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An Yashi, a professor at Sinchuan University in China, has produced tea which is fertilized with panda droppings. At $80,000 per kilogram, it’ll be the most expensive tea in the world when it reaches the market. Yashi claims that it’s worth the price because of special health benefits:
“Pandas have a very poor digestive system and only absorb about 30 percent of everything they eat. That means their excrement is rich in fibres and nutrients,” he told Chinese website Scol.com.cn.
“It has a mature, nutty taste and a very distinctive aroma while it’s brewing.”
He also believes there are serious health benefits to the drink.
“Just like green tea, bamboo contains an element that can prevent cancer, and enhance green tea’s anti-cancer effects, if it is used as fertilizer for the tea,” the professor said
Link -via Born Rich | Photo: Flickr user Danforth1
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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A new study has found that around 15% of all snails eaten by hungry birds survive the ordeal and live to be eaten another day. In fact, one of the snails in the study immediately gave birth right after she crawled out of the bird’s waste.
Unicorn Poop T-Shirt – $14.95
Do you know someone who is crazy about unicorns? Get them the Unicorn Poop T-Shirt from the NeatoShop. It’s the gift that keeps on giving (we promise it won’t have the side-effects like Freddie Wong’s unicorn).
If you love this design be sure to check out more of Mike Jacobsen’s work at the NeatoShop! We think you will love what you see!
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School officials in Raytown, Missouri have battled flocks of geese for years. The problem is the bird droppings in the playgrounds and ballparks. Young children were even forced to stay inside during recess. The school grounds crew was prohibited from poisoning or shooting the geese, but last month, they came up with a new idea.
They’re using plywood cut outs of coyotes, which is the natural enemy of geese. In the cutouts they placed plastic bags to make them look like they were carring a goose in their mouths.
Dr. Travis Hux, the assistant superintendent of support services for the district, said they brainstormed the idea after many golf courses use cutouts of foxes and other predators to keep animals away.
“For the geese from above it appears that they’re holding a goose in their mouth and that creates a threat to the geese, so they don’t land on the playground. We have giggled about it and people laugh when I tell them, but I say go check it out, you’ll notice no geese running around on the playground,” explained Hux.
For Principal Dickerson she said she’s excited that they students get to enjoy the playground once again
The planned UNESCOSat mission — a UN-owned satellite that will conduct low-gravity experiments — will examine whether or not the Shewanella MR-1 bacterium can convert human feces into a fuel that can be used on long-range spaceflights:
The goal is, to put it bluntly, to see if Shewanella can convert astronaut feces into hydrogen for use in onboard fuel cells. “The bacteria generates hydrogen. If we give waste to bacteria, it converts to hydrogen that could be used in a fuel cell. We’re looking at how reliable the bacteria are,” explains Donald Platt, the Program Director for the Space Sciences and Space Systems Program at the Florida Institute of Technology. Shewanella’s viability will be determined based on its growth rate in space–figuring out, in other words, how different its life cycle is in space than it is on Earth.
Link | Image: Fast Company
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I didn’t even know that this was actual job. Apparently some people pick up other people’s dogs’ poop for a living. One lucky soul in this profession recently found $58 in a fresh pile:
In this photo provided by DoodyCalls Pet Waste Removal, Steve Wilson, a worker with DoodyCalls Pet Waste Removal holds a plastic bag of money May 30, 2010, in St. Louis. On a recent call, he noticed money sticking out from doggie doo and after cleaning the bills, placed them in a plastic zip-locked bag and returned what turned out to be $58 to the customer. The money was torn, but the serial numbers were identifiable, which means the bills could be returned to a bank and replaced with new money.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: AP
Scientists have always thought that colorful mineral deposits in caves are the work of geology, not biology – but they were wrong: unusual deposits may actually be microbial poop!
"We’re finding that you need to look at things you might write off as not being biological—they might be biological," said Penelope Boston, a cave scientist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.
The microbes were found on the walls of lava tubes in Hawaii, New Mexico, and the Portuguese Azores islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean (see map).
The finds include "a lovely blue-green ooze dripping out of the [cave] ceiling in Hawaii; a vein of what looks like a gold, crunchy mineral in New Mexico; and, in the Azores, amazing pink hexagons," said Diana Northup, a geomicrobiologist at the University of New Mexico.
"That’s the waste—the bug poop, if you will."
Link (Photo: Kenneth Ingham)
Yes, you read the title right. This is a link to Baby Center’s visual guide to baby poop. Go ahead and giggle, but let’s face it new parents are obsessed with their kids poop.
Most new parents find baby poop quite surprising! It has so many shades and consistencies that even experienced parents may not have seen them all.
This photo guide to baby poop will give you a good idea of what’s normal and what’s not as your newborn grows, drinks breast milk or formula, and starts eating solids. You’ll find out when not to worry and when it’s wise to be concerned.
The following is reprinted
from Bathroom
Reader Plunges Into History Again
The guano-rich Chincha Islands of Peru (1863)
The next time a pigeon drops a load onto the windshield of your car,
spare a thought for the guano miners of Peru's Chincha Islands. They spent
their working lives knee-deep in the stuff.
The economies of most countries are founded on things like farming or
factories. But that was not the case for Peru, the mountainous South American
country just north of Chile. Back in the 1800s, this country's national
wealth was based on bird poop!
