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May 02 2012
How Our Circadian Cycle Helps Us Not Need to Pee Overnight
How to keep track of mouse urine
Eight hours is a long time without a trip to the bathroom when awake, yet most of us can sleep through the night without peeing. And no, it’s not just because you (presumably) stop drinking coffee in your sleep: even when food and drink are factored out, you both make less urine and have better bladder capacity during the night. As with most behaviors that change from day to night, it does indeed have everything to do with the circadian rhythm.
In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers compared normal mice with mice whose circadian rhythms were disrupted by genetic mutations. To keep track of mice urination over time, they used a rather charming contraption that slowly unspooled urine paper under the cages (see image). Urine spots on the paper were counted up and, sure enough, urination in the normal mice showed 24-hour patterns while the mutant mice did not.
The study also identified a molecular mechanism that lets bladders hold more urine during sleep. Concentrations of the bladder protein Cx43 goes up and down over the course of 24 hours. It makes bladder muscles more sensitize to ...
April 06 2012
Hyenas Change Their Diet During Lent, According to a Poop Analysis
Did you know I can eat and digest bone? Plenty of calcium.
After painstakingly identifying all the animal hairs in hyena poop, scientists have determined that Lent forces spotted hyenas in Ethiopia to change their diets too. No, Ethiopians have not managed to convert hyenas—they just deprive them of butcher scraps.
As the heavily Orthodox population gave up meat for Lent, hyenas could no longer depend on scavenging outside butcher shops, so they hunted down donkeys instead. Donkeys are a common livestock animal in northern Ethiopia and an especially easy target because they’re kept outdoors at night. While opportunistic hyenas will take whatever dead meals they can get, don’t underestimate the hyena’s ability to hunt down prey several times bigger than itself.
The research team had collected hyena feces from March to May and identified all the animal hairs found in them. With the start of Lent, goat and sheep hairs dropped off in frequency, while the percentage of hairs belonging donkeys doubled to over 30%. Hyenas will eat practically anything—from putrid corpses to dung—so donkeys are pretty much a treat.
Image via Flickr / Diamond Glacier Adventures
March 09 2012
How to Catch Beetles: An Ice Cream Scoop, PVC Pipe, and Frozen Dung Balls
After three and a half years of mucking around Florida cow pastures, veterinary entomologist Philip Kaufman has collected 62,320 dung beetles. That comes to about 60 beetles a day, if you’re counting. What’s the secret to his beetle-catching success? The New York Times Green Blog has got the scooper—erh, scoop:
He collected fresh dung with an ice cream scooper, then packed it into small pouches that he froze in his lab. He set up pit fall traps, or mesh-covered funnels partly buried underground that were baited with the thawed dung balls. Positioned at a slant, the mesh encouraged beetles to fall into a bit of PVC pipe from which they could not escape. After placing the traps, he would return within 24 hours to investigate the day’s catch.
Squatting around cowpats paid off: Kaufman’s research on the diversity dung beetles has just been published in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. He isn’t the only one with an affinity for dung beetles though. The little critters actually do a lot of a farm’s clean-up work, eating through the dung that can quickly pile up when a ...
March 01 2012
January 24 2012
Portland’s Tips for Making Public Potties That Last
Breezy and exposed! That’s the secret to bathrooms no one, not even street people, wants to live in.
Many cities have had epic, expensive public toilet fails. Seattle, we’re looking at you and your $5 million self-cleaning toilets that wound up trashed.
But over at The Atlantic’s Cities site, John Metcalfe has a piece detailing why Portland’s public potties have survived the aggressions (and heavy use) of the citizens. Here are Portland’s tips for defecation success.
1. Make it open to the elements: we’re talking bathroom stall, sans the bathroom. People walking by on the sidewalk should be able to see the peer’s feet and hear every little splish, splash, and sploosh in that potty. A comfortable, enclosed public bathroom is a bum’s living room, but an open-air crapper is just an open-air crapper.
