SciShow Tangents - Toilets with Deboki Chakravarti

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

This episode was brought to you by Gates Notes, the blog of Bill Gates. Go to https://www.gatesnotes.com to learn more about the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, which is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year!Just because you poop and pee in them doesn’t mean that toilets don’t deserve your utmost respect! From the International Space Station to the comfort of your own home, these waste-disposing scientific wonders help make our lives cleaner and safer. So next time you see a toilet, say “thank you!”Can’t get enough Deboki? You can follow her on Twitter @okidoki_boki, and find her on Scientific American’s Science Talk Podcast starting August 6th!Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsA big thank you to Patreon subscriber Eclectic Bunny for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenSources:[Fact Off]Lemur Toilet Treehttp://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150513-these-animals-use-public-toiletshttps://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00265-014-1810-z.pdfhttps://www.dpz.eu/en/home/single-view/news/informativer-toilettengang.htmlhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26392-zoologger-shy-lemurs-communicate-using-toilet-trees/Super Slippery Toilethttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/739396https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlYc8RfqA3I&t=10shttps://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/materials-innovations/slip-and-slide-spray-on-polymer-coating-keeps-porcelain-toilet-bowls-cleaner[Ask the Science Couch]https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/question314.htmhttps://iwaponline.com/wpt/article/13/1/157/38690/Vacuum-sewerage-systems-a-solution-for-fasthttps://www.courtesyplumbers.com/blog/2016/december/three-types-of-flush-systems-the-pros-and-cons/[Butt One More Thing]https://patents.google.com/patent/US4320756A/enhttps://www.adventip.com/blog/wackypatent/freshair-breathing-device 

This episode of SciShow Tangents is brought to you in partnership with Gates Notes. You can go to GatesNotes.com to read about the latest innovations in toilets and sanitation, and to learn more about the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week and sitting in for science expert Sari Reilly is science expert and Tangents editorial assistant and writer and co-host of Journey to the Microcosmos. It's Deboki Chakravarti. Hello. Hello. How's the Olympics going for you? Do you care at all?

I care when I want background noise. It's been great to be able to turn it on just when I need something, but I've been having a hard time with sports this year where I've been getting into it and then hating myself for it because I get so stressed. It's just too much. Yeah. myself for it because I get so stressed. It's just too much. An interesting thing about this Olympics that I have enjoyed is following all of the athletes on TikTok where I realize that it's just like party time village. Yeah. And they're like all 18 and going insane. I've definitely read all those secrets of the Olympic village articles in the past when they've come out and now seeing it live on Tik Tok,

I'm like, this is great. This is how they test out the cardboard beds. I'm like, yeah, that's perfect. Sounds about right. Yeah.

The, it used to be NBC would give you like these mini documentaries on the athletes. And so you'd see like the trials and struggles. And now instead of that, it's just like thirst traps and using audios in funny Olympics ways

anyway we're also joined by our resident everyman Sam Schultz who has already spoken up a little bit and also I'm sure has Olympic opinions I love the Olympics I feel bad that I love the Olympics so much but I do and I was supposed to go to these Olympics you were supposed to go to these Olympics. You were supposed to go to these Olympics?

For my honeymoon. Oh. Double whammy, huh? Didn't have my wedding, not for any bad, just for COVID reasons. We're still going to have it eventually. And can't go to Japan to the Olympics. God, that blows. Rachel's upstairs watching the Olympics right this second.

We love the Olympics. So you're more like streaming your own honeymoon. I guess we didn't think about it that way, but that's a nice spin on it. Yeah, I'm not actually sure how to watch the Olympics. I've only been watching highlights because I don't know how to get it into my home. Well, you can either have an antenna on your television or you can have cable. Well, I'm not doing that. I'll tell you that much. No, it's too late probably also.

