The sewer monster is made up of thousands of tiny organisms called bryozoans, or moss animacules, said N.C. State University biologist Thomas Kwak. Invertebrates, they bunch together in colonies and feed with tiny tentacles.

"They can get as big as the size of a watermelon," he said.

They've been known to clog pipes, but Raleigh officials aren't worried, even though bryozoans can move up to 10 centimeters a day. "I don't know if we've seen anything move on its own inside a sanitary sewer line," Public Utilities Director Dale Crisp said.

Previously, previously.

"You're probably curious about what alli™ does in your body."

The active ingredient in alli attaches to some of the natural enzymes in the digestive system, preventing them from breaking down about a quarter of the fat you eat. Undigested fat cannot be absorbed and passes through the body naturally. The excess fat is not harmful. In fact, you may recognize it in the toilet as something that looks like the oil on top of a pizza.

So let me get this straight: instead of eating 25% less fat, you can instead eat the same, in exchange for uncontrolled bouts of pissing motor oil from your anus?

Yup. Pretty much:

The fat passes out of your body, so you may have bowel changes, known as "treatment effects". You may get:

• gas with oily spotting
• loose stools
• more frequent stools that may be hard to control

While no one likes experiencing treatment effects, they might help you think twice about eating questionable fat content. If you think of it like that, alli can act like a security guard for your late-night cravings.

You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.

Previously, previously.

These people think you'd be better off with some parasitic worms. And they will sell them to you. Worm Therapy: Helminth-Induced Immune Modulation

My favorite bits from the FAQ:

I have heard bad things about medical treatments in Mexico.

Most of what has been reported in the American press is accurate if not prone to hyperbole.

Will I get worse before I get better?

It is not uncommon to experience what is known as the "worm flu".

How long do the worms last?

That depends on the worm you use. In the case of hookworm you can expect them to last between three to seven years. In the case of the tapeworm it is important to kill the worm before it reaches sexual maturity.

Is it safe?

We would like to take a moment to discuss hookworm specifically. This is an organism that uses a human host and though there are animal surrogates these surrogates run the risk of attenuating the organism or transmission of zoonotic disease. Thus, we use human hosts. This means that the organism that is crawling through your skin and into your bloodstream is only a few weeks removed from developing in the ovaries of its parent organism that feeds on the blood of another human. Moreover, some companies raise their hookworm from ova to the infective L3 stage using human feces. We do not. We can mitigate the risk of hookworm carrying fecal bacteria into your bloodstream and we can use hosts that are tested for blood born pathogens but there are mechanisms of vertical transovary transmission that may exist. This type of transmission of disease has not been reported in the literature and our human reservoirs undergo routine testing to mitigate the risk of co-infection. Bottom line: do your research.

Side Effects and Warnings for Beef Tapeworm

Common symptoms include loss of appetite or feeling of fullness, increased appetite, abdominal pain, weakness, headache, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, vomiting and spontaneous emergence of proglottids from the anal sphincter.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, and frankly, the entire poop tag.

My Yelp shakedown post got seriously derailed into a thread about sitting versus hovering and pissing all over the women's restroom, and I have a question.

Dear persons with vaginas,

Why in the world have you not yet learned to pee standing up?

I've seen demos of this. My understanding is that with proper technique, and without props, you can do it without pissing all over your pants and without getting your hands or legs wet.

If I found myself in some kind of Freaky Friday body-swap situation, figuring this out would be first on my list. Ok, second on my list. Ok, third on my list. Ok, definitely some time during the first week.

Did you know that San Francisco is in the midst of a crime spree? Someone keeps burning porta-potties to the ground. 22 so far. "All the plastic was melted down to the floor, and it smelled horrible, horrible, horrible." Here's a Google Map showing the color-coded locations.

I am pleased to get to use both my poop and maps tags at the same time.

Satire at the ballot box to 'honor' Bush

They want to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant come January, when the next president is sworn in. During the inauguration, the group also wants supporters to participate in a "synchronized flush" -- a way to send a gift to the renamed plant, which supporters say, would be a "fitting monument to this president's work."

It sounds like a harmless joke, or maybe a college civics lesson gone awry. But they have already collected 8,500 signatures in support of the plan - 1,300 more than the minimum needed to put the question to city voters in November.

The biggest opposition in this Democratic stronghold, McConnell said, is people who oppose naming anything after the 43rd president.

Officials at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which owns the plant, say they get the humorous intent. But they note that the plant is an award-winning facility that keeps the city's streets and the ocean clean.

"If you are looking for a place to make a negative statement about the Bush administration's impact on the environment, this would be the last place to do it," agency spokesman Tony Winnicker said.

Someone pooped in my elevator.

Was it you?

The brand new 8th Cloaca, Mini Cloaca

The tubular structure is made of metal and glass, and composed of mechanical organs that swallow, grind, digest and defecate a given amount of food. While Super Cloaca consumes 300 kg of food and produces 80 kg of faeces per day, the quantity of food ingested by the dwarfed one is equivalent to that of a breakfast.

[...] he also ate the same meal as a Cloaca machine, gathered some of the product of its digestion, went to the toilet, collected some of his own faecal matter and brought the two samples to a laboratory. The scientist compared the two samples bacteriologically and found them very similar.

