day, according to Scientific American, so they’re not always reliable.

One study found that fitness trackers mounted onto shoes measured movement more efficiently than those at hip level. It's also dubious as to how accurately the devices measure calories burned. Another study found that activity trackers were often erroneous in this category. Researchers at Iowa State University tested eight different models, finding that error ratings ranged from 9 to 23.5 percent.

While activity trackers are less than accurate, the act of monitoring activity could be enough to inspire people to embrace and maintain healthier habits.

"Research has shown that if you want to stick to a new habit, monitoring is one of the best ways to make a change," Joshua Klapow, Ph.D., clinical psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told Shape Magazine. One study presented at the American College of Sports Medicine, for instance, showed that people who wore pedometers were more active and lost more weight overall than those who didn't.

So with child obesity more than having doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years, wearing a cheap and potentially inaccurate McDonald's wearable just may do the trick for future adults everywhere. Or it could just a healthy dose of PR for the flailing brand.

McDonald's Offers Activity-Tracking Wearables with Their 500 Calorie Happy Meals

New Morphine Alternative Kills Pain Without the OD Risk

Researchers based at Stanford University have developed a morphine alternative that offers comparable painkilling but largely without the overdose risk. Moreover, early experiments targeting mice indicate that the compound, which is described Wednesday in Nature, may prove to be less addictive than opiate painkillers.

For the most part, opioids all kill via one mechanism: respiratory suppression. The neurons of the brain's respiratory control center happen to be laden with opioid receptors, and when these receptors are occupied by actual opioids, the effect is that the channels used by the cells for signalling start blinking off. The result is reduced neuronal excitability, and, with it, respiratory suppression.

So, the brain's breathing "pacemaker" slows, and, if it slows enough, the body will find itself starved of oxygen. This may lead to death. In the case of morphine, it leads to some 30,000 deaths annually. This side effect places a fundamental limit on how much morphine can be safely administered to a patient, which then becomes a limit on how much pain can even be suppressed using the drug.

The new compound doesn't have this respiratory effect, though it targets the same neural receptor that opioid compounds do. Recent research has demonstrated that the signalling cascades resulting in painkilling on one hand and respiratory suppression on the other are in fact distinct, despite originating with the same receptor (the mu receptor). With this in mind, the task of the Stanford group was to find new compounds capable of targeting this one receptor in such a way as to trigger the beneficial signalling cascade without triggering the other.

Computational methods now allow for the testing of vast numbers of simulated compounds against simulated neurons. In the initial screening round, the researchers vetted 3 million commercially available or easily synthesized compounds, resulting in a pool of 2,500 compounds that might possibly have the desired properties. The next round of vetting trimmed the field to a few dozen compounds. Then, from this group, the Stanford team looked for the compounds most unlike known opioids, resulting in a new list of 23 candidates. One more cull left only seven possibilities, which were then sent off to a pharmacology lab at the University of North Carolina for further analysis.

The UNC lab found just a single compound that seemed to have the desired quality of not triggering respiratory suppression while still having painkilling (analgesic) properties. The effect, however, wasn't large enough to be therapeutic.

So, the researchers tried tweaking the compound, which is known as PZM21. Eventually, they came up with a version much better at binding the mu receptor. The result was about a thousand times more effective than the originally vetted compound. Finally, it was time to try PZM21 out on mice, where the compound behaved as hoped. Not only did it have about the same analgesic efficacy as morphine while being relatively benign in terms of respiration, the mice showed little interest in the compound from a dependency perspective.

"Strikingly, mice did not show a preference for the testing chamber in which they received PZM21 over the one in which they received saline, and the compound did not induce hyperactivity—signs of addiction-like behaviour in mice," notes McGill University researcher Brigitte Kieffer in a separate Nature commentary.

PZM21 sounds like a pretty amazing solution, but there's still a whole lot of ambiguity. The compound may have further in vivo activities so far unobserved, for one. Two, it's metabolic stability is still somewhat unknown, and it's also unknown how and if animals may acquire a tolerance to the drug.

