Tertiarymatt

The only place in Leipzig open at 9am is the torture museum LET’S GO 

[X]

You know the drill. DNA holds the source code; RNA carries it to the ribosomes; ribosomes build stuff for the cell. Of course, the details of cellular operation are a million times more intricate than this— some RNA acts not to courier code but to switch genes on and off, for example— but it’s this venerable three-step that puts the tinkertoys together.

Now. If a sufficiently unscrupulous RNA molecule had an agenda at odds with the wishes of Daddy DNA, it could do a fair bit of damage. Change an instruction or two while on the road, enlist some hitchhiking enzyme into provoking a frame-shift or a faux-point-mutation. The nucleus mails off an order for Game of Thrones and the ribosome receives one for Spongebob Squarepants.

The term is RNA editing and it occupies center stage in this recent paper on cephalopod genetics. RNA editing is generally a very rare event. This makes it all the more remarkable that Alon et al report over 57,000 recoding sites for the Longfin Inshore Squid— an order of magnitude higher than reported for any other species. Even cooller, all these hijacked codes seem to be involved in building the nervous system. (“Synaptic vesicle cycle”, “axon guidance”, “actin cytoskeleton”, and “Circadian rhythm” are all processes listed as massively rewritten downstream of the DNA.)

It’s right there in the title: The Majority of Transcripts in the Squid Nervous System are Extensively Recoded. As the authors point out, this necessitates a major rethink of the whole squidly evolutionary process. But there are applications beyond such obvious intrinsic biological interest.

If I was interested in rebuilding a cephalopod to my own ends— perhaps adding organic tasers, or extra eye-sockets repurposed as oceanographic sensors (imagine luciferin fluorescence as an indicator of dissolved O₂, which trigger photopigments in a modified retina, which in turn send that data back to a central nervous system via an extra optic nerve!)—

Well, let’s just say that a squid who comes pre-equipped with its own set of downstream editing enzymes, targeted to major CNS functions, might come in really handy.

(Coming up in Part 2: Selection-resistant genes. What could possibly go wrong?)

Watch as one man tries to see how far he can push Skyrim before everything crumbles into complete chaos.

You've got your typical wacky Skyrim mods here—Thomas the Tank Engine as dragons, Tommy Wiseau horses, Sonic. But it doesn't take long for you to stop being able to track all the mods videogamedunkey activates—the entire game just becomes bananas. It's the best thing I've watched all day. Enjoy.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Most New55 supporters already know of the program's continuing need for time and money.  The Kickstarter funds were crucial to doing so much of the work to establish an industrial capacity for New55 FILM and so other new film-related products could be manufactured in the future. Here are some key areas:

The Receiver Sheet

Like any project with unknown variables, New55 has had its share of false starts, delays, design changes, flops and successes. One big flop was the old receiver sheet coating that was found to be too complex, too environmentally unsound, and too expensive - if made the way Polaroid made it in the past. It was a hard and expensive lesson, and even though it was anticipated that a start-from-scratch situation could occur if that development failed at first, it wasn't planned to go that way. But it did go that way,  and an all-new, water based receiver sheet coating had to be invented. The new receiver has now recently shown to have a reasonable chance of being cost effective and a good performer. The team has its fingers crossed because even though it is a relatively simplified design, it is still new and risky and has never been made before in production quantities.

Coating Development

New55 pays $2000 per hour at the commercial coater to test run and do final runs. It is the sincere hope of the team that the commercial coating will go smoothly and take two to three days to complete. There is no guarantee that will be the case, and you will be among the first to know if there are problems with this important step.  Today the team is trying to solidify the exact date of this coating event and the thought is that it is only a couple of weeks away.

Sleeve Assembly, and Cost Opportunities

In other areas, decent progress continues to be made. The sleeve assembly has undergone substantial changes so it may, one day, be produced on high speed machinery at a lower cost.  Everyone familiar with the project realizes that at first, the product will be very expensive to produce and that by iteration supported by sales the manufacturing costs should decrease over time. One nice thing about this improved sleeve is that it looks more like the "readyload" system and therefore could be used to make a single sheet reloaded 4x5 convenience product, if there is support for it.

The Pod

Another lagging item is the pod machine. This is owned by 20X24 and we are grateful it is in the building, but work to reconfigure it to make the right pods for New55 has lagged and is now also behind schedule.  Work is being done to try to catch up and although it is an unanticipated expense, various supplemental fundraising ideas and initiatives are being pursued to support that and the other things that still need to be done.

