If you remember President William Henry Harrison from U.S. history class at all, then you probably remember him as the poor fellow who died from pneumonia a month after delivering his inaugural address in freezing rain. Except was it really pneumonia after all? A New York Times article suggests a different theory, and a cautionary tale against giving long speeches instead turns into one against improper sewage systems.
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Underground in places nobody likes to look, bacteria are doing terrible things to our sewage pipes. The concrete pipes that carry our waste are literally dissolving away, forcing engineers into a messy, expensive battle against tiny microbes.
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When you flush the toilet, you’re sending a lot of bad stuff into the sewer. But what you might not realize is that you’re flushing away a lot of good stuff, too. That’s why a team of German scientists have developed a method for recovering those valuable particles.
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If you have ever been to San Francisco, then some part of you—or some former part of you—has almost certainly passed through the city’s Southeast Wastewater Treatment Plant. But, considering how utterly vital it is to the city, the wastewater plant is also very much invisible, tucked away in a neighborhood no tourist would have heard of. Bright and early one recent Saturday morning, Gizmodo went to see what San Francisco’s sewage plant is really like.
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Washington D.C. is overflowing with crap—and not just the sort spewed in Congress. Rather, its ancient sewage system regularly overflows, sending a literal river of poo into the city’s waterways. Lady Bird is the name of the giant tunneling machine sent to stop it.
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In this week’s round-up of landscape reads, we’ve got sacred grounds, coffee grounds, and camping grounds.
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Drug users might be less than forthright about their illicit habits—but they all have to pee. With that in mind, scientists are drug-testing entire sewer systems to study just how popular illegal drugs have become.
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We all have to poop, but how we deal with it changes with age. For babies, it’s diapers. For the elderly, it’s, well, adult diapers. And, for most of the rest of us, it’s toilet paper.
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Among the things I found mortifying about my parents when I was a teenager was their habit of leaving buckets of pee in the bathroom. Instead of flushing all that phosphorous- and nitrogen-rich urine down the toilet, they saved it for our backyard vegetable garden. Pee as fertilizer has since—contrary to everything my teenage self wanted to believe—become a hip idea among some eco-minded backyard farmers.
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When residents of Howard County, Maryland, flush their toilets, their sewage will soon end up at the NSA’s new computer center several miles away. Collecting and storing so much data has been generating a whole lotta heat for the NSA—we mean this quite literally—and the agency’s now buying treated wastewater to cool their equipment.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
