Tag: Toilets

Using yellow liquid to flush toilets [Improbable Research]

Improbable Research, as the site says, is research that makes people laugh and then think. “Our goal is to make people laugh, then make them think. We also hope to spur people’s curiosity, and to raise the question: How do you decide what’s important and what’s not, and what’s real and what’s not — in science and everywhere else?”

Consider this one for instance, German research that explores using urine as the main fluid to make flush toilets flush

 the utilization of yellow water as toilet flush liquid seems to be advantageous. To be accepted for this purpose, urine has to be decolorized (and also deodorized).

Conserve water, & save your water bills – watch out for those new products hitting the shelves at a store near you shortly!

Priorities: Toilet? Or Cell Phone? [Article]

Kevin Kelly observed during a trip that the residents of farmsteads in remote China had no running water, electricity or toilets, yet everyone had a cell phone. He offers an explanation: “The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don’t have a toilet because I’ve stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.” Noah Millman shares his take on the topic: