feces

We believed that tons of feces were the big problem with the touristification of Everest. Until the scam rescue arrived

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Everest may be the roof of the world, but it has long ceased to be the remote and isolated place they found themselves seven decades ago. Edmund Hollary and Tenzing Norgaythe first to summit its icy summit. The best proof was left to us just before the pandemic by Nirmal Purja, the author of one of the most famous (and striking) snapshots of the mountain: in it we see a very long row with dozens and dozens of tourists climbing in single file towards the summit, just as if they were queuing to enter the Louvre or board a cruise ship. That Everest has become a monster touristified It’s no surprise. What is curious is that there are people (presumably) breaking the laws to take advantage of that demand and defraud the insurers. A huge theme park. One would expect the highest place on the planet to be an inhospitable place, reserved for the most intrepid locals and adventurers. Perhaps it was like this in the 1950s, when Hollary and Norgay ascended to more than 8,800 meters of altitude to reach its summit. Not today. The photography that Purja took in 2019 is just the graphic verification of a phenomenon that can be measured in figures… and even in feces: Everest is a tourist icon that they visit every year hundreds and hundreds of climbers, leaving behind millions of dollars and a trail of tons of waste. You will find more infographics at Statista Where there is tourism… There is business, of course. That universal truth is applicable both in Amsterdam, Florence either Barcelona such as in the remote Himalayas, which over the last few decades has seen a thriving industry take shape dedicated to serving those who visit Everest. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTC), in 2023 alone Nepal’s tourism sector generated revenue worth about 2.5 billion of dollars and boosted hundreds of thousands of jobs, both direct and indirect. Even Nepal has considered shoot 40% the fees he charges mountaineers, a source of income that among other things helps him clean the region. Where is the problem? Beyond the environmental impact that this overcrowding has in the mountain range, there is actually no problem in travel agencies, Sherpas, transportation companies, hotels and other businesses oriented to Nepalese tourism trying to make money. Climbing Everest doesn’t come cheap, but at the end of the day, whoever wants to pay for it. The problem is that not all of these professionals respect the law when looking for ways to make money. What’s more, there are those who have no qualms about cheatfalsify and commit millionaire frauds. Mountaineering and picaresque. The news I advanced it a few days ago The Kathmandu Postone of the largest English-language newspapers in Nepal. The Central Investigation Bureau of the Nepalese Police (CIB) has revealed a network dedicated to deceiving insurers who cover mountaineers in the Himalayas. Their modus operandi may vary, but the idea is always the same: alleged scammers make fraudulent ransoms to claim compensation. It may sound rudimentary, but the scam takes advantage of two circumstances that work in its favor. First, in rescue operations speed prevails, so there is no room to wait for the approval of the experts. Second, deceived insurers are often based thousands of kilometers away (in London or Paris), making it difficult for them to confirm what is happening on the ground. One goal, two methods. How do you prepare the scam? The CIB has identified two methods. The first is quite simple and requires the tourist to participate in the deception. If a climber is exhausted after days (or even weeks) of hiking and wants to save the trip back to camp, his guide can offer him a way out that is as comfortable as it is ethically questionable: faking an illness so that the insurance company can mobilize a rescue operation. The second method is a little more complicated, but the end result is the same. The guides or accommodations take advantage of the client’s ignorance to make them believe that the symptoms of altitude sickness (which are usually resolved with rest, hydration and a gradual descent) are actually signs that they are at serious risk, even of death. The key is to suggest the hiker enough so that he ends up asking to be evacuated by a charter helicopter. And where is the business? In the cost of the operation. It is not just that the company that provides that service charges the insurer for a helicopter that was not really necessary, it is that, precise The Kathmandu Postoften manages to expand its profit margin. As? It carries several passengers on the same flight and then sends separate invoices to their insurance companies. In practice that means that a single $4,000 charter flight can end up giving rise to three separate claims worth $12,000. Added to this are alleged treatments in the hospital, even when the client in question did not need assistance. For example, the Nepalese newspaper talks about cases in which treatment is claimed for hikers who were actually in the cafeteria. Not all people who are involved in this mess have to participate in the deception. He post speaks of falsifications of flight manifests or reports with digital signatures of completely unrelated doctors. One figure: 20 million dollars. At the end of March the CIB accused 32 people for this type of crimes, which according to the AFP agency amounted to a total scam 19.69 million of dollars. It may seem like a lot, but the figures revealed by the CIB investigation are eloquent: between 2022 and 2025, it identified 4,782 foreign patients treated in the investigated hospitals. Of these, inspectors believe that 171 corresponded to simulated evacuations. During that period some health centers received deposits worth millions of dollars related to those services. The older ones are the helicopters. Poisoning? The CIB investigation has attracted the attention of the media everyonealthough their headlines often focus on another … Read more

We thought that the superpower of whales was their size. It’s actually the complex chemistry of your feces.