2. No sink. Bums like to wash clothes in sinks. Instead, provide a spigot outside the stall with cold water.
3. No mirror. People like to break mirrors. It’s just a thing.
4. No nice, homey touches or comfortable detailing. Stainless steel all the way, with a graffiti-repelling coating. People can and will take bats to it; don’t make it easy on them.
And yet, Portlanders ...
September 30 2011
Dizzy Discus Throwers, Horny Beer-Bottle Beetles, and the Wasabi Alarm Clock: the 2011 Ig Nobels
Those classy folks at the Annals of Improbable Research are at it again. Last night, they announced the 2011 winners of some of the most coveted awards in science: the Ig Nobels.
You should watch last night’s ceremony in its entirety, but here are (drumroll) the winners:
- First off, in Physiology…from the Cold-Blooded Cognition Lab at the University of Vienna, Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandle, and Ludwig Huber for their paper No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise, published this year in Current Zoology. As it turns out, if one tortoise is yawning, its buddies won’t join in. Not even if you show them movies of yawning tortoises.
- In Chemistry…Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining what concentration of airborne wasabi can awaken sleeping people in case of emergency. They are the inventors of the wasabi alarm, described in US patent application 2010/0308995 A1.
- In Medicine…Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, and Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff for illuminating how an intense need to pee can affect your decision-making capabilities in their papers Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains and The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults.
- In Psychology…Karl Halvor Teigen for his work in contemplation of the human sigh and its purpose in his paper “Is a Sigh ‘Just a Sigh’? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task.”
- In Literature…John Perry for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, summed up by the Ignobel site as: “To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.” See more in his article How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done.
- In Biology…Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for their work observing that a certain species of beetle will attempt to mate with a specific variety of Australian beer bottles, called “stubbies.” See Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females (Coleoptera) for more.
- In Physics…Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru, and Herman Kingma for elucidating the cause of dizziness in discus throwers in their paper Dizziness in Discus Throwers is Related to Motion Sickness Generated While Spinning.
- In Mathematics…summed up best by the Ignobel site: “Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.”
- The Peace Prize…Arturas Zuokos, mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for his well-publicized solution for dealing with illegally parked Mercedes. In his words: “It seems that a tank is the best solution.”
- The Public Safety Prize…John Senders for his series of groundbreaking 1967 safety experiments in which a person driving at high speed is repeatedly blinded by a visor flipping down over his face. And it’s all here on video.
Congratulations to the winners! We hope you’ll enjoy your Periodic Table table trophies. Our own experiments with half-drunk cups of coffee and the native fauna of magazine offices were not enough to garner nomination this time around, but we’ll just try harder.
August 10 2011
Success! Functioning Anal Sphincter Grown in a Petri Dish
Eyes, sperm, you name it: these days, chances are someone’s cooking it up on a little slab of agar and gearing up to graft/sew/implant it in anything that comes near. Today’s body part is the anal sphincter, that handy little ring of muscle that maintains the separation between your insides and your outsides. Researchers grew them from cells, implanted them in mice, and compared the new sphincters’ function with the animals’, ah, native orifices. And apparently, they were quite satisfactory.
You young whippersnappers out there might not realize it, of course. But malfunctioning sphincters are a big, messy problem as you get older, and a lot of people suffering from fecal incontinence (including women recovering from births, which can put everything down there out of whack) could benefit from this research. Right now, Depends or surgery with high rates of complication are what people with damaged sphincters have to choose from, and the possibility of replacing the muscle is intriguing.
The major step forward made here is that these sphincters, which were grown in a circular mold from human muscle biopsy cells and mouse nerve cells, could, by virtue of those nerve ...
June 23 2011
When Biologists Wear (Faux) Fur, It’s With the Babies in Mind
Don’t worry, this is for science.
It’s not easy being a parent. There are the constant feedings, the sleepless nights—and of course, the time-consuming task of shimmying into that unwieldy animal suit.
When the offspring of endangered species are orphaned or abandoned, scientists and vets fill the pawprints of the missing parents. But animals raised by humans can develop all sorts of issues; they’re not prepared to fend for themselves in the wild, they don’t play well with others, and they have an unhealthy interest in humans, cozying up to hikers and hunters.
