Results tagged “poop” from 60 Second Science

Methane-filled cow toots have long been the bane of environmentalists and pythonophobes everywhere (see also: megacorporations and carbon dioxide).

Now there's a chance that at least one thing coming out of cows could actually help stop global warming.

"When most people see a pile of manure, they see a pile of manure. We saw it as an opportunity for farmers, for utilities, and for California," said David Albers, dairyman and collaborater in The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project.

Continue reading 'Everybody poops, but cow's power the world' >

Genetic change has been coming 100 times faster in the past 5000 years than at any point in previous history say Robert K. Moyzis of the University of California, Irvine, and Henry C. Harpending of the University of Utah. I imagine they then immediately shouted, NBA Jam-style, "He's heating up!" while fantasizing about the inevitability of women who sprout wings and men who shoot lasers out of their nostrils.

While the more prevalent notion has been that evolution has slowed or halted, favoring cultural rather than biological change, 7% of all human genes showed evidence of recent natural selection.

Continue reading 'From poop to laser eyes: Human evolution is rapidly speeding up' >

I always knew feces was the key to complex life -- why do you think the best jokes involve poop? Scientists have long sought to explain the evolutionary explosion of life that occurred 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period; this population boom eventually gave rise to the ancestors of complex life. Biogeochemist Graham Logan argues that feces-producing creatures, which actually arrived about 40 million years before the start of the Cambrian, were the key that enabled single-celled organisms to expand.

Before pooping creatures, bacteria consumed most of the available oxygen. Plankton produced oxygen slowly, but bacteria would consume most of it in order to digest dead plankton. The dearth of oxygen didn't allow for much multicellular development.

Then the crappers came to the rescue.

Continue reading 'What gave rise to complex life on earth? Poop! (maybe)' >

Those of you trying to avoid the dreaded E. coli would apparently do well to dip your hands into a bucket of bleach after taking wet laundry out of the clothes washer.

“Anytime you transfer underwear from the washer to the dryer, you’re going to get E. coli on your hands,” says Charles Gerba, a specialist in environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona.

Gerba, or whomever he talked to, helpfully adds that a gram of feces is "a quarter the size of a small peanut."

Thanks for the take-home, Health magazine!