It was a hard night out on the barbecue chicken and beer. A hard night indeed.

But it got us thinking. What could we do with this lovely yellow-colored nitrogen-rich by-product?

What would MacGyver do? What would James Bond do?

So we figured we'd try a little experiment. We've got just over 300 mils of lovely fresh

brothy urine here. It's still nice and warm and steamy as you can see. Well this is pretty

dilute as it is so in order to do anything we're going to need a little bit more of

water. So we'll get this on a hot plate.

This is our spare kitchen we're working in, but even so we don't really want it stinking

up of old public toilets.

So what's in urine? Well urine is the human body's main way of getting rid of any toxic

substances from the bloodstream, and also getting rid of excess nitrogen.

If your body encounters chemicals that it doesn't know what to do with, its normal protection

mechanism is to try to convert them into something water-soluble so that they can be filtered

out by your kidneys and then pass into your urine.

As you know, organic compounds such as alcohols and acids which contain oxygen are more likely

to be water-soluble. The body knows this and so its main strategy to make foreign compounds

water-soluble is through oxidation.

So the alcohol in that beer we drank? Well it will have been oxidized very transiently

to acetaldehyde and then onto acetate, a fairly non-reactive water-soluble compound which we

can get rid of.

But the chicken contains a lot of protein and hence amino acids, and more than the body

needs. The amino acids oxidized and converted into urea. If you look at the structure, it's

a pretty efficient molecule for getting rid of acid.

getting rid of that excess nitrogen.

The urine does also contain small amounts of protein and some water soluble peptides

as well.

In fact, as we heat the liquid and start to reduce it you can see that the liquid turns

cloudy.

This is due to those proteins denaturing and forming a precipitate.

Ok let's keep reducing this down.

Ok we're about halfway there now and we're allowing to cool slightly.

We're now going to filter the mixture in order to get rid of the suspended solids which have

formed.

Getting steamy around here.

Here's the paste collected on the filter.

Deep nature this protein.

Very nice.

Too much protein in urine is a bad thing and a sign of kidney problems.

We're not sure how much there should be though, so we'll have to assume this is normal.

Here's our filtrate.

We're going to get this back on the hot plate and keep reducing down further now.

We've put a stir bar in as well to keep the heat evenly distributed.

Okay.

Let's see if we can get it off.

Don't heat to dryness because the urea will melt and decompose.

In addition, there's a little more precipitate to remove as well.

Okay.

Here we go.

We've got just under 40 mils of liquid here.

As you can see, there's a bit more protein precipitate formed in the mixture as it's

reduced right down.

So let's filter this off.

That looks really pure.

Attractive.

Doesn't it?

Okay.

We've got a little bit of brown colored protein precipitate here.

And here's our brown frothy concentrated filtrate.

This now contains urea in solution in water along with salts and other soluble compounds.

To get the urea out the easiest way is to get it to form a salt which is relatively

insoluble in water.

So here we've got 7 mils of 68% concentrated nitric acid.

If we add this to the solution then any urea present will form a salt, urea nitrate, and this isn't that soluble in water.

So let's try.

After just a few minutes you can see some yellow colored crystal forming in the bottom of the beaker.

We'll chill this down now for a few hours to maximize the crystal.

Okay here we go. You can see there's a mass of crystal in the bottom of the beaker. So let's filter these off.

So here's our first very crude product. 5.5 grams of urea nitrate crystals.

The pure substance is white and what we've got here is a mixture of white and brown crystals so there's clearly a lot of impurities and other things in there.

It's still got a bit of an unpleasant urinal aroma.

Okay well we could try to recrystallize this, but we've got a better plan in mind.

What would MacGyver do with this?

Well, we can convert urea nitrate into nitro urea quite easily via a reaction with chilled concentrated sulfuric acid.

So here's 20 mils of concentrated sulfuric acid.

Let's get this into a beaker equipped with a magnetic stir bar.

Now we're going to cover this up well using plastic wrap.

Remember that sulfuric acid will absorb atmospheric moisture very rapidly if you don't cover it.

And we'll chill this down in the freezer for a few hours to get it down to minus 10 degrees C.

And then we prepare a larger beaker containing a crushed ice and water mixture.

Let's get our beaker containing the now-chilled sulfuric acid into here in order to keep it cold.

And now we're going to add our crude urea nitrate crystal.

Add slowly so that the temperature doesn't rise too much in the beaker.

There's a faint aroma of nitrogen oxides, but only just and nothing is visible.

Now everything is added and the mixture is a brown color.

We'll leave this stirring in the cold ice bath now for 30 minutes.

That's for the reaction to complete.

What's happening is effectively a dehydration reaction whereby the urea nitrate is losing a molecule of water and forming nitro urea as a product.

You can see there's a yellow precipitate in the mixture floating around.

Here we are 30 minutes later.

Now we need to quench the reaction mixture so we've got about 30 grams of crushed ice in a beaker here.

So let's pour the reaction mixture onto this.

There's a little bit of foam and nitrogen oxides produced as you can see.

We let this die down and we've got the yellow colored mixture now.

There's already light colored precipitate forming in the bottom.

But we'll cover this up and chill down for a few hours in order to allow the crystallization of product to complete.

Here we are a few hours later.

A white precipitate has formed in the bottom.

So let's filter this off.

We wash well a couple of times with a little ice cold water.

Okay after drying well here's our product.

2.5 grams of slightly cream colored nitro urea.

The pure compound is white so there's still a bit of colored impurity in here.

But it's much better than the urea nitrate we started with.

It's completely odorless as well now.

Calculating a yield isn't really very meaningful.

But just for fun let's assume that the original urine urea content was probably somewhere around 7 grams.

So our recovery of nitro urea is around 20%.

Let's get the product into a makeshift desiccator so we can get it completely dry.

Okay we know you want a test.

So here goes.

It melts and decomposes pretty rapidly.

And there's some flame as well.

But with just heating it's not really that vigorous and certainly not explosive.

Let's try the rest.

But it is a high explosive.

To make it explode you would need to use a shaker.

A shockwave provided by a detonator.

But we're not going to do that.

So don't get too excited.

This stuff isn't really that interesting.

But we might make some more and see if we use it in a reaction.

Stay tuned.

Thanks for watching.