A giant inflatable dog poop sculpture in Swizerland blew away and broke the windows in a childrens’ home.  Scott Adams’ take:

I mean, if just once in your entire life you create a huge inflatable turd that injures an orphan, it sort of erases anything else you might do. You’ll always be that guy.

Via Chaos Theory

Kevin Z sent me a link to the most amazing poop-related machine ever. It’s named Cloaca. From the website Ectoplasmosis:

Food is put into the machine and is then fed through a series of tubes into various chambers containing biological compounds that mimic the human digestive system, breaking down the meals and finally excreting them. The finished product is nearly identical to actual human waste, which is quite an achievement. Delvoye even offered the artificial shit for purchase, although he seems to have sold out of it for the moment.

Apparently the machine-poop is not gross, because it’s produced by a machine. Note the lady at the end of the video running her well-groomed hands through the poo. (video & more below the jump)

This made me wonder – what exactly IS poop? Other than having a vague idea of nutrients, bacteria, and fiber, I had never deeply contemplated it before. Fortunately, Brenna Lorenz is on the case with her comprehensive website Scoop on Poop:

About 3/4 of your average turd is made of water. Of course, this value is highly variable – the water content of diarrhea is much higher, and the amount of water in poop that has been retained (voluntarily or otherwise) is lower. Water is absorbed out of fecal material as it passes through the intestine, so the longer a turd resides inside before emerging, the drier it will be.

Of the remaining portion of the turd, about 1/3 is composed of dead bacteria. These microcorpses come from the intestinal garden of microorganisms that assist us in the digestion of our food. Another 1/3 of the turd mass is made of stuff that we find indigestible, like cellulose, for instance. This indigestible material is called “fiber,” and is useful in getting the turd to move along through the intestine, perhaps because it provides traction. The remaining portion of the turd is a mixture of fats such as cholesterol, inorganic salts like phosphates, live bacteria, dead cells and mucus from the lining of the intestine, and protein.

Ok, so I wasn’t that far off. But I’ll be even more impressed by Cloaca if it actually manages to include intestinal mucus in its artificial poop. Now if you’ll excuse me, I am off to buang air besar.

“The picture is of an Antarctic minke whale taken from the bow of a ship,” said AAD principal research scientist Dr Nick Gales. “The white bits in the photo are pieces of ice-floe, the stream of pinky colour behind the whale is a faecal plume – a.k.a. “poo” – the large circle in the water is indeed the physical eruption of the whale’s flatulence.”

Thanks for the link, Greg.

Yes folks, the good people of Ontario have worked out a way to tap the energy in that terror of the global warming scene, the noble cow. The Stantons of Ontario are third generation farmers. In the past they’ve used the poop from their 750 cattle produce every year in the traditional fashion: They spread it on the land for fertilizer. But the neighbors complained about the stink, and everyone in town worried about ground water pollution. Then Laurie Stanton hatched a new plan: why not tap the methane cow poop emits and turn it into electricity? They implemented the system detailed in the illustration from the Globe and Mail (click on the image to make it bigger and legible) to move the poop from the barn to the power generation turbine. Each cow can keep three 50W bulb constantly illuminated. This year the farm will connect the system to the Ontario electric grid and power about 800 homes.

As any vegetarian will happily tell you, cows are really bad for the environment. Industrially produced beef is produced on giant cattle farms that get tons of corn shipped to them every day (with attendant emissions), and the finished beef gets trucked all over the place too. In between, the cows are producing ridiculous quantities of methane, an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. One gram of methane is equivalent to 23 grams of carbon when it comes to global warming. Burning a methane molecule does produce one carbon dioxide molecule in the end, but you get the attendant energy, and it’s considered cleaner than burning coal or oil.

Lest you fear Americans are missing out on the poop-power phenomenon, a farm in Riverdale, California has set up a similar system, but instead of producing the power directly, they’re pumping the gas into a nearby Pacific Gas & Electric natural gas line.

One thing I think we can all agree on: It’s been far too long since Poop Day. Bring on your poo-related news!

[Via Treehugger]

New York was fed and its waters kept clean by oysters for more than 200 years, but overharvesting and pollution finally did them in. The last oyster bed closed in 1927. (The “Cod” and “Salt” guy has also written an “Oyster” book, for those interested.) These modern pioneering oysters will not be edible, what with the toxins they will inevitably bioaccumulate, but edibility is almost beside the point. Along with filtering the water, these oysters will provide high-quality habitat to all kinds of other critters. The shells themselves are hard surfaces for tunicates and sponges to grow on, the space between the shells is a nice protected home for tiny bugs, and the whole structure is attractive to fish both for shelter and for eating said tiny bugs.

The big danger will be hypoxia, or low dissolved oxygen in the water. Oysters need to breathe just like all animals, and since they can’t exactly move out of the way, a low-oxygen incident (common in the summer in polluted waters) could easily kill them all in a matter of days. But if this works, it’s a huge step to giving Jamaica Bay back a bit of its former glory.

Still haven’t had enough oysters? The State of Virginia has a lovely oyster-reef popup book (PDF). And an official molluscan mascot – Omar of the Reef. He got to visit Japan!

               

Will “Jurassic Poop” replace “Everyone Poops” as the #2 children’s classic? Stay tuned!

Thanks to Sam, who is pretty much keeping TOG going these days.

Well, they can’t reduce the carbon emissions from jet fuel (yet), but the fellows at Earth Friendly Moving can at least save us the boxes problem. They make plastic moving boxes out materials they take out of the landfill, and they rent them out to customers for a buck a week a box, plus delivery fee. They also make a packing material composed mostly out of recycled paper pulp, and they drop off and pick up the boxes in their bio-diesel trucks. They even stack the boxes for delivery on a pallet made of recycled used diapers (They call it the Poopy Pallet. Yay Poop Power!). The founders, Spencer Brown and Brian Anton, claim that for ever 100 boxes they make, 256 pounds of landfill is removed, and it saves three trees.

The price is pretty reasonable, too. The cheapest deal I found with a quick Froogle search lead me to a supplier charging $1.58 per large box. On our last move we used over 100 boxes, but let’s call it 100 for the roundness of the number (nice, round zeros, like donuts, ahhhh…). So, at the high end delivery fee, we’re paying $2 a box, but we can feel good about ourselves. At the low end we’re paying $1.20 a box, so we get to feel good about ourselves AND save money. As good old Hannibal Smith said, I love it when a plan comes together.

(Thanks for the tip, Anna!)

In fact, converting our waste into energy has become a bit of a trend lately. Using a process called Plasma incineration, a few companies propose to convert solid trash waste into fuel for natural gas electricity generation. The process uses something similar to an arc welder to heat the trash very rapidly so that it melts into a big piece of slag. The trash ingots are then washed, to reduce the heavy metal content, and then sent to a natural gas electricity plant.

Of course, neither of these are as good idea as just building some solar and wind plants and driving electric vehicles. A 100-mile square of solar panels in Nevada would generate enough electricity to power the United States. Or, alternatively, there’s enough harnessable wind in North Dakota, Texas, and Kansas to power the nation. Somehow these technologies make more sense to me than building giant plasma incinerators or trying to extract car fuel from poop. Of course, then we still need to figure out what to do with the poop.