"Are we getting closer to the ideal pain-reliever?," writes Kieffer. "PZM21 is a leading member of a nascent club of pain-effective [mu receptor] agonists that seem to have reduced risk for abuse. These are not exactly opioids, and structure-based discovery approaches should increase their number and enhance the chances of a successful drug reaching the market at last."

New Morphine Alternative Kills Pain Without the OD Risk

​From Now On You'll Be Able to Access NASA Research for Free

Fancy some super nerdy bedtime reading? NASA has announced that it will now provide public access to all journal articles on research funded by the agency.

Any scientists publishing NASA-funded work will be required to upload their papers to a free, online database called PubSpace within a year of publication.

PubSpace is managed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) PubMed Central, which archives biomedical research. You can see NASA-funded studies here, with recent examples including a paper on cardiovascular disease in Apollo astronauts and one on Martian tsunamis caused by meteor impacts.

NASA explains that the new web portal is a response to a 2013 government request for federally-funded research to be more accessible. There are a few obvious exceptions to what’s included, such as and material that’s related to national security or affected by export controls.

NASA’s openness follows a trend to make science results more accessible outside of published, often paywalled journals.

Researchers across disciplines are also increasingly uploading results to preprint servers, so others can see their work before it goes through the review and publication process. Earlier this month, the American Chemical Society announced it wanted to make something like the popular physics-focused arXiv site so chemists could get in on the online data sharing trend.

While it’s cool that anyone will be able to check out what the space agency’s been up to, what’s probably more important is that other researchers will have easier access to build upon NASA-funded work, with one discovery hopefully inspiring others. “Making our research data easier to access will greatly magnify the impact of our research,” NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan said in a statement. “As scientists and engineers, we work by building upon a foundation laid by others.”

​From Now On You'll Be Able to Access NASA Research for Free

The Current Highest Bid for Alleged NSA Data is 999,998.371 Bitcoin Short

When a mysterious group called The Shadow Brokers dumped a bunch of hacking tools and exploits allegedly belonging to an NSA-linked group, it also said they had more, juicier stuff. But to see it, the group warned, someone has to win a strange auction for one million bitcoin, or around $500 million.

That’s a lot of bitcoin, which immediately raised a lot of eyebrows. The auction, many argued, was simply a ruse, or a scam. Either way, it’s not going great.

As of Wednesday morning, the auction is 999,998.371 bitcoin short. The bitcoin wallet set up by The Shadow Brokers has only received 15 offers for a total of around $930, and the highest bidder—by far—is from someone who paid 1.5 bitcoin, or around $850.

“Have a feeling nothing will come out of it, but worth a shot,” said the bidder, who declined to be identified but told Motherboard that they are interested in using the hacking tools and unknown, or “zero-day,” exploits that The Shadow Brokers might have in their possession.

“Have a feeling nothing will come out of it, but worth a shot.”

“The code is outdated, and there are no guarantees I (or anyone) will get anything from this,” the bidder said in an online chat. “I do however think that is the most anyone will bid. So, if I get a few 0days, even if old, for $850—that would still be nice.”

The bidder declined to elaborate on what they intend to use the exploits for. They said that they’re not interested in reselling them, but using them for their criminal activity, such as hacking routers to intercept people’s data—logins, for example.

Matt Suiche, the CEO of UAE-based cybersecurity company Comae, who’s been following the leak since the beginning, is skeptical.

“The auction is a PR stunt,” Suiche told me. “Initially I was thinking of bidding too but when I realized they mentioned they wanted $500M USD, it made me doubt about how serious they were on the auction.”

For Suiche, it’s more likely the auction was just a way to get attention. But if The Shadow Brokers don’t get enough bids, and the auction “is still shitty like now,” he argued, they might release what they have anyway eventually to prove they have more, and increase their chances of making a profit.

In any case, the highest bidder isn’t holding their breath, but is hopeful.

“If you ask me - in a month it will all be forgotten,” the bidder said. “People have short memory, this team will either disappear with the little amount of [bitcoin] and give me nothing, or release another teaser just to try to get more [bitcoin] (which won’t work)...my bet in [bitcoin] is on the part where they live up to their word :)”

The Current Highest Bid for Alleged NSA Data is 999,998.371 Bitcoin Short