Yellow

I took the kids to the museum yesterday. Among other things we saw a display regarding the human digestional tract. The start of the display was a plate of food. You then saw it progress through the system. It had beakers showing how food would look after four hours in the intestines (yellow slime with bits of diced carrots etc in it) and then after six hours (clearer slime - a bit like snot). It came to its logical conclusion with a lump of fake (I assume) poo at the end of the display.

"Where does the food go?" is one of my four year olds favourite questions, so this gave me a good way to talk through it. I had explained it previously, as best I could, over various meals but here we had things they could see and touch. I'm not sure how much attention either of them paid, as part of the display had some notes on cylinders you could spin and a spinning cylinder is great fun.

Later, when we were home, my daughter gave me her latest theory - wees are just snot. I asked why and she explained it was because they are both yellow. There is a certain kind of logic working there. I recently read Bill Bryson’s "A history of everything" and I recalled a seventeenth century German Alchemist, Hennig Brand, accidentally discovered phosphorus while trying to extract gold from urine. It appears he was working on the hypothesis that they were both yellow…