Alex Blasdel, writing in The Guardian, waxes eloquent about methods old and new: “Bowel movement: the push to change the way you poo— Are you sitting comfortably? Many people are not – and they insist that the way we’ve been going to the toilet is all wrong.” Blasdel describes in depth the commercial rise of […]
Tag: poop
The Straight Poop: Sociology of Canadian Donut Shops, Ongoing
The sociology of Canadian donut shops plays out afresh, as described in a New York Post report headlined “Lady poops on restaurant floor, flings it at cashier.” That report includes action video. The 1999 Ig Nobel Prize for sociology was awarded to Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, for doing his PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut […]
Dirty Hands Make Dirty Leaders? (study)
Florien Cramwinckel Msc (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) researches how people respond to the moral behavior of others. As part of this remit, an experiment was devised in which 78 participants demonstrated how dirtiness versus cleanliness might influence moral behavior in leader–subordinate relationships :- “They were asked touch, smell, and evaluate a dirty (fake poop) or […]
“Why does coffee make you poop?” Four videos.
Several organizations try to answer the same question (a question that is laden with assumptions): “Why does coffee make you poop?” Discovery News: Nickipedia: ACS Reactions: Nathan and Rose: (Thanks to Vaughn Tan for bringing this to our attention.)
Discarded dog-poop bags – a photo essay
It was somewhere around 2007, that Dr. John Darwell, who is a senior lecturer in photography at the University of Cumbria, UK, began researching and photographically documenting the phenomenon of ‘ddsbs‘. “Over the past two years I have observed with increasing fascination the growing number of discarded dog shit bags (ddsbs) I encounter whilst out […]
3 Unexpected By-Products of (both real and fake) Luwak Coffee
The cost and caché of “the world’s most expensive coffee” — kopi luwak — has created at least three related industries. BACKGROUND: Long-time readers might recall that Kopi Luwak is made from coffee beans that have been partially digested by the Asian Palm-Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus); an animal that cherry picks only certain fruits (some say, […]
An Arielian take on trying digestively-processed coffee
Ig Nobel Prize winner Dan Ariely [pictured here, right] answers a reader’s question about a substance that produced an Ig Nobel Prize in 1995. A reader of Ariely’s blog asked: During a recent trip to Los Angeles, I stopped by a coffee shop offering a very expensive coffee called kopi luwak, or civet coffee. I […]
The experiment where they purposely made poop glow in the dark
Investigator Kirk Maxey introduced us to this research by saying: “For those with fetishes, we can add multi-colors….” He gives details, including the image reproduced here, on his blog, which begins thus: Lose Weight…and your poop will glow in the dark too! Sean Davies had a problem to solve: If you genetically modify enteric bacteria to make them more […]
Advances in toilet system testing: Wigglers & Pseudo Poop
Whither waste? Toilet testing, not everyone’s cup of tea, makes things flow better, for society’s sake. Metafilter features a little roundup of toilet testing info (thanks to investigator Scott Langill for bringing it to our attention): Pseudo Poop for Testing Toilets Testing toilet flush performance naturally requires the replication of real-world loads. Striving for accuracy, […]
Delving into fecal transplants
Pagan Kennedy writes, in The Atlantic, the kinds of interest sparked by fecal transplants: The Poop Outlaws: At-Home Fecal Transplants to Cure Disease …But such treatments still shimmer in the future. In the meantime, the best approximation we’ve got is, well, crap…. Lately, rumors about poop miracles have been proliferating on the Internet. In patient support […]