So while humans are busily looking for Mommy’s nose in Junior’s face, these scientists take things in the opposite direction. Here’s how they make themselves over to look, act, and even smell like the animals they raise:
Scientists at the Hetaoping Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda, part of China’s Wolong Nature Reserve, donned full-body plush panda suits to raise a four-month-old cub. The result is both adorable and more than a little absurd: Look, it’s a panda! Walking on two legs. And weilding a measuring tape. Uh, what happened to its head? At the Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center in California, vets ...
May 24 2011
Newsflash: Civilization Was Built on Llama Dung
Far before the looming pyramids and the learned librarians at Alexandria, Egyptian civilization sprung up from the fertile banks of the Nile. Long predating the Inca empire and the sprawling structures of Macchu Picchu, Andean civilization emerged from a whole bunch of llama poop.
For civilizations to take root, people need to have enough food on hand to put time and energy into activities like waging war, building stuff, and composing epic poetry. In the high and rugged Andes, growing that much maize—the staple crop of ancient South America—isn’t easy. That’s what llama droppings are for, a new study suggests.
Digging through some deeply buried and really old dirt from a spot in the Andes two miles above sea level, paleoecologist Alex Chepstow-Lusty found two things: pollen and bugs. In particular, he found maize pollen from 2700 years ago—and, from the same period, a population explosion of little crap-eating critters called oribatid mites, which are known to make a meal of that which llamas leave behind. The local people were suddenly able to cultivate maize with such success, Chepstow-Lusty surmised, because they had growing herds of llamas, and therefore an ...
March 22 2011
Vets-in-Training Plunge Their Hands Into Rectal Simulators to Learn Their Craft
When you have your hand up a cow’s behind for the first time, you’re literally groping in the dark. Unable to see what you’re touching and armed with only textbook knowledge of cow anatomy, it’s easy to make a wrong move, which in your first rectal class can mean misdiagnosing a cow pregnancy or not even feeling your first uterus. That’s all changed with the advent of rectal simulators.
Dubbed Breed’n Betsy, this metal-framed simulator with a latex back-end and internal organs allows students to perfect their pregnancy-testing, artificial-insemination, and embryo-transferring techniques before they touch a living cow. After you put on your lubricated glove, you just plunge your hand into the cow and feel around to learn the positions of latex uteri, ovaries, and cervixes. There are also upgrades: A water-filled acrylic tube simulates real-cow temperatures, and you can switch out the latex organs for real ones from your local slaughterhouse (oh goodie!). So after you’ve grown comfortable performing rectal exams on this Frankensteinian mishmash of organs, you can confidently do the same to a living, breathing bovine.
England’s Bristol University snatched up two Breed’n Betsy models—replacing six living cows per ...
February 18 2011
New Zealand Enlists Dung Beetles to Deal With Piles and Piles of Crap
In New Zealand, there’s a running joke that the sheep outnumber the people. What’s not funny is the consequence of all those woolly creatures: poop. Piles and piles of it. To reduce this overflowing cornucopia of crap, the government is calling in reinforcements in the form of 11 Australian dung beetle species.
The country’s excess poo not only finds it way into water reservoirs, it also releases nitrous oxide into the atmosphere–and to put that in perspective, cow crap alone accounts for 14 percent of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. “One of the big things basically is the accumulation of dung on pasture surfaces,” Landcare New Zealand research scientist Shaun Forgie told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It’s bad for cattle because more dung increases the “zone of repugnance, which means there’s an area around dung which is basically offensive to grazing livestock…. They don’t want to eat around that, so unless you break feed, you’re losing that surface area to graze on.”
Dung beetles cut the crap by feasting on it: adults lay eggs in manure, and the baby beetles feed on the scrumptious scat, ...
January 19 2011
January 14 2011
Are ATMs as Filthy as Toilet Seats?
Cue the “filthy money” jokes: The same germs that touch your bum in public potties also touch your fingers during ATM transactions.