They're over like the middle of next week, so. Really? I thought it was like, I thought Olympics were like six weeks long or something. I think they're two weeks long. No, that's ridiculous. You can't build a city for two weeks of sport. It seems like a lot,

but we are very inventive and very clever species. So I guess we can make anything happen, which is basically what this podcast is about, because every week here we on Tangents get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic. Today the facts are not about

the Olympics. They are about something else, which you've already gotten several spoilers about what that is, but we're not going to tell you quite yet. Our panelists are playing for Glory, but they're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, it will either be Sam or Deboki taking home the medal. It's made of Hank Bucks this week, the Hank Bucks medal. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem. And this week it's from me. Joshua Everly Anthony Tripe laid 2.2 million miles of pipe to bring us fresh water and

take it away after we'd added a bit of our waste. Joshua Everly Anthony Tripe has every reason, maybe, to gripe that he took on the world's biggest villain and saved more people than penicillin. So why, oh why, don't we know his name? Why aren't there statues, parades, and fame? Well, a simple reason, really. Joshua Everly Anthony Tripe, he didn't exist, though it would have been nice. One person could not do all those things and save us from the diseases that water brings. Instead of one man, he was many millions, everyday unappreciated civilians. Diseases of water tried to spoil it, but instead, thanks to them, we just hook up our toilet. But since our brains like simpler myths, where one hero saves us from all of this.

Thank Joshua Everly Anthony Tripe every time you wipe. Wow, I thought he was real. Yeah, that was such a real name for a guy. That was a great, great poem. Thanks. I'm very curious about the process behind this poem, about how the name came about. You were like, I got Wipe.

What's the best fake last name that I can make? You must have had Laying Pipe first. I had Wipe first, yeah. Oh, got it. No, I lucked out. Wipe was 100% luck. I was like, holy shit. Wipe.

It's right there. Yep. That's amazing. So our topic for the day is not pipe, though that would be a good one. Instead, it is toilets. Toilets, one of the most important innovations in the history of humankind. They save a tremendous number of lives, and they are basically holes that go into either the ground or a sewer. Deboki, are you going to tell me what a toilet is? Yeah. So basically,

I think a lot of times, like if we're talking about what a toilet is, we kind of have assigned it at this point in our life to or humanity's life to a fixture that's being used for defecation and urination. Oftentimes, it is a water flushed bowl with a seat. So I think that's what a lot of us are familiar with. But obviously, there are many other types of toilets out there that we use. There are porta potties. There are squat toilets. There's a lot of different forms for basically collecting our waste and sending it somewhere else to be disposed of. And any of those is a toilet?

So I would want to say that if it gets collected and it's kind of like being designated as a spot for this collection, then I would argue it's a toilet. I mean, throughout history, we've had like a lot of different ways to basically kind of assigning like a pit-like structure for toilets. Romans are usually credited with like the early sewage system innovations. One of the first citywide systems was called the Cloaca Maxima

and was built around 600 BC or so, plus or minus a few hundred years. So I think there's both like the toilet as like the toilet thing. And then there's also the sewage system that we connected to. So those are kind of like both parts of it. But I would think of the toilet

as the actual instrument for collecting the waste. Yeah, it tends to be porcelain, though I think that there may have been a time when there was a thing that you would call toilet that had a number of elements of ceramic and wood to sort of do the work. But yeah, the sort of all of the stuff, all of the sewage collection stuff is certainly not the toilet. And in fact, a lot of toilets are just hooked up to a septic system and don't connect to a sewage system at all. Yeah. And I mean, if you're in space, you're not connected to a sewage system.

That's definitely true. That's a great point. you're not connected to a sewage system. No, that's definitely true. That's a great point. And they still have to figure out how to make space toilets so that there's a way to help out astronauts. And so there's a lot of innovation still going on with toilets. We are not done with toilets. There are ways to make them better.

There are ways to make them more accessible, more environmentally friendly. This is where the Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet Challenge comes in. And also there are researchers studying old toilets to see what we can learn from those about toilet technology and its long storied history. Do you know where the word toilet comes from? Because there's like eau de toilet and that's not like toilet water. That's something else that used to be called a toilet that we don't call a toilet anymore, right?

Yeah, so the word had nothing to do with like originally with waste. It was used in the 1530s in English as a cover or bag for clothes. It originally comes from the French toilet, meaning a cloth. So I think it was like a cloth thing. But then it apparently went on to refer to upper class dressing rooms. So things like mirrors, brushes, like that sat on like a table and that you would cover in cloth. And then around the 1800s, toilet referred to combination dressing rooms and bathrooms. And I think that's where it kind of started to shift. So Americans then took that and by the end of the 1800s, just kind of referred to any inside bathroom as the toilet. So that would be like a bathroom

that's inside versus like an outhouse or water closet. And then in the early 1900s, we Americans started calling the porcelain poop thing the toilet. So it just kind of got reduced from there, from the room down to the actual thing. That's very weird. What the hell? I mean, I guess this makes me feel like when it comes to naming things that are a little bit taboo, all bets are off. People are like, I don't know. I'm very nervous.