The Clip

If you recall there was quite a lot of talk about the clip in the past.  The design team took a chance with a very much improved clip made of stainless steel rather than just copy the soft steel that was used in the past. It turned out to be a good decision - the clip works well and has been so trouble free it now gets taken for granted. The initial cost per clip is 25 cents which is high. Working toward a less expensive clip is a future task.

The Shop, and Administration

It takes a lot of coordination and organization to set up an online store and a fulfillment system. New55 can't just "ship out" boxes of anything as that would be very expensive to do. A fulfillment center that happens to be run by an ex-Polaroid person will act as warehouse and order taker assuming there is a product.  We must have this system and the accounting and manufacturing planning resources in place for production. These areas tend to be out of the sight and comprehension of consumers.  To date, the shop has one item, a T shirt (in various sizes) and has sold about $3000 worth. This helps the team learn how to run the shop and the fulfillment center with something less critical than film, and makes a small but very important amount of additional cash available for the rest of the project. The response to the T shirt is so good that there is an eagerness to put up several of the supporter-suggested products like the "readyload" and monobath to help raise more funds. Watch for these items in the store.

Four Channels

New55 has four important information channels that include the Kickstarter list, this blog, the Facebook page, and the mailing list. Many people who supported the Kickstarter do not use Facebook, so they need to have regular updates. Many new people have come into New55 through Facebook but never look at the blog or Facebook. Then there are those who signed up to the mailing list.  There is also a minor presence on Twitter and a growing one on Instagram.  With all these channels it is sometimes hard to get the word out consistently, so we ask you to help chime in to assist those with questions and continue to share in the overall effort.

Summary

New55 FILM is late and the cost over run has been discussed and also the possibility that work could be slowed or stopped if the money runs out.  That lead to various fundraising ideas and a push for fundraise-friendly products. Meanwhile important progress has been made and results look good. There is still risk and the team is working diligently on all aspects of the mission of creating a new industrial capacity for the manufacture of an instant film product.

Grantville, a small city in Georgia where a few episodes of AMC‘s hit television series The Walking Dead were filmed, has recently gone up for sale on eBay. According to the listing posted by eBay user k9chabe, “three movies just signed up to film in Grantville that two very well known actors will be staring in the roles.” The historic city is currently listed at $680,000. Unfortunately, it is local pick-up only.

This is an opportunity for someone to own a piece of history. The City of Grantville is a vibrant community just south of Newnan Georgia. This downtown area is always being scouted by the movie industries and has been home to several block busters as well as TV shows like The Walking Dead who have filmed several episodes in the downtown area. This is a money maker for anyone trying to invest in an area that’s about to burst. The downtown area has several tenants occupying a good of the 45% percent of the area for sale, so instant revenue. The area for sale is approximately 34,000 Square feet of usable space. This includes 9 Buildings which include: Retail areas, Loft Apartments, Pizza Restaurant, Bar or Pub, Restaurant, Pharmacy, Office space and many other combinations.

photos via eBay

via Messy Nessy Chic

We’re going to be rolling out an exciting new program in The Old Reader over the next few weeks.  As you know, The Old Reader has been entirely Ad free since it’s inception and we’ve been vocal about doing our best to protect our users from excessive online advertising.  Our Premium accounts have been very successful, but we’re frankly still not where we need to be in terms of revenues in order to fund planned development and continue innovating this service.  We have a small, dedicated, and talented team but our vision for The Old Reader is ambitious.

So we’re taking a cue from some publishers that we really admire (such as Daring Fireball) and introducing Sponsored Content.  Premium users will never see sponsored content, but all other users will see up to 1 sponsored post per week in their RSS feeds.  That’s it.  It’s an exclusive program and we believe we’ll be able to make the program beneficial to both users and sponsors.

We’re also adding weekly site sponsors that would get a banner placement on the web interface.  It’ll be an exclusive program and we’ll only accept sponsors that we believe are relevant and inoffensive.  We will under no circumstances use any techniques such as tracking cookies or harvesting user data to advertise to our users.  And again, premium users will never see any sponsored content.

We know some of you might have concerns and we’re happy to field any questions that you might have.  If you are interested in signing up for the sponsor program, please visit out sponsorship page.