Previously.

Making cows fart like kangaroos

Thanks to special bacteria in their stomachs, kangaroo flatulence contains no methane and scientists want to transfer that bacteria to cattle and sheep who emit large quantities of the harmful gas.

"Fourteen per cent of emissions from all sources in Australia is from enteric methane from cattle and sheep," said Athol Klieve, a senior research scientist with the Queensland Government.

Researchers say the bacteria also makes the digestive process much more efficient and could potentially save millions of dollars in feed costs for farmers and graziers. "Not only would they not produce the methane, they would actually get something like 10 to 15 per cent more energy out of the feed they are eating," said Dr Klieve.

I've been wondering about this ever since I learned about fecal bacteriotherapy!

Hollywood Pigeons to Be Put on the Pill

Over the next few months a birth control product called OvoControl P, which interferes with egg development, will be placed in bird food in new rooftop feeders.

"We think we've got a good solution to a bad situation," said Laura Dodson, president of the Argyle Civic Association, the group leading the effort to try the new contraceptive. "The poop problem has become unmanageable and this could be the answer."

Dodson said representatives from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contacted her group with the idea to use OvoControl P. Other animal rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, support the contraceptive over electric shock gates, spiked rooftops, poisons or other methods.

I think the ubiquitous pigeon-spikes and mesh fences covering every statuary alcove are a far bigger architectural blight than the poop they are intended to avoid, so I'm all for it.

Now if only we could put human birth control in the water supply, we'd really be getting somewhere.

By the way, why is it that 99% of the birds you see in cities are pigeons? What makes them so much more successful than any of the others? Does it have something to do with their greasy coating or their deformed club-feet?

DNA Lounge update, wherein are presented photos of The Event Which Shall Not Be Named.

Italian scientists are testing a new diet pill that turns into a clear, gelatinous blob the size of a tennis ball that may help shrink waistlines by giving dieters a sense of satiety.

"The effect is like eating a nice plate of pasta," said Luigi Ambrosio, lead researcher on the project.

The unnamed pill is made from a cellulose compound of hydrogel, a material that's powdery when dry but plumps up to a cousin of Jell-O when wet. The gel can soak up to 1,000 times its weight. A gram in capsule form quickly balloons from the size of a spit wad to a ball that holds nearly a liter of liquid.

Let's recap:

Exhibit A: A Nice Plate of Pasta.

Exhibit B: Happy Fun Ball.

A certain someone didn't believe me when I described this procedure the other day, so I went and looked it up.

Recolonize your colon:

Dr. Aas:	Stool is an organ.
Me:	Excuse me?
Dr. Aas:	It is normally considered waste product, but it is in a way an independent organ, like the kidney, and it contains thousands of different bacteria living in symbiosis. These bacteria are needed for normal health. When you use some antibiotics, some of this bacteria population gets destroyed. If you later get infected with Clostridium difficile colitis, there is this competitive battlefield in the colon, and without the necessary bacteria, Clostridium has the upper hand. So what we do is take normal stool from a normal person, make an extract of it, put it in a blender with water, take two tablespoons of that cocktail, and introduce it into the patient's body.
Me:	It is, in effect, a human poop transplant?
Dr. Aas:	Yes. To replace the normal colonic flora.
Me:	That's a nice word!
Dr. Aas:	Okay.
Me:	And how is this transplant done?
Dr. Aas:	Through a tube down into the patient's stomach. A naso-gastric tube.
Me:	It goes in through the nose?
Dr. Aas:	Or the mouth, yes.
Me:	Can't it go in the other end?
Dr. Aas:	There is a doctor in Australia who does it that way, but sometimes the small intestine is infected, too, so it is more effective this way.
Me:	In this particular organ transplant, who are the donors?
Dr. Aas:	Most of the time, a loved one.
Me:	I can imagine.
Dr. Aas:	Yes.
Me:	And this works as a cure because the microbes remain in the colon?
Dr. Aas:	Yes.
Me:	It is the gift that keeps on giving!
Dr. Aas:	We've been doing it for 10 years without a single failure. [...]
Dr. Aas:	You wouldn't believe the [flora] I have taken from colleagues since publishing that paper.

If the name "Dr. Aas" screams "prank" to you, perhaps you will be more convinced by the fact that Wikipedia has managed to wring all of the humor out of a poop joke: Fecal bacteriotherapy.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, and previously.

But don't worry, only some of it was human:

A Minneapolis city worker is worried about blood in the sewer system because he said, while he was cleaning the system, blood sprayed out of a hole and got all over him.

"We could tell it was blood, I mean large amount of blood," said Minneapolis Sewer Maintenance Worker Ron Huebner.

It happened about two weeks ago in Northeast Minneapolis near a lab that does medical testing and dumps blood into the sewer. It is allowed but the city is now making changes to help protect workers in the future.

"Blood just all over my face, in my mouth, I could taste it. It was terrible. I had it in my mouth and I kept spitting and I couldn't get rid of it," said Huebner.

Huebner said he hasn't been sleeping much. He's worried about the blood that he swallowed when he was operating a jet machine to clean out the sewer.

The Met Council said it was a mix of human and animal blood used in medical testing at this nearby lab.