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When we think about the baleen whaleswe usually imagine giant animals that sail the seas and feed on huge schools of fish, without much relevance to us as humans. However, they have been more important than we can think, being crucial when it comes to talking about the survival of our marine ecosystems. And all thanks to their excrement. What we knew. For years science has known that whale feces acted as a natural fertilizer top level. Now, a new study has brought to light the sophisticated chemical mechanism behind this ‘floating gold’. To understand its great importance, we must look at the base of the marine food chain that is in the phytoplankton. These are nothing more than microscopic algae that have the function of being the lungs of the ocean and the basis of marine life. The ‘problem’ is that to thrive they need iron, since without this mineral these algae cannot grow and could spell the end of all marine life. The feces. This is where enter the classic and revealing study led by Stephen Nicol in 2010, where something astonishing was quantified: the fecal iron measured in the whales was about ten million times higher than that of the Antarctic water that surrounded them. This was important because the whales functioned as a “biological bomb,” recycling and releasing about 50 tons of iron a year into surface waters before industrial hunting depleted their populations. But we were seeing that adding iron to the sea was not enough, since it tends to sink or become inaccessible quickly. So we were asking ourselves a logical question: how is this whale fertilizer made so effective? We already know it. The answer has recently come thanks to research published in Nature which shows how a team analyzed five fecal samples from baleen whales. Here they were able to discover that the secret of being such a good marine ‘fertilizer’ is not in the amount of metals they excrete, but in how they package it, since the feces contain high concentrations of what are known in chemistry as organic ligands. Its function. We can find that it is twofold, the first being the enhancement of the bioavailability of iron. This means it acts like molecular ‘tweezers’ that trap dissolved iron, preventing it from precipitating to the sea floor and keeping it in a format that phytoplankton can easily absorb. But in addition to this, it neutralizes the copper that is present in the ocean and that in high concentrations is lethal for this phytoplankton. In this way, the ligands present in whale feces bind to copper, drastically reducing its toxicity and creating a safe environment for algae growth. Its importance. In addition to being a very curious fact, the reality is that this discovery has changed our understanding of the biogeochemistry of the ocean. And, although we think that whales are not only consumers at the top of the food chain, the reality is that they are gardeners of the sea, since they fertilize the surface waters and protect the phytoplankton that is essential for the rest of the animals that live in the ocean. But these blooms not only feed the entire marine ecosystem, they also capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to mitigate climate change. In this way, whale feces help their environment, but also us indirectly. Images | Todd Cravens Annie Spratt In Xataka | China is making an “invisible ocean” of the planet: when it’s done, it will steal the last advantage the US had left

we will not have to resort to our feces to grow plants

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In The Martianthe character played by Matt Damon was forced to use his own feces to grow potatoes in the inhospitable Martian soil. The dust lacking nutrients prevents any plant from growing on it. That’s why he had to desperately obtain nutrients. In the future the story could try to replicate itself, but a team of German scientists has found a somewhat more elegant way to grow crops in the soil of Mars: using cyanobacteria as fertilizer. A lifeless soil. The dust that covers the Martian soil, known as regolith, it is rich in mineralsbut it lacks the organic nutrients necessary for plants to grow on it. Therefore, if in the future an attempt was made to grow plants on Mars, it would be impossible. The rest of the planet doesn’t help either.. Soil is not the only limiting factor for growing plants on Mars. The extreme temperatures, which can reach 60ºC, and the atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide are not great incentives either. On the other hand, there is the lack of liquid water and cosmic radiation seriously endangers any known form of life. The win win of agriculture. Growing food on Mars would be very advantageous for obvious reasons, such as feeding astronauts, but also because plants generate oxygen through photosynthesis. Considering how unbreathable the Martian atmosphere is, this would be very advantageous. The problem is that, to do so, it is not enough to use feces in the purest style of The Martian. The enemy is on the ground. Martian regolith is known to be covered in perchloratestoxic salts that hinder plant growth at many levels. For example, they prevent germination and alter the metabolism of plants. Fortunately, it has been detected that there are specific points on the planet where the wind has caused the accumulation of gypsum, displacing perchlorates. Since there are plants that benefit from gypsum as a substrate, you could try growing them in those spots. The problem is that this solution greatly reduces the growing locations and plants that can be chosen. A peculiar pantry. Many scientists have been researching for years ways to improve the diet of future space colonizers. If it cannot be grown directly in the ground, it will have to be done in the warehouses themselves. For example, already in 2015 lettuce was grown on the International Space Station. Much more recent is the cultivation of tomatoes on the Chinese space station Tiangong. In this case, has been achieved done in the air thanks to a technology that sprays water and nutrients in the form of mist to directly feed the roots of the plants. And if it’s complicated with plants, you can always resort to crickets. It is one of the bets for the future of the European Space Agency. Cyanobacteria to the rescue. Cyanobacteria are capable of using the carbon dioxide so abundant in the Martian atmosphere to generate oxygen in a process in which nutrients can also be extracted from the mineral-rich dust of the Martian soil. For this reason, a team of scientists from the University of Bremen has tried using them as fertilizer. To do this, once the cyanobacteria have been cultured, have resorted to anaerobic fermentation. This is carried out by inoculating bacteria that metabolize cyanobacterial biomass in the absence of oxygen. They are capable of growing in high concentrations of perchlorates and in the fermentation process they release very beneficial nutrients for plants, such as ammonium. In laboratory tests, in which this fertilizer was used to grow lentils, 27 grams of lentils were obtained from a single gram of cyanobacteria processed through fermentation. By the way, a little fuel. In the fermentation process, methane is also released, which can be used as fuel. These are all advantages for a future colonization of Mars. It’s not over yet. With this type of fertilizers, some of the barriers that prevent farming on Mars would fall. However, it should be noted that the study was carried out with a simulator of the Martian regolith, but without simulating the external conditions of the red planet. That is, neither extreme temperatures, low gravity nor cosmic radiation were taken into account. In the future it is hoped to test these cyanobacterial fertilizers again in a much better simulated environment. It is a necessary step so that there will truly come a day when food can be grown on Mars. Image | The Martian In Xataka |Interview with the author of The Martian: a story more of science than fiction

Before the Incas, a civilization created an impregnable empire in the heights of Peru. His secret: feces

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The coastal desert of southern Peru is one of the most arid environments on the planet, but this was not an impediment for a civilization that was able to prosper here with more than 100,000 people and before the arrival of the Inca empire. Their secret here was seabird guano, and science has now just demonstrated to what extent bird dung was the real economic and demographic driver. of the Chincha Kingdom. The feeding problem. During the Late Intermediate Period, approximately 1000 to 1400 AD, the Chincha Valley became a pre-Inca superpower. But to sustain its growth and maintain some 30,000 workers, it was logically necessary to produce food on a large scale, and more specifically corn, which was the basis of their diet. The problem is that the Peruvian coast is not exactly the most fertile place in the world, so the population faced a serious food problem. But here the solution was to look at the sea and the islands full of guano birds, and more specifically towards their feces and their ability to fertilize. Something that made them begin to prosper and become very strong in the region. The confirmation. To confirm this theory, a scientific team analyzed stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur in 35 ancient corn cobs and 11 seabirds found in tombs in the Chincha Valley. Here it was possible to see how clearly plants that absorb nutrients from fertilizers derived from marine animals show a very specific chemical signature with high levels of nitrogen 15. The results. Here the conservative limit to determine the use of guano in the experiments was located at a value of +20%, but in Chincha corn the average values ​​were +19.4%, reaching peaks of up to +27.4%. Thanks to radiocarbon dating, scientists have been able to place the beginning of this large-scale agricultural practice around the year 1250 AD.a date that coincides millimeters with the rise and expansion of the Chincha Kingdom. What we knew. Modern chemistry only confirms what archeology and history already hinted to us, since the iconography of the time is full of references to this agronomic practice. In textiles, friezes and ceramics of the Chincha culture, corn appears constantly represented alongside guano-producing birds, such as the guanay cormorant, the Peruvian booby and the pelican. Even Spanish colonial chroniclers, such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, recorded this practice when describing how the indigenous people applied the guano to corn through irrigation systems and they documented the strict taboo laws later imposed by the Incas to protect these birds that for them were the focus of fertilization of their fields. This is why killing a guano bird or disturbing its nests was a crime punishable by death. A great revolution. The mastery of guano technology not only filled the stomachs of the Chincha, but made them a key player in Andean geopolitics. In this way, when the Inca empire began its expansion, they did not conquer the Chincha because of their great strength, and instead they formed a strategic alliance. The Chincha here had control of the precious fertilizer and dominated the maritime trade routes, exchanging the guano for luxury goods such as prized shells. Spondylus. This agricultural base allowed the Chincha Kingdom to negotiate its integration into the Inca empire from a position of power and privilege. Images | Ames Wainscoat In Xataka | Prehistory was also ‘woke’: a woman from 7,000 years ago suggests that gender was not an immovable barrier

