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The Aviarios del Caribe sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica is an orphanage that cares for abandoned and injured sloths with the goal of releasing them back into the wild. But the youngsters have to be taught how wild sloths do sloth things. -via Arbroath
Doggie Doo – $24.95
Do you love wacky activities and toilet humor? We have a great game for you! You need the Doggie Doo game from the NeatoShop. This hilarious game is simple to play:
Who knew poo could be so entertaining? Now you can tell your friends that picking up poo is your favorite way to pass the time.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fantastic Toys & Games!
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In 1961, Piero Manzoni created created a piece of art called "Merda d’artista" which was composed of 30gr of net freshly preserved poo (his own) in a tin.
Fast forward fifty years later, and we have this: hipster extraordinaire and artist Jammie Nicholas has turned his own poo into perfume … and selling ‘em!
Enough of this shit. So, to your perfume – how’d the idea come about?
I was reading a book by the French writer Dominique Laporte called The History Of Shit, which analyses the theoretical and social implications of faeces, and its role as a building material for cosmetics. It suggested that pleasant smells were used to cover bad smells, so it could be suggested that a bad smell could be used to cover pleasant smells.Isn’t that an incredibly obvious thing to base an art stunt like this around?
Well I did some research and spoke to perfumers and scientists involved with smell at molecular levels. I learnt that there are molecules that are common to both good and bad smells – for example, the smell of faeces and many white flowers, such as orange blossoms and juniper, are from the molecule Skatol. They’re just there in varying concentrations.
Link – via I Heart Chaos
Why did woolly mammoth go extinct? Scientists discovered that the none-too-smart animal enjoyed – and I quote – "poo-snack":
… a team led by Bas van Geel of the University of Amsterdam found fungus spores deep inside a piece of mammoth dung that can only grow on the outside of dung. Only way that can happen is if the mammoth eats the fungus, which means eating poo. Their work is in press in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
This is the second time evidence has been found that mammoths enjoyed poo-snacks — "coprophagy" to scientists — the first was in 2006. In some ways it’s even more important than the first discovery, though, because it means the initial finding wasn’t a fluke: mammoths made a habit of eating their own excrement.
It may sound gross to you or me, but coprophagia (that’s the fancy scientific word for eating poo) may actually serve a valid purpose:
Microbes that feasted on poo left behind high concentrations of vitamin K, B12, and B7, making mammoth pies a great way to get essential nutrients. That would’ve gone double for any time when food was scarce and/or the animals were stressed and in need of a prehistoric PowerBar.
"The indication that the adult mammoth had eaten feces (its own or that of another’s) is interesting, but not remarkably strange. Young elephants eat the feces of their mother to obtain the necessary bacteria for the proper digestion of the vegetation found on the savanna.
"This behavior may have a marked effect upon the type and function of the intestinal flora. Coprophagy is an important means of making a variety of nutrients synthesized by intestinal microflora available to animals.
Remember the guy police caught in a shop’s ventilation system who claimed to have been playing a game of hide and seek? Well, a vent shaft may be a very good hiding place but that’s nothing compared to this:
The long, narrow barn has an open-air trough that runs along one side of the building and flows into a vat covered by a steel grate. The setup allowed the farmers who once used the barn to spray the animal manure from the floor into a holding tank.
An officer looked down and there, through the steel grate in the floor, he could see the 52-year-old man, just his head peering out from the cesspool deep with frigid feces, said Chief Deputy Doug Harp of the Noble County Sheriff’s Department. “The pig operation hadn’t been in there for a while, but the previous tenant had been using it for dog kennels,” Harp said.
January is almost over, but if you haven’t purchased a calendar yet, you’re in luck: they’re now cheap! But don’t settle for that ho-hum boring ol’ calendar … get these strange and bizarre calendars instead!
(L) What’s Your Poo Telling You?
More at our own Jill Harness’ article over at InventorSpot: Link
Whoa! Where did the time go? I’d like to wish everybody a Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for reading Neatorama – the blog won’t be as fun without its loyal readers and commenters
(My wife and I lovingly call the cake above, which we got from the local supermarket, our Thanksgiving poo cake. I think that’s supposed to be a turkey or something. Oh, and it was surprisingly good!)
It’s like a modern day version of Captain Ahab’s quest for the white whale Moby Dick. But ickier. A whole lot ickier and much more intriguing.