We had to pick the fanciest French word we can think of. There's this additional note that toilet paper came around in 1884, but the Middle English equivalent was arse wisp. Arse wisp. Yeah. So yeah, I think there's just, when comes to the toilet, like the vocabulary is just. Yeah. There's a whole myth about how the guy who invented the toilet was named Thomas Crapper, and that's why it's called the Crapper. But that's not true. There was a guy, though, named Thomas Crapper, and he was a sanitary engineer and businessman in England in the mid 1800s. But his real innovation was rebranding toilets to be a thing that you

could show off and sell. So he would actually show them off in showrooms to try to get people to be excited about buying toilets. So were there crapper brand toilets? Apparently, you can actually still see tea crapper on manhole covers in England on their sewer infrastructure. But does that have anything to do with the word crap not that i know of oh wow okay wow that's that is weird i mean coincidences it's gotta right no it's not related it's not what the hell he's just like well that's my name so i guess I have to do this. That happens all the time. I got my tendon reattached in my hand by Dr. Hand. I guess you're right.

So I feel well informed on what a toilet is now, though it turns out to be broader than maybe any of us imagined, especially as we consider how to distribute these things and make them more equal. But that means that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're playing a game designed by Sari Riley, actually. It's called Toilet Technology or Carnival Contraption. That sounds like something she would come up with. The rules are very simple. I'm going to read to you an invention, and you're going to have to guess whether it was created to upgrade a toilet or to enhance a carnival-going experience. You are not allowed to ask me clarifying questions.

All right. Invention number one. All right. Invention number one. Humans have built all kinds of architecture to satisfy our needs for separating different rooms, death-defying stunts, or simply nice views. In the 1400s, through at least the 1700s in Russia, people would regularly climb a wooden tower as high as 70 or 80 feet and sit on a hollowed-out block of ice filled with straw. What happened next? I'll leave that up to your imagination. So is that a toilet technology or a carnival contraption? Man, imagine having to climb 80 feet in the middle of the night.

Yeah, I mean, like the ice and straw seems like, because like you can go to like a dive bar and still pee in like a urinal with ice in it. And I'm sure that there must be bathrooms with straw in them somewhere. What is the ice for, Sam? Well, I don't know. Does it stop splashing maybe? I thought it was just

like the flushing was the ice. Oh, right. So you don't have to flush. It just melts a little bit. That's what I always assumed. I think that's what it is. Maybe nobody knows. And it's just a tradition. It's very big. bit but yeah in montana there's plenty of big metal long toilets with ice in them oh ice troughs it's the climbing for me yeah you don't want your pee and poop to be that high up in the air i'm pretty sure and you don't want to have to fall that far you mean your poop and pee yeah yeah i think it's a carnival thing i don't know how this could be a toilet thing it's a trick this is a trick it's a carnival thing i want to go with

a carnival thing too you are both correct it is a early roller coaster like contraption for winter festivals of course because it's russia uh it's a giant ice slide so you would sit up there and then you would slide down the 70 to 80 feet down a slide. The block of ice with straw in it would be your sled. And people would then careen down a 600 foot long icy slope with a sand patch at the bottom to slow them down once they got there. Did people die? We assume. I think they must have.

Yeah. And to be fair, like someone probably peed on it at some point. Yeah, that's true. Oh, well, that's I mean, yes. What carnival contra like someone probably peed on it at some point. Yeah, that's true. Oh, well, that's, I mean, yes. What carnival contraption hasn't had pee on it? The sleds did get more advanced over the years and Catherine the Great built an ice slide with actual rollers on it to make the contraption closer to a roller coaster that we would recognize today. Wow. Regardless, it was super dangerous and don't put your children on blocks of ice with

straw in them at 70 to 80 feet in the air. There was, however, a medieval toilet that was kind of like this. There was just a hole cut into a stone. The toilet was called a garter robe and the hole dumped a long way down into a hole or a cesspit or the moat, depending on the structure of the building. So you'd be pretty high up when you poop and your poop would go like, Wow. So you would have to hear it fall. It would whistle like a bomb. I assume. All right. Invention number two, humans are social creatures. So you want to hang out in groups. So

this invention helps you do just that. It's a large oval-shaped structure estimated to weigh around 26,000 pounds, and it contains 15 individual seat tubs that could onboard and hold a group of users at once, though not all of the tubs have to be occupied for the device to work. This sounds like some kind of Roman thing to me. The problem is it also sounds like it could be like a teacup ride. Oh, I feel like you cracked it with the teacup thing. I think it's got to be those teacups, but it's going to be so embarrassing if it's something

people are pooping in at the same time. And then they're watching all their poop like flow into a common hole of some sort just for fun yeah but i think you're right and i think i'm gonna go i think i gotta go with teacup that sounds like a sary way to describe that kind of situation now i'm wondering if i should go with toilet This is the classic trap of the smart person on the show. Yeah, I can go full Sari on this and change my mind and then be wrong. You know what? In honor of Sari, I'm going to change my mind and I'm going to go with the toilet.

The answer is carnival contraption. Of course it is. It's not like teacups, though. It's more like a weird long Ferris wheel, like a short oval Ferris wheel, but it could load four cars at once. So there's less time sitting around. So it was a way of like shortening the Ferris wheel time. But it also wasn't as high as a Ferris wheel. So it's probably way of shortening the Ferris wheel time, but it also wasn't as high as the Ferris wheels, so it was probably a little less fun.

There were only 15 built because it was bulky and hard to assemble and disassemble for traveling carnivals. There were, and probably still are in some parts of the world, communal toilet bath houses that aren't separated by stalls like we see these days. A lot of imagery online that shows ancient Roman toilets. You just got everybody sitting next to each other on holes yeah uh and i imagine chatting right we were having a really good time yeah so i don't see any reason why you wouldn't do a circle just so that we could see each other yeah hey jeremy it's good to see you is that a roman name name? I don't know. Actually, I really don't know. It could be. Our third invention, part of the fun of decorations, is creating immersive experiences.

So inventors have taken the boring old back of your chair to new levels of fun. This aquarium tank, patented in the 1900s, is designed to attach or detach from your seat back. And it can hold aquatic animals, plants, decorative objects, or whatever you can dream up to create an underwater paradise wherever you are. So is that toilet technology or a carnival contraption? So like your toilet tank, hypothetically,

if this is a toilet thing, could be filled with fish and stuff. But that water goes in the thing. But is it separate? Well, I guess it could be. Because the other thing is like, wouldn't it be really bad to have fish on a roller coaster? Yeah, but I'm, well, no clarifying. This could be at some kind of like, I mean, maybe there's like a restaurant at the carnival where all the seatbacks have fish in them or like a river cruise or something.

True. That sounds like way more trouble than any carnival would ever go to, though. But it does sound like something a weird person would make the back of their toilet look like to me. This definitely sounds like a rich person's toilet. Yes. The richest person's toilet. That's what I'm going to say. Yeah, I'm going with toilet. The correct person's toilet that's what i'm gonna say yeah i'm going with toilet the correct answer is toilet contraption or toilet technology there are actually multiple

toilet tank aquarium patents with the same general concept you replace the standard toilet tank with a two tank system mounted to the toilet bowl one chamber works like a normal though small tank for flushing the toilet bowl, and then the larger chamber is an aquarium that can be removed as needed, presumably to care for your fish or whatever. They're connected by the same lid, and the handle is attached

to one side, so it looks sort of like one giant aquarium toilet, but you don't have to worry about flushing the fish. So I guess people, lots of people have been like, you know, there's a tank and tanks. One thing I know they do is hold fish. So why not? You're going to like cover it with the toilet seat, right?

If you put that up, like there's a lot. You can't look at it while you're going to the bathroom. Yeah. And your fish are going to watch poops come out of your butt, basically. Weirdly, that doesn't bother me at all. Oh. Does it bother you to be watched? I feel like now that he's said it, it does.

To think that they're behind you and they're like, hey, it's that guy. Yeah, I can't even see them watching. Yeah. Do you guys sit on the toilet facing out? Oh, gosh, don't trick me on this, please. All right, well, that means the Sam Schultz has come out with an astounding three of three correct

and is leading to Boki three, two, two. If there's one thing that the common man knows about, it's toilets, so makes sense. Next, we're gonna take a short break and then it will be time for the fact off. This episode is made in partnership with Gates Notes, the blog of Bill Gates. For the last 400 years, toilets haven't changed that much. But that does not mean that toilets are perfect.

that much. But that does not mean that toilets are perfect. There are communities all over the world living with unsafe sanitation conditions or living in places where traditional toilet and sanitation methods just aren't practical. The challenge remains to make toilets that are safer, more efficient, and more accessible to people all over the world. And there are scientists and engineers trying to tackle that challenge every day. The Reinvent the Toilet Challenge was founded in 2011 with the goal of finding the most innovative ideas for safe, sanitary toilets that don't need water or electricity and that transform human waste into useful resources.

In the 10 years the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge has been around, researchers have come up with tons of ingenious toilet innovations that are helping keep people everywhere healthier. You can learn more about the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge and some of the amazing toilets it has inspired at GatesNotes.com. Welcome back, everybody.

Now, get ready for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. After they presented their facts, I will judge them and I will award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. But first to decide who gets to go first, I have a trivia question. The question is, the S-bend in flush toilets is designed to permanently hold water in the curve of the pipe creating an air seal that stops sewer gas from entering buildings through the toilet the s bend and its successor the u bend represent a simple solution to a dangerous problem however these solutions rely on being connected to a sewer system which isn't possible in much of the world. But here's your question. When was the S-Bend invented?

Oh, when was the damn toilet invented? When was the sewer system invented? I have no idea. 1450. All right. 1450 is Sam's guess. That's not right at all. I'm going to change it.

You want to try again? Can I change it? 1850. 1850 is Sam's guess. That was a big difference. That was originally going to be my guess. So I guess I'll go with 1800. Oh, and Deboki pulls it out.

1775. Oh, phew. Well done. Good job, Sam. You did feel around that one correctly. All right, Deboki, who do you want to go first? I'll go first. Hit me.

The white-footed sportive lemur of southern Madagascar is a family animal, but it's more like kind of like a loose family. They'll hang out in the same territory, but they wander around on their own. They sleep on different trees. And like a lot of other primates, they won't even groom each other. But they do share one thing, a toilet. So like humans, there are other animal species that will designate a spot for defecating and urinating. We call these spots animal latrines. And in addition to their immediate and obvious use as a toilet, these latrines can serve other important functions like protecting the animal from predators or helping them mark their territories. In the case of the white-footed sport of lemur, these latrines are likely kind of like a family bulletin board, helping lemurs communicate with each other using smell. So in 2014, scientists from the German Primate

Center reported the results of watching a family of lemurs for over a thousand hours, and they observed that for their latrines, the lemurs usually pick a group of trees in the middle of their territory that's not immediately close to where they eat or sleep. And all of the members in that family will use those designated latrine trees. And, you know, when they need to go, they'll just like hold on to the tree trunk, lift their tail and do their business. But while they're there, they'll also sniff and lick the tree, which allows them to communicate with each other via scent cues without actually having to directly engage with each other. I just like the idea that they don't want to see each other, but they will do this. But they'll lick each other's butt. That's fine.

I don't want to hang out with you, but do pee and pee pee. And so these cues can include information about their sexual and individual identity to the rest of their family. And in addition, the scientists observed that the male lemurs from that territory, they would make more visits to the territory's latrines when a potentially invading male from another territory was like a bit too close to comfort. And in those cases on their more frequent pit stops, the males from that territory, they'd mark the trees with their scent glands, which is kind of like demonstrating, you know, their willingness to protect their family. So all that using their little latrines. I mean, I can relate that there are a lot of people

that I don't want to spend any time with, but I would love to know all the gossip in every little part of their personal life. Yeah. So we're not so different. Yeah. I mean, don't we kind of do the same thing? We write on bathroom walls.

Uh-huh. Oh, yes. Yeah, there's always, there's a social component to the bathroom that I think is, you know, maybe not ideal, but it's definitely there. There always is in movies and TV shows like people are like in high school. They're always hanging out in the bathroom, like being naughty. We used to do that.

