Word: fecal
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...felt like crap. Literally. After what seemed like a series of unfortunate personal and circumstantial setbacks, I’d been subjugated in my sophomore spring to the lowest caste of the Harvard housing system: floater. The word itself conjures up images of things fecal. A floater—an upperclassman unable to form a rooming group who is then randomly assigned a room and bunkmate for the following semester—is a lowly untouchable, a creepy loner left to bob about in a cesspool of social rejects and awkward bedfellows...
...seat. I have a private theory that whoever designed Harvard dorm furnishings had strong moral objections to people sitting down, which explains why all the chairs gang up on you whenever you try to lean back, but I don’t know why he would have wanted fecal coliforms all over everything in the restroom. Maybe he had one as a pet and got attached...
...important part of that investigation will involve having an accurate map of the genetic makeup of those gut bugs. And in a separate paper published Wednesday in Nature, an international group of scientists generated the most comprehensive genetic map to date of human gut microbes, using 124 human fecal samples, which gives scientists just the critical window they need to figure out which species of bugs tend to reside in our intestines and which may contribute to weight gain. (See how to prevent illness...
...picked up 1,500 gal. (5,700 L) of excrement, which she'll give back to participants this spring after she and Mother Nature have transformed it into a rich bag of fertilizer. "I've sent a sample in for a coliform test," Klehm says. "There is zero detectable fecal bacteria." (Read a brief history of toilets...
Canada geese are also prolific poopers, and with excretions adding up to as much as 1 lb. a day per bird, the health hazards are serious. The birds have been blamed for fecal contamination that has led to beach closings. "It's not just the geese, but what the geese leave behind," says John Moriarty, natural-resources specialist for Minnesota's Ramsey County parks...