Pigs can fly

This morning I came across a post on facebook (thanks Prince) that linked to an article about 4 girls who had devised a method to turn urine into electrical energy. When presented with such information my immediate reaction is not, "I wonder how they do that" but "I wonder how they manage to fake that". It's obviously a fake since it disobeys certain well established scientific principles. That should be the end of the story but non scientists are not convinced by scientific arguments and want more details. Well, the article claims that an electrolytic cell separates Hydrogen from the urine. That's perfectly possible but requires a source of electrical energy like a battery. The hydrogen emitted then passes through some filters and is pushed into a gas cannister only to be pushed out again through some borax (never did trust borax) into a generator. Just maybe the gas from the cannister is also flowing into the generator. So it looks to me like the generator is running on a mixture of butane and hydrogen, sounds quite dangerous. The girls are probably producing more electrical energy from the generator with the added Hydrogen from urine, but to do that they have to use some of that energy to electrolyse the urine. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the amount used must be more than the extra they get out of the system. So, pigs can't fly, except the one in the photo of course but to make him fly you have to hang him off a string attached to the ceiling and that's cheating.