they used feces as medicine

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The Roman Empire built an impressive sewage network and multiple public buildings for hygiene such as baths and latrines. However, we know that they lived in high fecal contamination conditions and that Rome, despite the efforts of the Romans, it didn’t smell good. Because well, it is one thing to have an advanced infrastructure and another to have bacteriological understanding. In fact, texts by classical authors such as the naturalist Pliny the Elder speak clearly about using excrement to cure diseases. However, there was no evidence that these fecal remedies were actually applied because ancient medicine was partly a hodgepodge of theoretical formulas that did not always reach the patient. Until now: a chemical analysis of a medicine bottle from Roman times published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports confirms it: the Romans thought that excrement was medicinal. A “perfume” bottle with remains. Archeology professor at the University of Cumhuriyet (Turkey) Cenker Atila was working in the warehouses of the Pergamon Museum when he noticed that several glass jars from the 2nd century AD still contained a crust of residue, so he set out to find out what was there. After selecting a candelabra-shaped one called an unguentarium normally intended for storing perfume or makeup, Atila and his research team carefully scraped the residue and passed it through a gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometrywhich is used to analyze and quantify traces of compounds within complex mixtures with a high degree of effectiveness. What the analysis discovered. The GC-MS results returned compounds such as coprostanol and 24-ethylcoprostanol, which are biomarkers produced solely and exclusively from human and animal digestion. This finding constitutes the first direct chemical evidence that the Romans used feces for therapeutic purposes. It must also be taken into account that the bottle comes from Bergama (the ancient Pergamon), the birthplace of Galenthe physician par excellence of the Roman Empire. The famous surgeon lived there between 129 and 216 AD. C., a period that fits with the dating of the bottle. And wouldn’t that ointment smell bad? The results also showed the presence of carvacrol, which is the characteristic aromatic compound of thyme. The research team proposes that Roman doctors mixed feces with herbs with an intense aroma, such as the aforementioned thyme or oregano, to mask the smell, something that makes the treatment more bearable. It’s not that strange. Beyond the joke of imagining someone spraying themselves with feces, the reality is that excrement is currently used for healing, (in a way) in the form of fecal microbiota transplants for serious intestinal infections such as Clostridioides difficile. In this, Roman doctors were ahead of their time. In Xataka | Rome defeated Hannibal and Viriatus, but its soldiers fell to something much more mundane: diarrhea In Xataka | Depositions, excrements and other garbage: a very brief fecal history of the challenges (social and health) that remain to be resolved Cover | Clayton Majona and Heinz Schneider

