geekosystem

There are disadvantages to factory farming. The crowded conditions lead to health risks for the animals. As a result, they're given antibiotics which can lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Oh, and also sometimes there's foam that makes pools of hog poop explode. Farmers don't know the cause of the foam, but they think they may have a solution, but it's not a very good one.

Life in the wilderness is no bowl of cherries, and animals aren't exactly known for graciously sharing their food. One exception, though, may be Canadian pikas. A recent study from the University of Alberta shows that the little mammals actually prefer leftovers sometimes, choosing to dine on patches of vegetation that have already been grazed on -- and thus also pooped on -- by caterpillars. Exactly why isn't understood yet, but researchers suspect that the caterpillars' leavings may act as a sort of seasoning for the plants.

Energy drink and vodka mixer Red Bull has announced that it is being blackmailed by a person or group of people who have threatened to place cans of the sugary caffeine supplement contaminated with feces on store shelves. While the threats have been coming for several weeks, the Vienna-based company's checks of grocery store supplies have found no contaminated cans so far. Though considering how many cans of Red Bull are carried in groceries, gas stations, and convenience stores around the world, we're not sure how thorough those checks could have been...

Even as the Curiosity rover roves across the rusty-hued surface of Mars collecting samples, multimillionaire "space tourist" Dennis Tito announced earlier this week that he plans to send his own mission to the Red Planet in five years. Except Tito's intent on sending humans, not robots. That's a formidable trip to make, fraught with the perils of time, atrophy, boredom, and high-energy radiation from the depths of space! To protect against such cosmic rays, Tito's team says they will use the astronauts's own fecal matter as part of their wall shielding.

This is really happening! Microsoft announced in a blog post on Monday that they're building a new data center that will be fueled by the methane from a sewage treatment plant. The new data center will be a 200kW facility built at the existing Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The pilot program is being called the Data Plant and it will be fueled by collected methane from the wastewater treatment plant as it processes sewage. As a reminder: Sewage is poop.

It's Global Handwashing Day, everyone! You'd like to think that maybe we don't need an entire international holiday devoted to reminding us to wash up after we visit the restroom, right? We'd like to think that, too. Except here's the thing -- the numbers don't bear that out. In fact, a study released today by Queen Mary College and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that 1 in 4 Londoners have fecal bacteria -- like e.coli -- on their hands. Hands that they are just walking around touching things with. The really bad news, though? That seems tame compared to some of the other findings in the study.

Here's a quick quiz of your media savvy: If you saw a press release titled "Fecal Incontinence Is Highly Underreported," what would be your first thought? Yes, after giggling for a little while. If you're like me, your first thought would be to look at the evidence presented that this embarrassing condition is actually affecting many more than the 18 million Americans estimated by the National Institutes of Health. In that search, you, like me, would be rather disappointed by the complete lack of data backing up that statement. Which is made even more frustrating by the fact that this misleading press release is actually about the really interesting nerve therapy.

Sick of watching raw sewage and wastewater just laze about all day getting a free ride and harboring vile diseases, a team at Oregon State University has made strides in putting the gnarliest substance on planet Earth to work. Their new technique rethinks the way wastewater is treated, and has the potential to produce 50 times more electricity than conventional approaches to generating power from poo water. Yes, there are conventional approaches to that. They may soon take a backseat to the seemingly more efficient OSU method, which could turn sewage treatment facilities into miniature power plants.

Artist Whatshisname created these two lamps that portray pooping dogs, the bigger of the two dubbed Good Boy and the smaller dubbed Good Puppy. The switch to turn the bigger lamp on and off is actually the pile of curled poop found underneath the dog that you need to step on, so don't you worry, the poop is practical. The artist states that both of the lamps were set to be part of the Art Below exhibition at London Underground stations, but were banned from the show due to being offensive. If you'd like to get ahold of one of these lamps, you actually can, but it'll cost you.

The most interesting animals in Australia are the ones that have evolved to fill the very specific niches available on the once-isolated continent. The introduction of new species during European colonization brought animals that weren't so well adjusted, and have strained the local environment to keep up. Domestic cattle, for instance, have been fouling fields because the local dung beetle population simply can't cope with that much cow crap. This has forced scientists to look elsewhere for a solution.

Surely you've had annoying experiences with battery operated devices. You have to find the right batteries, put them in, and eventually replace them. Sure, it beats wires, but it's still not optimal. So what about robots that could go around and find their own "batteries" and generate power by eating things like leaves and dirt, and even maybe urine and feces? That's what the Ecobot-III --product of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory-- can do, and it even has a fancy new feature it's predecessors didn't have; the Ecobot-III can poop.

Chimps throw their poop at people, in the zoo at least. This is a verifiable fact, one that many of you zoo-goers may have experienced first hand. When you think about why they throw their poop at people, you're likely to come up on an explanation something along the lines of "Well, they're animals." While that is true, Bill Hopkins of Emory University, has done a study that shows that the chimps who throw their poop the most often and are the "best" at it, are actually smarter than chimps who throw less frequently and less accurately.

Antibiotics, while being one of the greatest advances in medical history, have their downsides. Sometimes, they can do some collateral damage and destroy cultures of bacteria that rightfully belong in the human body, nice cultures of nice bacteria. When these get killed, problems start. One of the more common instances of this has to do with intestinal bacteria. When the intestinal bacteria landscape gets screwed up, sometimes the only way to right the situation is to reintroduce a culture of healthy bacteria to the area. How do you do that? A fecal transplant.

Sichuan University professor An Shi has been awarded a patent for a tea that uses panda feces as fertilizer. Pandas only digest about 30 percent of the bamboo they eat, and bamboo, similar to green tea, contains a cancer preventative. So, considering about 70 percent of bamboo is left in the panda excrement used to fertilize the tea, the tea is supposed to provide cancer preventative effects. The tea, due to using excrement from a rare animal, could cost upwards of $69,000 per kilogram.

Despite what you may have assumed, alchemy is not dead. While there's pretty much no doubt that it will never work, people are still trying it. Recently, Paul Moran from Northern Ireland attempted to put a twist on the old lead-into-gold trick by turning feces into gold. No word on whether this modification to the recipe was out of necessity or a indomitable sense of adventure. Either way, the process involved leaving feces, along with fertilizer, on top of a heater. While this process did not manage to transmute the feces into gold, it did manage to transmute his entire apartment into a blazing inferno.