In response to a survey of 3,000 British adults, a majority of which believe that public toilets out-filth everything else, the company BioCote–a producer of anti-bacterial coatings–decided to get to the bottom of the issue by comparing ATMs and toilets. Researchers scoured England, swabbing heavily-used ATM key pads as well as nearby public toilet seats. After letting the swabbed bacteria grow over night, they compared the cultures and discovered that both contained bacteria from the groups Bacillus and Pseudomonadaceae.
The Daily Mail quotes BioCote microbiologist Richard Hastings:
“We were surprised by our results because the ATM machines were shown to be heavily contaminated with bacteria; to the same level as nearby public toilets. In addition the bacteria we detected on ATMs were similar to those from the toilet, which are well known as causes of common human illnesses.”
But one should always consider the source: BioCote specializes in selling anti-bacterial products. How convenient, then, that they are able to find so much bacteria on ATMs. And the company’s finding has garnered at least one detractor.
January 06 2011
Potty Trained Piggies Help Keep Taiwanese Rivers Clean
Toddlers can learn, cats can be taught–so why not take the next step and potty-train our livestock? Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration is encouraging its pig farmers to do just that with the countries’ six million pigs. The move will clean up the farms and help prevent water pollution, they say.
To keep the pig waste from flowing into the rivers (and to save water on cleaning up farms), the pigs are trained to relieve themselves in a trough. The “toilets” are smeared with feces and urine to attract the pigs–kinda like that spot on the carpet where the dog keeps relieving itself. All it took to start the porcine potty-training revolution was one genius farmer in 2009 trying to avoid the Taiwanese government’s “water pollution fee.” He noticed the difference immediately, he told the Mail and Guardian Online:
“The pig toilets on my farm help me collect about 95% of all pig waste, making cleaning much, much easier,” Chang Chung-tou, a pig farmer in Yunlin county, said.
After a trial of 10,000 pigs by Chung-tou and others in 2009, the Taiwanese ...
December 16 2010
Pee-based Gaming Coming to a Urinal Near You (If You’re in Japan)
For you men, peeing has become complicated these days: You have to deal with everything from tests judging your ability to pick a urinal to pictures of women laughing at you. It’s about time someone put the fun back in pee time, and SEGA thinks they have just the thing: urinal gaming. As Pocket Lint describes:
This wacky video (filmed in Japan, where else?) shows off the pee-based game in which the speed and accuracy of your urine stream is judged and converted to a cartoon-like mini-game display on the LCD.
Games to play with you pee include a graffiti cleaning task, a Marilyn Monroe-esque trick that blows wind up a lady’s skirt, and a game that asks you to shoot milk from your character’s nose. You control the game by hitting the sensor in the urinal, which rates you on how long and hard you can pee. The aim of the game is to help dudes stay on target, Popular Science explains:
If you can’t go standing up, perhaps Toirettsu isn’t for you (sorry ladies, but your hands-free method allows you to play Angry Birds on the can anyhow). Toirettsu targets restaurant and retail environments, ostensibly in hopes that by giving users goal-oriented mini-games to focus on, their men’s room floors might stay a bit cleaner as gents have somewhere to aim. And, of course, it gives establishments (and Sega) somewhere to place an ad.
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Discoblog: Step 1: Pee on Stick. Step 2: Ask Your Phone if You Have an STD
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DISCOVER: Video Games That Make the World Better
Video:Youtube/uye515
December 02 2010
A New Treatment for Bowel Problems: Eating 1,000 Parasitic Worm Eggs
Intestinal parasites might turn most people’s stomachs, but for some people suffering from ulcerative colitis, the creepy crawlies might actually reverse intestinal discomfort and symptoms. A new study found that infestation with whipworms, aka Trichuris trichiura, can ease the symptoms of an inflammatory bowel disorder, possibly by stimulating mucus production in the intestines.
Ulcerative colitis is an intestinal auto-immune disease causing inflammation and ulcers, which can bleed. Patients can either take immune-suppressing steroids (with lots of side effects), or have parts of their intestines and bowel removed to reduce symptoms.
One colitis patient, on a lone voyage to cure his bowel problems, went in search of worms after hearing about a researcher, Joel Weinstock, who believes that intestinal parasites like whipworms and hookworms can cure autoimmune diseases. In 2004 he was able to get his hands on a batch of human whipworm eggs from Thailand. He ingested 500 of them, and the eggs hatched inside him and set up shop in his intestines (want to see a picture? Beware: linked photo may make you revisit your lunch). Three months later, he downed 1,000 more eggs.
None of this was done under doctor supervision, of course, since the only kind of whipworm approved for medical testing in the United States don’t live very long in humans. After the patient has filled his bowls with worms, he contacted parasite immunologist P’ng Loke. The man allowed doctors to take a gander at his colon and track the worms and his symptoms, Loke explained to LiveScience:
“When he had colonoscopies for different reasons, we basically tried to characterize biopsies that were taken from his gut,” Loke told LiveScience. “We tried to look at these biopsies and see what kinds of immune cells were activated … what kind of genes were activated. We were trying to put together a picture of what was going on in the gut at different times.”
The patient’s symptoms decreased until he didn’t need any other treatment, though they returned in 2008 after a massive worm die off. Luckily, he was able to procure more worms and took 2,000 more eggs to replenish his supply; his symptoms once again disappeared. Somehow the worms were helping his intestines recover from the colitis, Loke explained to Scientific American:
“Ulcerative colitis is often associated with decreased mucus production and the worms seem to somehow restore mucus production…. It’s possible the mucus serves as a defensive barrier between bacteria and the gut that prevents bacteria from causing inflammation and crossing over into other tissues.”
Inflamed areas of the man’s colon weren’t producing enough mucus, but where the worms were present, the colon was awash with it. Testing of the white blood cells in the worm-infested colon regions indicated that many of these immune cells had switched from producing interlukin-17, a protein which promotes inflammation, to interlukin-22, which promotes mucus production. 
It’s possible, the researchers say, that the switched-on mucus production is the body’s attempt to expel the worms, as well as to repair the damage the worms cause to the intestines.
Problem is, you never know what else you might get with such worms: They are known to transmit hepatitis, and are harvested from poop. They also have their own detrimental effects, since they are, after all, parasites. Until medical strains of the worm are tested for safety and efficacy, you are SOL (literally), Weinstock explains to LiveScience:
“There’s no safe way of getting exposed to it at this point,” Weinstock said. “All of these things should be done with the aid of a doctor and carefully thought through, not by indiscriminately seeking exposure.”
Related Content:
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80beats: Let Kids Eat Dirt: Over-Cleanliness Linked to Heart Disease
DISCOVER: Breathe Easy, You’ve Got Intestinal Worms
Images: Kimberley Evason, UCSF
November 18 2010
In the Glorious Future, Could Space Travel Be Poop-Powered?
Since we’re experimenting with using human excrement to power all kinds of things on earth, from buses and cars to natural gas for our homes, why not try renewable poop power in space?
That’s the mission adopted by a team at the Florida Institute of Technology–they hope to bring the flexibility and sustainability of poop power to space. As a first step towards that goal, they’re testing the ability of a special hydrogen-creating bacteria, called Shewanella MR-1, to live aboard a UN satellite, says Fast Company:
The goal is, to put it bluntly, to see if Shewanella can convert astronaut feces into hydrogen for use in onboard fuel cells. “The bacteria generates hydrogen. If we give waste to bacteria, it converts to hydrogen that could be used in a fuel cell. We’re looking at how reliable the bacteria are,” explains Donald Platt, the Program Director for the Space Sciences and Space Systems Program at the Florida Institute of Technology.
The bacteria will be going up on the UN’s first satellite, a $5 million project by the UN’s Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that will stay in space for five years. The satellite is scheduled for launch in the first half of 2011. If the bacteria are able to successfully grow in space, this project might lead the way to recycling the astronaut waste of the future, instead of freeze drying the excrement and turning it into a shooting star.
Related content:
Discoblog: Is Muskrat Poop the Next Penicillin?