They became millionaires searching for dinosaur feces

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Finding gold, diamonds or oil has been the origin of many of the greatest fortunes in history. A stroke of luck or investing in excavations in the right area and at the right time were the key to amassing an enormous fortune. However, sometimes that fortune comes with much less “glamorous” finds. In the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 19th century, coming across the remains of a dinosaur was very striking. But encounter his feces could become a lucrative business made many millionaires lucky. There’s a new gold: dinosaur dung At the beginning of the 19th century, the famous fossil hunter Mary Anning He came across some strange dark and irregularly shaped nodules on the coast of Dorset, a county in the south of England. The paleontologist studied these strange fossilized remains and discovered that they were full of fish scales and small fragmented bones trapped in their structure. That intrigued experts who began studying them in more detail. In 1829, the geologist William Buckland examined them and determined that these remains were fossilized feces of ichthyosaurs and called them coprolites, kopros (dung in Greek) and lithos (stone). These fossils from the Lower Cretaceous (110 million years ago) were preserved in soft, phosphate-rich seabeds. As the writer Martin Sayers highlighted in an article in History Extraalthough they looked like common rocks, their high mineral content triggered a unexpected “gold rush” to find them. in 1845 John Stevens Henslowa Cambridge professor, revealed that these curious fossils not only had a paleontological interestbut they also contained up to 40% phosphoric acid that they had absorbed from the clay soil, and it was perfect for compost after grinding it and treating it with sulfuric acid. William Buckland analyzed coprolites After the Napoleonic Wars, the United Kingdom, like the rest of Europe, suffered a pressing shortage of food, so the fertilizer use that increased crop productivity skyrocketed. In this context, finding raw materials to manufacture these fertilizers became a lucrative business. That is where the depositions that the dinosaurs were dispersing throughout what is now southwestern England come into play. Coprolite fever According to Sayers’ account, in 1858, Robert Walton leased land in Cambridge for £200 per acre per year, which was in itself a small fortune. His intention was to create one of the first open air mines to extract in an industrialized way the numerous coprolites that had been found in the area. The starting signal was given for a business that made many seekers millionaires. Coprolite mine in Trumpington (Cambridge) According the studies At St Mary’s Twickenham University in London, thousands of miners flocked to the area and deep shafts were dug to extract the coveted dinosaur droppings. With its extraction not only did the businessman earn a lot of money, he also paid very juicy salaries. A miner earned 10 shillings a day washing and sorting coprolites, twice as much as a farmer. This caused all agricultural activity in the area to become mining, industrializing the southern part of the United Kingdom. The demand for labor was such that workers and coprolite seekers began to arrive from all corners of the country, making the “coprolite fever“. Fossilized dinosaur poop fetched £3 a ton, and a mine like the one Walton had created produced around 300 tonnes of coprolite. That is to say, if you had enough money to pay the rent for the land and the labor, the profitability of the extraction could make you earn a lot of money. This unleashed madness in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Bedfordshire. From 1850, local and foreign miners flooded the county, excavating areas of southern England like burwellReach or Coldham’s Common with simple methods: dig holes 6 to 10 meters deep and scoop out clay with buckets or carts to filter its contents and find the valuable coprolites. According to the historical recordslocal production reached 90% of British phosphate, some 54,000 tons annually in 1877, valued at more than £150,000 a year. The data points Because, in 1874, the dinosaur dung industry contributed around 628,000 pounds annually to the British economy, exceeding by more than 20,000 pounds the contribution made by materials such as tin, which in those years was a key product in United Kingdom exports. The risk of extraction was very high because the clay terrain made the excavations prone to collapses, burying the workers, and diseases from contaminated water plagued the camps of coprolite seekers. Even so, the fever lasted decades and was revived during World War I, driven by demand for phosphorus to make ammunition for the army. However, once declared the armistice in 1918the coprolite mines in the United Kingdom were sealed again and all the product was imported from the US, where the coprolites were closer to the surface and their extraction was much simpler and cheaper. In Xataka | Seven of the ten largest fortunes in the world in 2026 are due to AI: this illustrative graph makes it very clear Image | Unsplash (David Valentine), Wikimedia Commons (United States Geological Survey, Diego Delso, National Portrait Gallery), Cambridgeshire Collections