Sam Miller, BBC’s former South Asia correspondent, has been obsessed with finding a man "whose dexterity and gall [he] admires beyond reason," … the New Delhi Poo Squirter:
I was in Connaught Place, in the heart of New Delhi, and as I emerged from an underpass a shoe-shine man came up to me, and whispered into my ear.
He then pointed at my right shoe on which sat, to my amazement, a small worm of brownish goo. He offered to wipe it off, but I knew that something was, well, afoot, and cleaned my shoe with a few leaves.
Some months later it happened again and I had a minor altercation with the shoe-shine man. Then one day, I decided I would take a photograph of the person who squirted my shoe. But I was daydreaming as I wandered through the underpass and was squirted again.
Link – via Cabinet of Wonders
This has got to be one of the strangest police investigations ever. Detectives in Valencia County, New Mexico, identified a possible suspect by extracting DNA from a very unusual piece of evidence left by the thief: his own turd!
The thief used the bathroom and left his solid waste on display for the homeowner. "It’s more of an insult right there. It was a big slap in the face," the homeowner said.
That same type of evidence was found at several different burglary scenes. The detectives on the case said they used the thief’s calling card against him. The feces went into evidence and the state crime lab extracted DNA from it. "We ended up getting a hit," Rivera said.
Good work, CSI Valencia County! Link – via Dave Barry’s Blog
Sculptor Antony Gormley of One & Other‘s summer art project is loads of fun: he asks the people of London to occupy the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, usually reserved for statues of kings and generals. Every hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days, a different person will become their own living sculptures on the Fourth Plinth.
This guy to the left is aquatic scientist Oliver Parsons-Baker, who came up dressed as a giant poo. He’s trying to raise awareness and promote better sanitation around the world with Water Aid:
The 26-year-old, who works for Severn Trent Water, has teamed up with Water Aid to raise awareness of the billions of people trapped in the poverty cycle due to a lack of safe water and toilets.
His cumbersome costume meant he had to be hoisted onto the plinth, drawing laughter and applause from the crowd. The outfit was composed of brown foam and leather, with a sizeable housefly dangling from it.
Parsons-Baker got his message across via two placards which bore the message: "2.5bn people don’t have a toilet" and "G8 leaders – take action on the sanitation crisis now".
You can view the live webstream of the shenanigans here: Link | Coverage at the Guardian | Poo-Man at The London Paper (photo: PA)
Those wily Tasmanians have hit upon a gem of an idea that lets them:
a) get rid of stuff no one wanted (i.e. wombat poo)
b) make lots of money doing it (make it into paper)
c) from people they don’t like (tourists)
Creative Paper manager Darren Simpson says the manufacturing process can be rather unpleasant.
"When we are boiling it, it does smell horrific as you can imagine, but once it has been sterilised and rinsed properly there’s no scent left to it. If anything it just gives you a nice organic smell," he said.
He added that it was the tourists themselves who came up with the wombat idea.
"As people were coming through and we were showing them the samples of our paper, they would throw questions at you like ‘can you make it from sheep poo or can you make it from koalas?’. And the one that kept popping up more than any other was the wombat."
Previously on Neatorama: Tiny Flower Turns Pig Poop into Fuel, Elephant Dung Paper
Daniel Bennett had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day: One day, after spending 7 years collecting Komodo dragon excrement, he found out that his University had incinerated his prized bag of poo!
But two years into his PhD he returned from fieldwork to find his collection had been "accidentally" thrown away by technicians clearing space in a laboratory.
"The Butaan is so reclusive that all attempts to study it using methods that have proved suitable for the Komodo dragon and other large lizards have ended in total failure," he told Times Higher Education magazine.
"My team and I studied the animals by searching the forest floor for their distinctive faeces and using clues to estimate dietary patterns, population size and structure, and activity areas. By the beginning of the third year of my PhD, I knew more about lizard faeces than I had ever thought possible.
"Returning to Leeds from fieldwork, I was surprised to find my desk space occupied by another student and to see that photographs of my daughter, my girlfriend and my favourite lizards had been removed from the wall.
"My personal effects had been carefully stowed in boxes, but there was no sign of my 35kg bag of lizard ****."
(Photo: Heathcliff O’malley)
I challenge all of you to come up with a better title!
