Bill Gates loves the Janicki Omniprocessor, an amazing machine that turns human waste into electricity and drinkable water. He saw it and he is extremely impressed. So impressed in fact that he drank from a glass of water that was human poop only five minutes earlier. "It's water," he said, obviously relieved.
"In places without good waste treatment plants, it could be a real game-changer," he says in his The Gates Notes YouTube page. Indeed it is. In fact, drinking water distilled from poop and reprocessing all our waste is the future.
It should come as no surprise that the Apollo astronauts left a few things behind after landing on the moon. Since the lunar module could only lift so much weight off the surface, they swapped out unwanted goods and gear for moon rocks. Among those unwanted goods were all kinds of weird things. What kinds of weird things? There were 96 bags of poop, pee, and puke.
I know what you're thinking: That makes total sense. That's super gross! But it makes total sense. The Apollo missions brought back a total of 842 pounds of moon rocks, dust, and core samples on six separate missions between 1969 and 1972. That amounts to who knows how many pounds of poop—not to mention the other excrement as well as boring old stuff like tools, golf balls, photographs, cameras, a gold-plated telescope and random symbolic objects. You can get a peek at the manifests that show what the astronauts abandoned in this video:
There is, however, scientific value to the things left behind. Astrobiologists, for instance, hope to one day inspect that half-century-old feces to see if the crap has undergone any genetic mutations while in space. Even more mundane gear on the moon's surface offer a unique perspective on how different materials hold up in extreme environments like the moon, where temperatures oscillate between minus 370-degrees to 250-degrees Fahrenheit.
What kinds of mundane gear, you wonder? Well, there's actually an entire website devoted to trash on the moon. However, here's a list of the more interesting and unusual items—aside from the 96 bags of poop, pee, and puke:
It's easier to get into Harvard than to qualify as a poop donor, says Dr. Zain Kassam, chief medical officer of OpenBiome, a stool donation clinic. Only 4% of people who apply to be donors qualify.
When both the New Yorker and Washington Post published stories on the rise in stool donation, the Internet erupted with incredulity (and the occasional off-color joke). In reality, the donations are crucial for life-saving transplants to patients with serious intestinal conditions, such as Crohn's disease
Clinics like OpenBiome in Boston test, collect, store and distribute healthy stool to clinicians who need it. With those samples, doctors conduct fecal matter transplants (FMTs), transferring healthy bacteria into their patients' digestive systems Read more...
If you want to avoid pooping at a bad time, you'll probably try to plan ahead and visit the bathroom before that long meeting. But how do you make yourself poop on command? Try a hot beverage—coffee works, but so does tea or even hot water.
This advice comes to us from Runner's World, because there are few worse times to hear the call of nature than when you're in the middle of a race—and running is notorious for loosening your bowels. Dr. Felice Schnoll-Sussman, a gastroenterologist, explains why hot beverages work:
"The warm liquid acts as a vasodilator," she says. "It widens blood vessels in the digestive system and helps increase blood flow and GI activity."
Schnoll-Sussman advises runners to drink a hot beverage in the morning and then sit on the toilet for a while. "Just the act of sitting there for few minutes can bring on the urge to go, even if you don't feel like you have to right away."
Read the full article for more of Dr. Schnoll-Sussman's advice, including why exercise helps but glycerin suppositories could backfire.
How to Make Yourself Poop | Runner's World
Photo by Selina .