They are the feces of their soldiers

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The United States Navy is experiencing a contradiction that very few could anticipate: while maintains a superiority global in tonnage, scope and technology, carries a series of daily maintenance and sustainment problems that erode its image and, in the long run, its real availability. The clearest example is most advanced nuclear aircraft carrier and an enemy that cannot be mute for five years: feces. The great paradox. As we will see, it is not just a matter of ugly photos or internal anecdotes, it is rather the sum of small breakdowns and material degradation that has ended up becoming an operational burden. And the most striking thing is that these failures appear on both veteran ships and cutting-edge platforms. War, but against feces. The most advanced and expensive nuclear aircraft carrier on the planet, the USS Gerald R. Fordhas been encountering for more than five years an adversary that has no flag or missiles: its own sanitation system. The V.C.H.T.a vacuum system to collect, store and transfer waste, has repeatedly jammed and caused breakdowns since the ship entered service, to the point that during its deployment in 2023 the problems They became almost daily. The irony is brutal: a colossus conceived to project power for weeks without touching port is conditioned by an internal circuit that collapses due to something as basic as evacuating human waste. A lesson not learned. The most serious thing is that Ford’s problem is not new, but rather the second chapter of an error that had already given very clear signs. The last Nimitz, the USS George H.W. Bushwas the first large ship of the US Navy to incorporate a vacuum system of this type, and in 2011 it had all 423 toilet bowls out of service simultaneously on two occasions. That degraded life on board to absurd levels, with sailors urinating in showers or sinks industrial, using bottles and, in the case of many women, enduring so much that they ended up with health problems. The pattern was already written, and yet it was repeated on the ship called to be the symbol of modernization naval. Limited resistance. The VCHT is similar to systems used on cruise ships due to its efficiency in water, but on an aircraft carrier complexity becomes its worst enemy. The network moves waste by suction through hundreds of km of pipes to treatment tanks, and the design has a structural fragility: If one section loses pressure due to a blockage, all bathrooms can be unusable. This is not a minor failure, because it causes a habitability crisis and forces staff time to be spent on continuous repairs, just the opposite of what the ship promised. In an environment where the ship is literally a floating city, sanitation is not a detail, It is critical infrastructure. Toilets on the USS Ford The price of “throwing”. The partial solution that has been identified is as revealing as it is depressing: acid washed periodically to clean the system, something not planned as a routine throughout the life of the vessel. Each operation can cost more than $400,000and it also cannot be done on the high seas because it requires maintenance facilities and adds technical and environmental complications, which chains the problem to shipyard windows. The result: not only are pipes clogged, the ideal of total logistical autonomy that justifies a nuclear superaircraft carrier is also clogged. And in the midst of an era of budget pressure, this turns a key piece of naval power into a platform that requires very expensive “rituals” to function as something as basic as a bathroom. Bathrooms on the USS Enterprise Human factor and design. The Navy has attributed part of the problem to throw inappropriate objectsfrom clothing to utensils to hygiene products, which sounds plausible on a ship with thousands of people living in stressful conditions. But the truly revealing fact is that a GAO report pointed out that the system was undersized for a ship with more than 4,000 crew members, which shifts the blame from individual behavior to industrial design. If an infrastructure does not tolerate realistic use of its population objective, it does not point to a failure of discipline, but to a failure applied engineering. At that point, the aircraft carrier stops being a “technological miracle” and becomes an overly optimistic experiment. Gerald R. Ford during construction in Newport News, along with his construction crew, 2013 Even the bathroom is political. In the Ford, in addition, a concept was introduced that in theory increased the flexibility of accommodation: bathrooms neutral without urinals. That triggered other frictions, because each toilet occupies more space than a urinal and the majority of the crew is still male, which multiplies uses and stress on the system during peak hours. Here, more than a cultural debate, everything points to a debate of physical efficiency within a hull where every meter counts, and where the habitability design has a direct impact on the load on the pipes. In the end, what seemed like a “modern” improvement may have added complexity and stress to an infrastructure that I was already going to the limit. Rust on American warship Rust on deck. If the Ford case is embarrassing, the rust on ships surface is grotesque because it is public, because it is the first thing anyone sees when a destroyer enters port. The Navy recognize that for years has “ignored” the corrosion problem because there was always another emergency. The trigger to prioritize it: Trump got it an image of the USS Dewey with “rust dripping” and that made it a top-notch affair. The technical manager summed it up with a devastating phrase: “We know what to do, but we choose not to do it.” Simple solutions. They were on TWZ The ironic part is that many anti-rust measures sound almost insultingly simple, like using better resistant paintsimprove drains to divert water, or incorporate materials less prone to corrode. It also seeks to reduce the workload and the margin … Read more

that our feces do not fall into oblivion

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For decades, the intimacy of the bathroom was a forbidden territory even for the most invasive technology, a space culturally shielded from the modern obsession with constant body measurement. However, what a long time ago started in Japanaims to become the gold egg mine of the West: the business of human feces. The unexpected rise of “fecal data”. Bloomberg remembered it in a piece this past weekend that began with a scene that occurred recently and that symbolized the turning point: a gastroenterologist holding in hands a piece of feces dried on the set of a podcast, debating their form as if evaluating a piece of sculpture. The fascination by intestinal transitpreviously relegated to the clinical setting or to certain biohacker nicheshas jumped to the mainstream driven by an industry that identifies in fecal matter a vast new territory of data capable of anticipating diseases, adjusting lifestyle habits and recording dimensions of health that until now escaped the digital radar. What began as humor, modesty or taboo has become the basis of an emerging market in which bathroom technology giants and biomedical startups see a completely virgin field comparable, in potential, to the early days of the smart watch. From taboo to smart device. The jump is not accidental. The almost simultaneous appearance of two products from giants in the sector (the line Neorest by Toto and the sensor Kohler Dekoda) demonstrates that the industry has decided to turn the toilet into an ecosystem of continuous physiological analysis. For companies that have been innovating in the domestic environment for decades, the bathroom represented the last intact space, and at the same time the most intimate and emotionally charged, a place where people isolate themselves, reflect and lower their defenses. The new devices are supported precisely in that stillness: algorithms, optical sensorsspectroscopy and small cameras work silently to analyze parameters such as color, consistency, volume, hydration, hidden blood or patterns linked to gastrointestinal inflammation. In the Toto model, the toilet itself take the initiative: illuminates the material, captures its fall, compares it with the Bristol clinical scale and sends conclusions to the user’s mobile phone in less than a minute. They are systems that do not require discipline, manual registration or will: the bathroom operates as an automatic laboratory integrated into the daily routine. Toto’s Nearest The clinical leap. Although at first glance it may seem like a technological extravagance, the medical logic behind these devices is compelling. The specialists they underline that serious diseases (from inflammation to colon cancer) begin to manifest themselves subtly in the fecal pattern months or even years before severe symptoms appear. Hence a toilet capable to detect changes before a patient reaches “six or eight bloody liquid stools” can literally save lives. In a context in which health systems increasingly treat pathologies associated with lifestyle, a discreet and automatic home detector is a prevention tool. first order. For vulnerable people or groups with a higher incidence of intestinal diseases, technology can shorten diagnostic times, avoid hospitalizations and reduce healthcare costs through continuous monitoring that was previously unthinkable. From Japan to Silicon Valley. The expansion of the sector is not limited to Asia: American companies like Toi Labs They have oriented their technology towards nursing homes, hospitals and care centers, where the taboo disappears in the face of necessity. In that area, the fecal monitoring provides critical information on hydration, nutrition, risk of infections and evolution of chronic pathologies. In parallel, researchers as Park Seung-min have taken innovation to the extreme, designing prototypes capable of identifying users through anal topographyan idea as bold as it was problematic that was finally discarded due to its obvious implication in terms of privacy. Your project evolved to Kanaria Healthwhich seeks to develop a toilet capable of acting as an early warning system, not only in digestivebut also in hormonal or metabolic processes, from ovulation to drug detection. Institutional interest in Asia and the United States confirms that governments see this technology as a public health instrument, capable of anticipating problems in vulnerable populations without increasing pressure on medical services. Kohler Dekoda Sensor The intimate dilemma. But this technological advance runs into the most delicate wall of the 21st century: privacy. Physiological data is, by its nature, much more sensitive than the pulses of a watch or the calories counted by an activity bracelet. In a scenario in which some governments have used health information to persecute citizens (as is happening in the United States after legal setbacks on reproductive rights) an inevitable question arises: who will guard the toilet data? Extreme cases, such as political leaders who travel with private bathrooms to avoid leaks, they serve as a reminder of the strategic value of these samples. For users, accepting a device that analyzes blood, hormones or illicit substances means trusting that this information will not be exploited, hacked or prosecuted. The challenge for the industry is to demonstrate that the health benefit outweighs this risk, generating safe, anonymous and shielded systems. Obsession and risk. The expansion of smart toilets also reveals a certain tension of our era: the balance between healthy monitoring and anxiety due to excess of data. As with fitness devices, there is a risk that users end up “chasing their own tail”, interpreting every minor variation as a problem to the point of paranoia. At this point, the experts remember that the real value is in medium-term trends, not in compulsive daily observation. For those who do not suffer from digestive diseases, the usefulness can (or should) be marginal if it is not integrated into a rational habit. Even so, the possibility of aligning diet, hydration and exercise with an objective intestinal pattern marks a qualitative leap in bodily self-knowledge. The immediate future. He advancement of the sector suggests that, in a few years, the smart toilet It will be as common as digital scales or air purifiers. The combination of cheap sensors, artificial intelligence and a growing culture of self-care pushes towards a domestic … Read more

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