poop
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What happened to Washington's wildlife after the largest dam removal in US history
That thing fish do in water is shockingly important to biological diversity in the Pacific Northwest.
Hitting the Books: NASA's Kathy Sullivan and advances in orbital personal hygiene
Journalist Loren Grush recounts the trailblazing efforts of America's first female astronauts in The Six.
iRobot's latest Roomba can detect pet poop (and if it fails, you'll get a new one)
With the $849 Roomba j7+, iRobot is ready to take on its greatest challenge yet: Pet poop.
After Math: Space toilets and long-haul hybrid pickups
While we’ve all been caught out like this at some point down here on Earth, this week we have a glimpse at how NASA will provide bathroom facilities on the moon. Tesla may push the boundaries of automotive technology but its production process is a bit of a mess. In a recent initial quality survey from JD Power and Associates, Tesla customers reported 250 build defects (misaligned body panels, shoddy paintwork, things of that nature) per 100 vehicles.
DFree is making an emergency alert system for your colon
Last year, Triple W won a Best Of CES award for DFree, a wearable that adhered to people's stomachs and gave incontinent people a heads-up when nature was about to call. This year, the company is back in Las Vegas to show off a prototype for its new sensor for people with intestinal issues. If successful, the next DFree product will buzz your phone to let you know that it's time to go number two.
Charmin's ‘Van-Go’ is the on-demand toilet NYC deserves
Everybody's favorite cartoon shit bear (slow your roll there, Mike Isaac), is coming to New York City! On June 21st and 22nd, the Charmin toilet paper company is running a promotional event wherein folks will be able to order an on-demand, mobile port-a-potty in select neighborhoods throughout the city, right from their smartphones.
NASA crowdsources better ways to poop in spacesuits
Back in December, NASA and X Prize competition website HeroX announced the Space Poop Challenge to find a hands-free human waste solution that would work for six days in spacesuit. The winning entry was designed by Air Force Colonel Thatcher R. Cardon, Commander of the 47th Medical Group at Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas. Cardon's background as a family physician and a flight surgeon certainly helped informed his system which features a hygiene wand.
ICYMI: Pig poop could make more eco-friendly roadways
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The chemical makeup of pig manure is so similar to petroleum that it's being tested as a more bio-friendly way to make asphalt roads, while the leftover bits can be used as fertilizer. Since pigs already produce 43 billion gallons of manure each year, re-using some for road construction might be the smartest thing we've done with bioengineering yet. You can find our diabetes story from Cambridge here, the first banking chatbot from Kasisto here, and the selfie drone that's going to be everywhere, here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd
ICYMI: Poop fuel, magnet-attached spherical tires and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-182793{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-182793, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-182793{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-182793").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: UCLA's biofuels lab is doing interesting work with manure protein, to see if supply of a better kind of alternative fuel can be produced on an industrial scale. Goodyear is out with crazy futuristic prototype tires that would connect to a car with magnets, be 3D printed, totally beach-ball round, include foam sponges inside the grooves to help with traction on water, and more. A Swedish musician spent a year constructing a marble music machine that is absolutely stunning to see in action. And even though this video has made the rounds before, the Japanese company that created it is still riding high so we wanted to include it. It's a tomato-headed, 18-pound robot backpack that automatically feeds you tomatoes while you run. As always, please share any interesting science or tech videos, anytime! Just tweet us with the #ICYMI hashtag to @mskerryd.
Hack Amazon's Dash buttons to do things other than buying stuff
Amazon's Dash buttons are tiny adhesive physical triggers that can order for you, through the magic of WiFi, anything you need to stock up on. But that's not the limits of their power, if you're willing to tinker with them. Ted Benson, (who works at a company that likes to regularly perform such shenanigans with the aid of its web tools), reckons it''ll you take under 10 minutes to repurpose Amazon's physical iteration of Buy It Now. (I think he's underestimating the degree of incompetence this editor possesses, but anyhow.) Benson managed to hack a diaper-ordering Dash button to act as an Internet Of Things-style tracker for how often his (adorable) baby poops. Or how many times he wakes up in a night. The trick lies in the fact that Amazon's buttons aren't constantly connected to WiFi. For the sake of battery life, the buttons only come to life when pushed, meaning the workaround picks up when your button is trying to access the internet, and registers that as a trigger for anything but buying stuff from Amazon.
San Francisco's public defecation map highlights a shitty situation
Wondering what that smell near the Civic Center is, San Francisco resident? As far as serious interactive maps go, Human Wasteland is one of the strangest we've seen. Created by civil-engineer-turned-web-developer Jennifer Wong, the project plots human excrement "incidents" reported by the public to SF311. Her project won an internal hacking contest for employees of a real estate website, an ironic honor considering the city's contentious housing issues. The highest concentration of crap is at a downtown alley next to the financial district, right in a high-traffic area frequented by tourists.
ShitExpress will send poop in a box anywhere in exchange for Bitcoins
You can find absolutely anything on the internet, and services that send poop on your behalf to people who've incurred your hatred are old news. This new startup called ShitExpress, however, offers something its older rivals can't: the ability to accept Bitcoins for total anonymity. No credit card means no paper trail. And, if you take great care to make sure you browse the internet anonymously, nobody will find out it's your doing. For the Bitcoin equivalent of $17, the company will send horse manure (more types will be added in the future, as should be expected from a respected poop delivery service) anywhere in the world for you.