THE REIGN OF SPAIN
The Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1532. After
taking a good look around and figuring out that the local Indians would
be no match for Spanish firepower, he claimed the country for Spain. In
1533, he did away with Atahuallpa, the Incan king, and formally made Peru
a Spanish colony. The Spanish remained in control for the next 300 years.
When independence came in 1821, the Peruvians suddenly realized that they
had to look out for themselves. One of their main problems was how to
make money. Peru wasn't overly blessed with natural resources, but it
did have a lot of birds. And where there are birds there's usually a whole
lot of bird crap.
Guanay cormorant (Phalacrocorax bougainvillii) - photo: Jens
Tobiska [wikipedia]
WHAT
A DUMP!
It's true what they say: birds of a feather really do flock together.
And the area where all discerning South American cormorants love to flock
to is a group of three unimpressive-looking lumps of Pacific rock just
off the coast of Peru called the Chincha Islands. Maybe it's the fishing;
these seabirds just love to hang out en masse there. And what
do cormorants do after they've gorged themselves on the poor, unsuspecting
anchovies that swim in the waters thereabouts? Well, they relieve themselves.
In fact, they've been doing it there for centuries. So, by the early 1800s,
the Chincha Islands were coated in a very deep and very smelly layer of
cormorant crud.
Don't ask who discovered that bird poop, or guano, was an excellent fertilizer,
but it's true that few things will help your roses bloom better than a
good dollop of cormorant droppings. So, starting in the 1840s, citizens
of Peru, under the control of a military strongman called General Castilla,
realized that there was white gold in the hills. And that all that waste
was too good to, well, waste. The general dished out licenses to highest
bidders (or bribers) to "mine" guano. And he set himself and
his cronies up in prime positions to exploit the amazing profits that
were expected from guano sales to the United States and Europe.
CHINESE TAKE-OUT
The only problem was, who in his or her right mind would want to spend
days working on what are possibly the smelliest islands on Earth, knee-deep
in guano, while being dive-bombed by incontinent cormorants? The people
of Peru were poor and desperate, but they weren't that desperate.
The usual solution to this sort of problem is obvious: oppress your local
minority. Castilla tried this, but there just weren't enough natives to
go around. Fortunately, one of the important businessmen controlling the
guano trade, Domingo Elias, knew where he could get his hands on some
really cheap labor: namely, China. The Taiping Rebellion in China was
a civil war that drove hundreds of thousands of Chinese out of the country.
Many were desperate to leave and would go anywhere: the United States
to build the railroads, England to work in sweatshops - or the Chincha
Islands to mine guano. The first coolies (from the Hindi word kuli,
which refers to an unskilled laborer, usually from the Far East, hired
for low or subsistence wages) arrived in 1820. Soon, they were probably
wishing they'd stayed home. They were kept in conditions of near slavery
and were flogged if they didn't meet their quota of two to five tons of
guano - each! - per day. Needless to say, they were paid terrible wages.
The only avenues of escape were suicide or opium, both of which were rife
on the islands.
CLEANING UP THEIR ACTS
Castilla and his bunch of guano gangsters did very well. During the 1850s,
there was so much guano waiting to be shipped out that vessels would commonly
have to wait at the dock for 30 to 80 days to load up. Between 1840 and
1875, the value of Peru's exports rose from 6 million pesos to 32 million
pesos ($43,351 to $231,226). Unfortunately for the rest of Peru, Castillo
and company didn't get around to plowing the profits they made back into
the economy. In fact, on the rare occasions they did, the results were
disastrous. Again using coolie labor, Peru built over 770 miles of railroads
around the country in the 1860s, at a cost much higher than the profits
yielded by the guano trade. In just a few years Peru leaped from last
to first place as the biggest borrower on the London money markets.
OH, POOP!
By the 1860s, new and cheaper forms of fertilizer were being developed.
Guano's big rival was salitre, or nitrate of soda. As most of the salitre
trade was conducted through neighboring Chile, Peru began to lose out.
Then, in 1866, Spain tried to recapture the Chincha Islands from Peru.
Although Peru won that little skirmish, the financial cost of the war
was crippling. In 1879, Peru went to war with Chile in an attempt to wrestle
control of the salitre trade. Peru lost the war in 1881 and was occupied
by Chilean soldiers, who went on an orgy of looting and destruction. The
Golden Age of Guano was well and truly over.
ENOUGH OF THIS POOP
By the time Peru got back on an even keel in the early 1900s, it had
learned not to place all its cormorant eggs in one basket. It diversified
into agriculture, copper mining, oil production - in fact, anything that
didn't involve guano.
And today? Well, those hungry cormorants are still creating one almighty
mess on the Chincha Islands. But fortunately for all involved, there are
no Chinese laborers to clean up after them. |
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.
The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
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Photo: Bettyboop4 [Flickr]
National Geographic Traveler’s Intelligent Travel (and now Neatorama) blogger Marilyn Terrell just came back from a trip to the Yukon Territory in Canada. Naturally, she’s got lots of stories about her adventure, the fascinating ecology of the Yukon and so on and so forth.
But since I’m stuck here in the ‘burbs, my jealous brain wouldn’t allow me to properly process all her stories save this tiny but golden nugget of trivia that will forever be with me till the day I die: Bear poop can be pink.
