This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Black hole bum— Roger Sharp adds another item to Feedback’s compendium of black holes that are findable on surface maps of our own planet (7 October). Visitors to the Maitai Esplanade Reserve in Nelson, New Zealand, may find relief […]
Dr. Seung-min Park was awarded the 2023 Ig Nobel Public Health Prize for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and […]
Eva Wentink from OnePlanet (an institute created in a partnership of Wageningen University and Research, Radboud University Nijmegen and IMEC) muses, low-key charismatically, about the need and feasibility of a self-monitoring toilet. She explains how and why she and her colleagues built three toilets: (Thanks to Michiel Scheffer for bringing this to our attention.)
Why would London’s Science Museum permanently archive four rolls of Kleenex toilet paper from 1997? The answer lies in the design of its embossed cushioning pattern . . . The tiled design is a version of Penrose Tiling – a mathematically repeating pattern which was devised (or if you prefer discovered) by Nobel Prize winner Sir […]
The first scholarly work on toilet graffiti was very likely The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 written and published by ‘Hurlo Thrumbo’ in 1731. ‘Hurlo Thrumbo’ was, many believe, none other than poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, lexicographer. and man-of-letters Samuel Johnson himself. “The Original Manuscripts written […]
Pressure from the pandemic is bringing an urgent flow of partial information about the safety-or-danger of everyday activities. That flow brings us this new study: “Can a Toilet Promote Virus Transmission? From a Fluid Dynamics Perspective Featured,” Yun-yun Li, Ji-Xiang Wang, and Xi Chen, Physics of Fluids, vol. 32, 2020, 065107. The authors, at Southeast […]
A new, distinct form of backend processing— a very distant relative of potty training, for computers—is presented in this new study: “A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta,” Seung-min Park, Daeyoun D. Won, Brian J. Lee, Diego Escobedo, Andre Esteva, Amin Aalipour, T. Jessie Ge, Jung Ha Kim, Susie […]
A look at how a library manages to manage the facilities that help library users manage their bowels will likely enliven the 5th annual international User Experience in Libraries conference, or UXLibsV. The conference will take place at Royal Holloway [pictured below], University of London, on 17-19 June 2019. The session to be sure to […]
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 […]
When it comes to designing icons for the operation of household equipment, care must be taken to avoid misunderstandings. “If the right button is pushed, the desired function will be performed. If the wrong button is pushed, an unexpected function will be performed. It might cause the user’s body or mental state of unwell even […]