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80beats: Meet the Genetically Engineered Pig With Earth-Friendly Poop
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Image: UNESCO
August 25 2010
Meet Dr. John, the Fancy Japanese Toilet That Gives Check-ups
Instead of going to the doctor’s office for simple health tests, some Japanese can now go to the bathroom. The “Intelligence Toilet” can measure blood pressure, body temperature, weight, and urine sugar levels, all while you… well.
The toilet is the latest in a family of smart loos called “washlets.” Other toilets in manufacturer Toto’s fleet feature water jets for cleaning, warmers for comfort, driers for after the water jet, and “otohime” or “princess of sound” speakers for drowning out any unpleasant user noises.
The toilets also have automatically opening and closing lids, resetting after every use to keep his and her bathrooms in bliss and to help young children or elderly people who may have trouble reaching or bending down. In Japan, the toilets run for around 400,000 yen, about $5,000.
Once the Intelligence Toilet has your health stats, it will display them on a wall monitor, though the toilet has the potential for more. An architect for the firm Daiwa House, which will install a set of the toilets in a retirement home, told the AFP:
“With the current model, your data is sent automatically to your personal computer, and then you can email it to your doctor…. In the next generation model, the data will be sent automatically to family members or doctors via the Internet.”
Just think of the automatic advertisements accompanying emails that detail your pee’s contents.
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Image: flickr / David McKelvey
August 10 2010
Look at the Size of That Chinchilla Poop–to Know How Much It Rained
The bigger the fossilized feces the more ancient rain. A team of paleontologists has uncovered this apparent correlation during a study of chinchilla scat at nine sites in South America’s Atacama Desert.
Claudio Latorre Hidalgo of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago presented his findings on this rainfall metric at a talk held yesterday during the ongoing American Geophysical Union’s Meeting of the Americas. Science News, where we found the story, reports that Latorre Hidaglo looked at fossilized feces from middens–shared rodent poop piles that contain “fecal pellets cemented together by crystallized urine.”
Latorre Hidaglo’s team carbon dated organic bits from the largest twenty percent of the chinchilla pellets (so as to exclude pellets from rodent youth). Given information on rainfall from other sources, they correlated the larger feces with periods of greater rainfall. According to Science News, Latorre Hidaglo suggests that the more rain, the better the environment to support bigger chinchillas; the bigger the chinchillas, the bigger the chinchilla poop. The poop test, the researchers say, may provide a way to estimate past rainfall when other tests aren’t available.
The American Geophysical Union talk announcement advises researchers to keep digging into the middens for more information:
A correlation between the size of rodent droppings and rainfall quantities is enabling researchers to establish a new paleoclimate record. Plus, a study of the contents of middens accumulated long ago by rodents offers further insights into the Atacama’s past.
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Image: flickr / nosha
August 05 2010
This Poop Mobile Could Get All Its Energy From 70 Homes’ Worth of Methane
Last week, we discussed a poop-powered rocket. Now a new car promises we’ll see human waste’s potential closer to home–or further from home, but not as far as space. The Bio-Bug, a modified Volkswagen Beetle, can run on fuel made from raw sewage.
“Biogas upgrading” has allowed GENeco, Bio-Bug’s developer and part of the British waste-processing companies that make up Wessex Water, to create methane from human waste.
The process starts with anaerobic digestion: Microbes eat through waste in an airtight, oxygen-free container. They leave behind only digestate, which works as a fertilizer, and a gas mixture that is mostly carbon dioxide and methane. Methane is combustible in the modified car’s engine. So, after removing the carbon dioxide, the company has poop power.
Mohammed Saddiq, GENeco’s general manager, says on the company’s site, that human waste is only the beginning.
“Waste flushed down the toilets in homes in the city provides power for the Bio-Bug, but it won’t be long before further energy is produced when food waste is recycled at our sewage works. . . It will mean that both human waste and food waste will be put to good use . . .”
The company told the BBC that Bio-Bug operates (and smells) the same as the fossil fuel-burning alternative, and that waste from 70 homes could generate enough methane to drive the car, assuming it drives about 10,000 miles a year.
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Image: flickr / Stephen Sullivan Sr.
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