FORT WORTH — Gabe Brown is in such demand as a speaker that for every invitation he accepts, he turns down 10 more. At conferences, like the one held here at a Best Western hotel recently, people line up to seek his advice.

“The greatest roadblock to solving a problem is the human mind,” he tells audiences.

Mr. Brown, a balding North Dakota farmer who favors baseball caps and red-striped polo shirts, is not talking about disruptive technology start-ups, political causes, or the latest self-help fad.

He is talking about farming, specifically soil-conservation farming, a movement that promotes leaving fields untilled, “green manures” and other soil-enhancing methods with an almost evangelistic fervor.

Such farming methods, which mimic the biology of virgin land, can revive degenerated earth, minimize erosion, encourage plant growth and increase farmers’ profits, their proponents say. And by using them, Mr. Brown told more than 250 farmers and ranchers who gathered at the hotel for the first Southern Soil Health Conference, he has produced crops that thrive on his 5,000-acre farm outside of Bismarck, N.D., even during droughts or flooding.

Photo

He no longer needs to use nitrogen fertilizer or fungicide, he said, and he produces yields that are above the county average with less labor and lower costs. “Nature can heal if we give her the chance,” Mr. Brown said.

Neatly tilled fields have long been a hallmark of American agriculture and its farmers, by and large traditionalists who often distrust practices that diverge from time-honored methods.

But soil-conservation farming is gaining converts as growers increasingly face extreme weather, high production costs, a shortage of labor and the threat of government regulation of agricultural pollution.

Farmers like Mr. Brown travel the country telling their stories, and organizations like No-Till on the Plains — a Kansas-based nonprofit devoted to educating growers about “agricultural production systems that model nature” — attract thousands.

“It’s a massive paradigm shift,” said Ray Archuleta, an agronomist at the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the federal Agriculture Department, which endorses the soil-conservation approach.

Government surveys suggest that the use of no-tillage farming has grown sharply over the last decade, accounting for about 35 percent of cropland in the United States.

For some crops, no-tillage acreage has nearly doubled in the last 15 years. For soybeans, for example, it rose to 30 million acres in 2012 from 16.5 million acres in 1996. The planting of cover crops — legumes and other species that are rotated with cash crops to blanket the soil year-round and act as green manure — has also risen in acreage about 30 percent a year, according to surveys, though the total remains small.

Farmers till the land to ready it for sowing and to churn weeds and crop residue back into the earth. Tilling also helps mix in fertilizers and manure and loosens the top layer of the soil.

But repeated plowing exacts a price. It degrades soil, killing off its biology, including beneficial fungi and earthworms, and leaving it, as Mr. Archuleta puts it, “naked, thirsty, hungry and running a fever.”

Degraded soil requires heavy applications of synthetic fertilizer to produce high yields. And because its structure has broken down, the soil washes away easily in heavy rain, taking nitrogen and other pollutants with it into rivers and streams.

Soil health proponents say that by leaving fields unplowed and using cover crops, which act as sinks for nitrogen and other nutrients, growers can increase the amount of organic matter in their soil, making it better able to absorb and retain water.

Photo

“Each 1 percent increase in soil organic matter helps soil hold 20,000 gallons more water per acre,” said Claire O’Connor, a staff lawyer and agriculture specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In turn, more absorbent soil is less vulnerable to runoff and more resistant to droughts and floods. Cover crops also help suppress weeds. Environmental groups like the Defense Council have long been fans of soil-conservation techniques because they help protect waterways and increase the ability of soil to store carbon dioxide, rather than releasing it into the air, where it contributes to climate change.

One recent study led by the Environmental Defense Fund suggested that the widespread use of cover crops and other soil-health practices could reduce nitrogen pollution in the Upper Mississippi and Ohio River basins by 30 percent, helping to shrink the giant “dead zone” of oxygen-depleted water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Defense Council, Ms. O’Connor said, has proposed that the government offer a “good driver” discount on federal crop insurance for growers who incorporate the practices.

But the movement also has critics, who argue that no-tillage and other methods are impractical and too expensive for many growers. A farmer who wants to shift to no-tillage, for example, must purchase new equipment, like a no-till seeder.

Tony J. Vyn, a professor of agronomy at Purdue, said the reasons growers cite for preferring to fully till their fields vary depending on geography, the types of crops they grow and the conditions of their soil. But they include the perception that weed control is harder using no-tillage; that the method, which reduces water evaporation, places limits on how early in the year crops can be planted; and that the residue left by no-tilling is too difficult to deal with, especially when corn is the primary cash crop.

Even farmers who enthusiastically adopt no-till and other soil-conservation methods rarely do so for environmental reasons; their motivation is more pragmatic.

“My goal is to improve my soil so I can grow a better crop so I can make more money,” said Terry McAlister, who farms 6,000 acres of drought-stricken cropland in North Texas. “If I can help the environment in the process, fine, but that’s not my goal.”

For years, Mr. McAlister plowed his fields, working with his father, who began farming outside the town of Electra in the 1950s. But he began having doubts about the effects of constant tilling on the soil.

“We were farming cotton like the West Texas guys were, just plow, plow, plow,” he said. “And if you got a rain, it just washed it and eroded it.

“It made me sick,” he said. “You’re asking yourself, ‘Is there not a better way?’ But at the time, we didn’t know.”

Mr. McAlister said that he switched to no-tillage in 2005, when an agricultural economist calculated that the method offered a $15-per-acre advantage over full tilling.

Photo

Now he is a convert. Standing in a field of winter wheat, he pointed proudly at the thick blanket of stubble sprinkled with decaying radishes and turnips.

“One of the toughest things about learning to do no-till is having to unlearn all the things that you thought were true,” he said.

Mr. McAlister grows cotton, wheat, hay, grain sorghum and some canola as cash crops, using a GPS-guided no-till seeder that drills through residue, allowing him to plant precisely and effectively.

He credits no-tillage for one of his biggest wheat crops, in 2012, when extreme drought left farmers throughout the region struggling to salvage any harvest. His healthier soil, he believes, made better use of the tiny amount of rain that fell than did the fully tilled fields of other farmers.

But few growers go as far as Mr. Brown in North Dakota, who produces grass-fed beef and has given up most agricultural chemicals. Mr. McAlister, for example, still uses nitrogen fertilizer. He plants seeds that are genetically modified for drought or herbicide resistance. And he depends on herbicides like Roundup to kill off his cover crops before sowing the crops he grows for cash.

The philanthropist Howard G. Buffett, a proponent of soil-conservation practices, said that the drought and flooding that have plagued much of the country in recent years have drawn more farmers to no-till.

“When you get into a drought, that gets everybody’s attention,” said Mr. Buffett, the middle son of Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor. “Farmers don’t really change their behavior until they see that they have to, which is pretty much human nature.”

The Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake Bay under the Clean Water Act in 2010, Mr. Buffett said, should also be “a wake-up call that the E.P.A. is coming soon” and if farmers do not address fertilizer runoff, the government will do it for them.

Still, he said, reaping the benefits of no-tillage farming demands patience, given that it may take several years for deadened soil to recover. Some farmers try no-tilling for one season and then get discouraged. And there is no one-size-fits-all solution: Farmers must adapt what they have learned to their own land and crops.

Mr. McAlister and other no-till farmers said that perhaps the biggest barrier to the spread of no-till is the mind-set that farmers must do things the same way as earlier generations did them.

“We have a saying in our area: ‘You can’t no-till because you haven’t buried your father yet,’” Mr. McAlister said.

“You can’t take on an endeavor like this with someone leaning over your shoulder every day telling you you’re wrong and it’s not going to work,” he said.

That your government will spy on you should, sadly (by now) come as no surprise. But, some of the ways they go about it still trigger disbelief. The Intercept claims to have received documents outlining methods the CIA has considered to access data o...

dailydot:

A Jihadist extremist told this female Lebanese news anchor to shut up, so she cut off his microphone.

Karaki was interviewing Hani Al-Seba’i about the phenomenon of Christians joining Islamic groups like ISIS. Al-Seba’i is a Sunni scholar who fled to London after he was sentenced in an Egyptian court to 15 years in prison for being a part of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The United Nations considers the group to be an affiliate of al Qaeda.

But despite Al-Seba’i’s extreme ties, Karaki didn’t back down when he disrespected her on Al-Jadeed TV after she politely tried to redirect his historical tangent. Instead of taking his guff, she cut off his microphone when she decided she’d had enough.

10u ABV over blue. Rough, but perfectly sealed.

