The folks behind the best-selling book, “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” aren’t satisfied with being mere bathroom reading material. So they’ve dropped a new iPhone app, the Poo Log, which allows you to time, log, and graph your BMs—and learn about your gastrointestinal health while doing so.
The ‘Poo Log’ is a digital timer and journal for recording and studying the wondrous uniqueness of each bowel movement. With a clever mix of bathroom humor and legitimate medical information, the ‘Poo Log’ allows the user to track his/her digestive workings and graph their ‘poo’ – all with one hand.
According to the app’s developers, AvatarLabs Inc, the tracker features medically accurate info that is suitable for all ages, and of course helpful tips such as, “Light a match. Now.”
• Helicopters search for radioactive rabbit poop near the Hanford nuclear reservation. Workers to begin removing the poop soon, which might be the worst job ever.
• Mathematician predicts an ESPN fantasy—a Dodgers-Yanks World Series. FOX Sports also has its fingers crossed.
• Doctors enjoy the five-fingered discount by pocking watches, severed hands from hospitals.
• Think technology is invasive now? A new camera is under development that could capture your entire life.
Sometimes the best way to get people fired up about a cause—be it environmental, political, or anything else—is to get them angry. But instead of trying to piss citizens off, a Brazilian environmental group is trying to get the country’s residents to, well, urinate in the shower.
The group says that if a single household flushed the toilet just one fewer times a day, it would save a whopping 1,157 gallons of water each year. The organization has even come out with a video touting the idea. Urine is sterile, so peeing in the shower is harmless (except if someone has a disease that can be transmitted through their pee, such as hepatitis).
If you think changing your underwear day after day gets tedious, try doing it while orbiting the Earth. What better opportunity is there, then, to test a new type of undies that are anti-odor, anti-bacterial and water-absorbent—and that allowed an astronaut on the shuttle Endeavour to wear the same pair for a month straight.
Koichi Wakata, who was in orbit for four-and-a-half months, also tested socks, pants, and shirts that use the same technology. The AP reports:
NASA’s space station program manager, Mike Suffredini, stressed the importance of testing new products, especially those aimed at improving astronauts’ quality of life. There’s no way to wash clothes in space. Station residents simply ditch dirty outfits, along with other garbage, in cargo ships no longer needed that are sent plunging in flames through the atmosphere.
Scientists say they are excited to examine Wakata’s high-tech underthings to see how well they worked. For their sake, let’s hope that the undies are, in fact, as odor-resistant as the manufacturers claim.
When emperor penguins are in your vicinity, their signature tuxedos and waddling gaits make them hard to miss. But when scientists from the British Antarctic Survey tried to track Antarctic emperor penguin populations using satellites, the birds proved too small to be seen. That’s when they got the idea to focus on something much larger and darker than the penguins themselves: the stains left by their feces.
Using the patches of poop as a guide, the scientists examined the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica and spotted 38 penguin colonies, including 10 that had never before been recorded.
Emperor penguins, which starred in the adorable documentary March of the Penguins, are at risk of becoming endangered if climate change threatens their habitat and food supply. In fact, populations in some of the colonies could drop by 95 percent by 2010.
The machine takes single-celled microoranisms called archea and gives them little electric jolts, which trigger the organisms to turn carbon dioxide from the air into methane and release it as, um, micro-farts. The methane can then be used to power fuel cells or store the electrical energy chemically until it’s needed.
Taking recycling to a whole new level, the Peepoo bag allows you to, well, pee and poo in a bag, which can then be planted to help your garden grow. For slums in the developing world where human waste is an unregulated nightmare and flying toilets are common practice, the bag provides a means of waterless sewage disposal and organic fertilizer all in one easy, biodegradable step.
The bag is lined with Urea, a common fertilizer that breaks down urine and feces into ammonia and carbonate. Pathogens in the waste, including viruses, bacteria and parasites, are killed within anywhere from a matter of hours to several weeks.
Bathroom time may not be wasted time after all: A year’s worth of your poop can be turned into 2.1 gallons of useable diesel. And the Norwegian capital of Oslo plans to put all that waste to work powering 80 of its buses with fuel made from the Bekkelaget sewage treatment plant, which houses the waste of 250,000 people.
If all goes as planned, the city’s other waste treatment plant, as well as biofuels made from food waste, will eventually contribute to the total supply—and with serious results: Fueling 400 or so buses this way would reduce 30,000 tons of carbon emissions a year.
While the idea certainly has an “ick factor,” it’s not like gas-station attendants will have to start shoveling sewage directly into a bus’ fuel tank.
Anyone who’s seen Slumdog Millionaire knows the sorry state of sanitation in many of the world’s biggest slums. And with sewage contaminating more waterways and public spaces every day, the need for effective sanitation measures is dire. To bring the point home, here’s a stat for you: Only 16 percent of people in Cambodia have access to some sort of latrine or toilet, and five million people around the world die from waterborne illnesses every year.
The folks behind the best-selling book, “What’s Your Poo Telling You?” aren’t satisfied with being mere bathroom reading material. So they’ve dropped a new iPhone app, the Poo Log, which allows you to time, log, and graph your BMs—and learn about your gastrointestinal health while doing so.
• Waste not, want not: Stockholm 
Sometimes the best way to get people fired up about a cause—be it environmental, political, or anything else—is to get them angry. But instead of trying to piss citizens off, a Brazilian environmental group is trying to get the country’s residents to, well, urinate in the shower.
If you think changing your underwear day after day gets tedious, try doing it while orbiting the Earth. What better opportunity is there, then, to test a new type of undies that are anti-odor, anti-bacterial and water-absorbent—and that allowed an astronaut on the shuttle Endeavour to wear the same pair for a month straight.
When emperor penguins are in your vicinity, their signature tuxedos and waddling gaits make them hard to miss. But when scientists from the British Antarctic Survey tried to track Antarctic emperor penguin populations using satellites, the birds proved too small to be seen. That’s when they got the idea to focus on something much larger and darker than the penguins themselves: 
As if 
While it may sound like every six-year-old boy’s dream, a new 
Taking recycling to a whole new level, the 
Bathroom time may not be wasted time after all: A year’s worth of your poop can be turned into 2.1 gallons of useable diesel. And the Norwegian capital of Oslo plans to put all that waste to work 
Anyone who’s seen Slumdog Millionaire knows the sorry state of sanitation in many of the world’s biggest slums. And with sewage contaminating more waterways and public spaces every day, the need for effective sanitation measures is dire. To bring the point home, here’s a stat for you: Only 16 percent of people in Cambodia have access to some sort of latrine or toilet, and five million people around the world die from waterborne illnesses every year.
