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Only under special circumstances. "I mean, it doesn't just happen to any Joe Schmo walking down the street holding his urine too long," says Scott Eggener, a urologist at the University of Chicago. "But for someone who has had major surgery or cancer or had radiation in his bladder, or whose bladder had been removed and we make them a new bladder out of intestine, then yes—those are situations where the bladder can rupture." These situations can be extremely painful. When the bladder bursts, urine generally pours into the abdomen, sometimes requiring an emergency procedure in which surgeons drain the urine with catheters. But usually there's little risk to holding one's urine; people will typically pee accidentally before a bladder bursts. Doctors caution against regularly avoiding urination, however. "People who don't empty frequently enough may get bladder infections," says Gerald Timm, a urological researcher at the University of M...

Durian fruit is well known for it's very strong smell. One might say it smells like sewage mixed with gasoline. Depositphotos Durian, best known in the United States as a fruit so stinky it caused the normally unflappable Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods fame to gag, has an unexpected (though arguably as pungent) cousin. In a study published today in Nature Genetics, researchers sequenced durian’s genome to reveal not only the source of its distinctive stench, but also the fact that it shares family ties with cacao—the plant that gives us fragrant joy in the form of chocolate. “Now that we have the genome sequence of durian, we can compare them to different plant sequences that are in the public domain,” says study author Patrick Tan a biomedical researcher at Singapore’s Dune-NUS Medical School. “A number of interesting features came up. We found that durian’s closest earliest ancestor is the cacao plant.” Once you know that cacao and durian share an ancestry, the similar...

WASP PRIME TEST FROM OPERATION TEAPOT Wikimedia Commons You've seen what a nuclear winter looks like, as imagined by filmmakers and novelists. Now you can take a look at what scientists have to say. In a new study, a team of four U.S. atmospheric and environmental scientists modeled what would happen after a "limited, regional nuclear war." To inexpert ears, the consequences sound pretty subtle—two or three degrees of global cooling, a nine percent reduction in yearly rainfall. Still, such changes could be enough to trigger crop failures and famines. After all, these would be cooler temperatures than the Earth has seen in 1,000 years. et's take a detailed look at some of these super-fun conclusions, shall we? First, what happened? The team imagines 100 nuclear warheads, each about the size of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, detonate over the Indian subcontinent. The team members are imagining an India-Pakistan nuclear war. It seems unfair to ...

This cocktail party factoid is pretty dumb It's a fact frequently shared at parties and across social media: urine is sterile, so you should drink it if you find yourself in a waterless pinch. But like so many cocktail party factoids, this one is absolutely not true. Urine ain't sterile, friends, and neither is any part of you. Microbes are an indelible part of our bodies and the world around us. Not even the uterus and placenta, long thought to enshroud fetuses in sterile envelopes during gestation, are actually germ-free zones. They contain complex, varied microbial colonies—microbiomes—that help prepare us for the real world. But it's apparent that many doctors are still under the impression that urine is sterile (unless someone has a urinary tract infection). That's likely a holdover from the days when bacteria in the body was thought of as a negative thing—the source of infections—as opposed to the complicated garden we now know to exist within us. It would...

BARACK OBAMA  Science and technology helped make America the greatest country on Earth. Whether it’s setting foot on the moon, developing a vaccine for polio, inventing the Internet, or building the world’s strongest military, we’ve relied on innovative scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians to help us tackle the toughest challenges of our time. In my first inaugural address, I promised that my administration would restore science to its rightful place, and that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve expanded clean-energy research; we’ve launched major initiatives in advanced manufacturing, biomedicine, and strategic computing; we’ve increased preparedness and resilience against climate change; and we’re training STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] teachers so every child grows up with the skills they need to compete in the 21st century. Being pro-science is the only way we make sure that America continues to lead the world. Our policies reflect that....