20+u of Image over gloss. Remains smooth, but too thick so it will crack

2+u of release layer over Image. Look at how smooth the top is. This thickness did not interfere with image color or density formation.

2u Release layer. Like a ruler.

This week's Three Layer Mix over blue. Hills and bumps like a cheap hotel room ceiling. Dmax inside the valleys is perfect. Almost no Image remains on the tops of the hills.

The white spots are just the hilltops and the polluted Dmins are reagent puddles.

1966 T47 uncoated area. Image is 1-2u thick and the colloids can be seen too. Brown area is hydrogen sulfide affected lead acetate nucleant degradation where I missed with the print coater.

GreyBack from Polaroid. Looks familiar.

Those who have been following know that the actual amount we got from Kickstarter was reduced from the "pledge" of $415,025 - caused by failed payments, and fees - to $365,256.

1. Beginning Cash. Kickstarter yielded $365,256. 
2. We also put in $2000 to open the bank account, and then people donated $858 through paypal.
3. The starting amount was $368,114.

In early May we opened the New55 checking account with $2000 to cover expenses needed right then, and by May 29 the Kickstarter proceeds were finally in the account, referred to as "beginning cash". We also got some donations totaling $858 at that time. Together, these have been applied to fund the development of New55 and the industrial capacity to manufacture a product, according to the descriptions and risks on Kickstarter.

Spending

1. These are the things we spent money on
2. Each category is a summary of what was spent in that area
3. We might adjust these numbers as we go through the end of year accounting.

Nine different expense (spending) categories are listed here. The word "expense" means money spent. We have records of spending that occupies many pages, so this is just a summary according to the main categories.

Rent, Heat and Lights.  New55 occupies substantial dedicated assembly and lab areas, and shared office space, and pays a portion of the rent and utilities at 72 Nickerson Rd. in Ashland, MA. The charge New55 pays is allocated on a square footage basis.

Payroll is what New55 reimbursed, at cost, the hired hourly help. To save time and money, New55 used the existing system at Soundwave Research  (Soundwave Research started New55 several years ago and funded the initial R&D, and other things) which provides administrative, insurance, regulatory, bookkeeping, payroll services, accounting and other things that New55 did not have to go out and find separately.

Equipment consists of machines, tools, tooling (including hard tooling at a vendor location), test equipment, and lab equipment. The sleeve machine, coaters, big microscope, ovens and dies come to mind, and there are others.

Materials are films, papers, emulsions, metals, formed metals, chemicals, reagents, substrates, tapes, adhesives, labels, boxes and more.

R&D is the charge for services from Soundwave Research that are not on payroll, but take professional time, software, or equipment not owned by New55.  For instance, New55 gets full access to CAD such as Solidworks, and Quickbooks Manufacturing as well as other engineering tools used to perform product development and create bills of materials, component drawings, process charts, and necessary manufacturing documentation.  If New55 had to get these by itself it would have been very costly and time consuming.

Shipping and freight is what was spent on UPS, postage, overland freight, TNT international, and other charges relating to getting materials, supplies and machines shipped.

Marketing relates to websites, promotions, email support lists, logo designs, etc.

Travel is mainly airfare and hotels, and fuel and mileage. Both US and international travel was done to obtain services and key materials for the project.

Miscellaneous consists of things that are not in another category.

Total spending is the sum of the above. The total, and this report, is unaudited, which means that adjustments might still be made, additional bills could still come in, and checks for errors are still to be done.

Remaining Cash as of January 6, 2015

Remaining cash is what was in the bank on January 6.

It is apparent that we will need to raise additional cash. 

1. Most of the biggest expenses have been made, and we believe we are close to being able to begin scale up of the New55 product.
2. The project is very near its biggest ramp up event which is to run actual receiver sheet in a large coating facility, and we believe we have the budget already in place to cover that.
3. We have not yet achieved "first lot to stock" which is the formal placing of completed product into a stock location.
4. In addition, we are readying "the store" so we can sell accessories and other items to raise more cash and fund operations.
5. Remaining cash on January 6, 2015 is $111,575, subject to tax.

New55 Holdings, LLC

Red Robot is having battery life problems lately.

February, 24th

The US leads the world in incarceration, but most of its prisoners are in state prison. And a majority of state prisoners are serving sentences for violent crimes. That means that while states have made some progress in recent years in reducing their prison populations, it's going to be extremely difficult for that trend to continue indefinitely.