Scientists look to take the pooping out of civet coffee
At first glance, coffee that's result of animal's bowel movements sounds pretty gross. But for anyone who's actually tasted brew from those poop beans (or a beer that features them), the process takes a backseat to the taste. And it makes for one of the most expensive cups of joe in the world. Well, a pair of scientists are skipping the civet's digestive tract when it comes to the flavors of the Indonesian Kopi Luwak coffee, opting for a fermentation process to achieve similar results. A company called Afineur has developed a two-day process that's "inspired by" the civets' work rather than recreating it exactly. It does, however, reduce the bitterness of the coffee and modify aroma just like the small animals do. Fermentation also adds another variable that can be tweaked to fine-tune flavor profiles -- on top of bean selection and roasting techniques. When Afineur's coffee goes one sale later this year, the price per pound should be between $50 and $100 -- cheaper than the several hundred dollar figure that civet-digested beans demand. Of course, you'll still need to decide on a brewing method once you're able to snag a bag. [Photo credit: SONNY TUMBELAKA/AFP/Getty Images]
Finally, a hydroponic farm that runs on goldfish poop
Everything that we have ever eaten has probably, at some point, been in contact with some poop. Plants grow in soil that's mixed with horse poop, and at some point a careless burger joint employee has touched your meal after a tricky bathroom break. The sooner that we admit the role poop plays in our survival, the sooner that we can turn it to our advantage. For instance, wouldn't it be great if we could harness the power of poop to grow herbs, purify water and look after a goldfish at the same time? You bet your ass (the part of your body where poop lives) it would, which is why Dutch startup EcoBird is launching its aquaponic farm on Kickstarter.
Scientists extract clean water from cow pies
The planet's 1.5 billion cows are (innocently) an environmental scourge thanks to the copious amounts of horrible greenhouse gases they disgorge. Scientists from Michigan State U have flopped that around, however, and figured out how to turn the resulting manure into something good for the planet: fresh water. By running the poop through a so-called anaerobic digester and reverse osmosis system, they got pure H2O out the other side. The average bovine produces about 10,000 gallons of "raw materials" a year and scientists can transform at least half of that into water (the other half becomes energy and fertilizer). The final product is intended for livestock and not human consumption, but maybe all it needs is some good marketing.
The Daily Grind: What's the most insulting quest you've ever done?
The other night, a friend of mine took to Twitter to express her displeasure over an EverQuest II mission. "I have to do something called Jenni's Stained Pants," she said, nonplussed. "This may be the most insulting quest I've ever done." While the actual mission turned out to be more benign than she'd anticipated from the title, I could relate. There have been so many quests in MMOs that aren't just beneath my stature but outright mocking my status as a hero. How many times have we had to pick up poo on the whims of a developer? Or pluck flowers for Elves? Or run extremely pointless errands because an NPC has a deadly case of fat butt and doesn't want to stop watching Honey Boo Boo? So let it out today: What's the most insulting quest you've ever done? Vent! Lance that wound! Rebuff those devs who think it's OK to make a monkey out of you! Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Breakfast Topic: What's your favorite quest mechanic?
Remember when everyone loved to hate The Oculus? Group members dropped like flies the moment some hapless noob intimated not having flown a drake before. Or jousting in the Argent Tournament -- ah, yes, another quest mechanic that united many players with the burning passion of unmitigated hatred. The thing is, some players like varied quest mechanics, even flying things and jousting at things. They like a change of pace from MMO standards such as Kill 10 Rats and the Fed Ex breadcrumb delivery (or in Blizzard's case, anything to do with poop). Me, I usually resent the intrusion. I prefer to play my character, galloping around the hills to find things and using my entire arsenal of spells to peek, tweak, and then slay everything in my path. I must admit, though, that Mists of Pandaria could be swaying me from this stoic path. While I'm adamantly not a fan of the quests that put you in the shoes of the quest giver and his saga, the general variety of quest mechanics has been ... distracting. Refreshing. Dare I go so far as to even say they're downright fun? A little variety is turning out to possibly be a good thing. (I said "a little." I still want to play my character. Harrumph.) Do you enjoy playing a variety of quest mechanics as you move through WoW's storylines, or do you prefer to stay in your character's own skin with your own spells and abilities? What are your favorite quest types? Which would you be just as happy to never encounter again?
Latest Mew-Genics teaser collects trinkets with 'magic properties'
Team Meat recently released some new pieces of information about its current project, Mew-Genics. The game includes a trinket display case for all the "stuff" that players acquire, which sometimes "appear imbued with magic properties that change space and time."Collectable trinkets include food, vomit, kittens, mail and petrified poop. The petrified poop shown in the picture "slightly lowers damage taken," so at least we can assume that this game about cats (many cats) includes some kind of health and damage system. Of course, the petrified poop seen here also lowers the "poop rate" of all cats, so there are apparently some other gameplay elements happening here. There are 105 trinket types in Mew-Genics, each with semi randomly-generated properties.
The Daily Grind: When has an MMO made you feel least like a hero?
For me, it was the early days of World of Warcraft's first expansion, The Burning Crusade. After years in Azeroth, honing my uber-skills and collecting my uber-armor (everything was uber back then), I gave a battle cry and leaped through the portal to Outland with adventure in my heart. "Oh hey, you're here," the unsurprised NPC said. "Here's a bag. Go collect boar droppings." "Boar droppings? Shouldn't the janitor take care of that?" I replied, fingering my sword. "They're, um, hellboars. So this poop can only be handled by a level 60 character. You have 0/6, by the way. Get cracking!" A little part of me died that day. But I still did the quest. Whether it's picking up poo, collecting flowers or escorting little children on their quest to find a flute, all MMOs have those moments when we have to do things that are decidedly unheroic. What were the times when an MMO made you feel least like a hero? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The worst name for a knockoff cellphone, ever
And in case you're wondering, they're ripping the Oppo logo.