This infographic, from the Marshall Project, shows how hard it is to reduce the prison population substantially just by targeting nonviolent, low-level offenders:

In September, Vox offered a few reasons why recent criminal-justice reforms haven't made that much of a dent in the prison population. One reason is that they often targeted people who weren't going to prison to begin with, rather than tackling the question of what to do with violent offenders.

The good news is that lawmakers don't have to stop putting violent offenders in prison to reduce the incarceration rate substantially. They just have to stop putting them in prison for quite so long:

Experts say there should be reforms that let violent offenders, particularly those who are older and committed their crime decades ago, out early. The research indicates that people age out of crime, so letting them out of prison 10 or 20 years down the line might not pose a significant threat to public safety.

"While those people have committed serious crimes, in many respects their incarceration is often excessive," says Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project. "The person locked up on armed robbery at 19 is not necessarily the same person when he turns 30 or 40."

To accomplish this, Mauer says state lawmakers would need to establish policies that make it so just about everyone — no matter what crime they were convicted of — can get parole or reduced sentences, through good behavior and evidence of rehabilitation. Policymakers could also take additional actions that relax or eliminate three-strike laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and other policies passed over the past three decades that force criminals to serve extremely long sentences.

This would present a dramatic shift in recent policy trends. According to the Sentencing Project, about one in nine US prisoners are currently serving a life sentence, and that rate has climbed over the past few decades. "Increasingly, those prison terms have overwhelmed any reductions we see on the lower levels of the scale," Mauer says.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have a few different ways of measuring obesity in the U.S., including phone surveys, in-home interviews, and physical exams of nationally representative slices of the population.

None of these methods involve poop.

It’s an unsurprising fact, probably, but one that bears noting only because some scientists believe it may soon change—or at least, that it should. In a study recently published in the journal mBio, researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, laid out the case for sewage as a public-health tool, arguing that human waste may be a more efficient way of measuring obesity at the population level.

To prove their concept, the authors examined more than 200 sewage samples taken from treatment plants in 71 U.S. cities, using genetic sequencing to identify which bacteria in the mix came from human feces (an average of around 15 percent across the samples). A city, like each of its individual inhabitants, has its own unique microbial signature that tends to stay constant over time; by looking at the bacterial makeup of a city’s sewage, the researchers found, they were able to predict its obesity rate at a accuracy rate between 81 and 89 percent.

“This is a way to generate information about the public without infringing on any individual’s privacy,” says A. Murat Eren, one of the study’s co-authors and a researcher at the Marine Biological Lab. “In a natural way, we access the microbiome of a given community.”

The mBio study is one of a handful of projects in recent months that have mined a city’s waste for information about the bodies that created it. If the old journalism cliché—three examples equals a trend—holds any truth, then it’s probably fair to say that sewage is having something of a moment. In January, The Boston Globe highlighted the joint effort of the Cambridge Public Health Department and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to take a “sewage snapshot” of the city, a test case for the MIT team’s larger goal of analyzing waste for population-level information on illegal drug use, diet, and the prevalence of certain bacterial and viral diseases. And in November, The New York Times profiled Jane Carlton, a New York University geneticist collecting sewage from each of New York’s neighborhoods to “create a genetic map [that] highlight[s] the city’s microbial diversity across different districts.”

“It’s a preventative public-health question. We need to know the baseline to know how the baseline changes,” Carlton told the Times. Eren makes a similar argument: “By looking at the changes in microbial composition, we can come out with some early warning signals” about how a community’s health may be changing over time, he says. In discovering what normal sewage looks like, researchers can understand when and why it strays from the norm.

In some ways, the sewer-as-lab is a more community-minded extension of people’s growing fascination with what their own waste can do. Companies like uBiome have customers send in stool samples for an in-depth analysis of their microbiomes; fecal transplants are catching on as a viable treatment option for certain gastrointestinal conditions. Here, now, is the democratization of waste research, a chance for each of us to make our own contributions to science (ideally at least once every three days, doctors say). In fact, the average person will flush around 360 pounds of science per year.

“There are traces of all of us in the sewers—and those will tell a different, more collective story,” a member of the MIT team told the Globe. Or, put another way: It’s a scientist’s world, and we’re all just pooping in it.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the-secrets-in-sewage/386794/

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

making toast is an intimate act