Did you? I didn't ever know anybody who used to do that. So, well, maybe maybe it went away. Maybe it's more of maybe it was sort of I was on the tail end of that being a thing that people did. Well, I do that. So, well, maybe, maybe it went away. Maybe it's more of, maybe it was sort of, I was on the tail end of that being a thing that people did. Well, I like that. That's very weird. Does this have any impact on the tree getting peed and pooped on all the time?

I mean, I assume so. I don't, they didn't report anything, but I just assume like all poop and pee, it all goes back to nature. Like it all has, it has lots of nutrients in there, lots of nitrogen in there. So there's plenty of. Do they, is there a reason they choose a particular tree? I think they choose the ones in the middle so that it's like in the,

like kind of marks the designated center. There are other animals that will choose actually like the opposite. They'll choose trees that are, or like locations for their latrines that are on the borders of their territories. And that helps mark that for their species. So I think some of that's a little bit species dependent. Cool.

I like the idea of there being sort of a central pillar of the community. Like you just sort of have a ring around it. I don't know that I like it being a poop tree, but yeah, whatever. But it's the one thing everyone's going to do. It's true. I like that a lot.

Sam, what do you got for me? All right. So do you know, and I am hoping that this is a universal experience, that sometimes when you poop and you flush the poop, your poop leaves a big streak in the toilet bowl. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah.

I do. And that sucks, right? Because what the hell are you supposed to do? Like, if you aren't at home especially, leave the streak and just walk away or keep flushing a million times and hope that the streak will go away. And then you're like, why aren't toilets just nonstick anyway at this point? Like they kind of are, but come on.

Tough on pooper. Well, in response to that last question, a team at Penn State has developed a liquid, quote, sludge and bacteria repellent spray that can be applied to the inside of a toilet bowl making the bowl incredibly smooth and poop streak proof so the treatment is a two-step process step one is a spray-on coating of silicone molecules that when they dry arrange themselves into like little pokey outy strands that are one million times thinner than human hair then step two is a spray on silicone lubricant that kind of gets trapped in the hairs and that keeps the inside of the toilet bowl

nice and lubricated. The silicone plus hair lubricant combo is what's called a liquid entrenched smooth surface or less. The spray sets in about five minutes and the treatment lasts for 500 flushes. And I'll link a video in the notes of them doing experiments with liquid, but then with synthetic fecal matter where they just drop these big globs of, it just looks like poop.

It's disgusting. Why didn't they just use poop? Well, Hank, I don't know. It's a different color than poop, but it does look like poop. What color was it? Yeah. Oatmeal colored? Oh, no.

Yeah, it's kind of gross. I was hoping it would just be like purple or blue. They should have made it a nicer color, huh? Yeah. Well, anyway. So a streak-free bowl is nice, but that is not the primary reason that they developed the spray. So every day, 141 billion liters of water get flushed down the toilet worldwide. And according to the American Ceramic Society, only about half the water that goes into the toilet bowl with each flush is actually needed to make the flush happen.

And the rest of the water is released just to force tenacious poops down to where they can get carried away by the water. But with the super slippery surface, the poop slides down to where it needs to be. Yes. Did they call them? Was that your language or theirs? Mine it needs to be. Yes. Did they call them? Was that your language or theirs? Mine. That was mine.

Okay. I just like the American Ceramics Association being like, the scientific designation for this kind of problematic fecal matter is tenacious poops. Yes. No. No, that came out of my own brain. So with this slippery, slippery surface, no extra water assistance is needed to get poops where they need to be. The researchers suggested that with a combo of their spray and then properly calibrated toilets, each flush could end up needing half the water.

And on top of that, toilets treated with this spray were found in lab studies to have way less bacteria on them and need way less cleaning, which would make toilets safer. And then there are lots of things that they were taught. Like many of the articles also said that this treatment had other applications. But the toilet thing must be like really what they're banking on because I couldn't find any other applications. But it's probably nice to make a lot of stuff really slippery. So in the future, we might not have to worry about particularly sticky poops. And the future may also hold toilets that are more ecological and sanitary. Well, I love that.

I do push back against anyone who cares about the bacterial content of a toilet bowl. The one place in the world I am least likely to touch. the one place in the world I am least likely to touch. I think that comes into play more at like in places where a toilet would be helpful, but maybe cleaning the toilet is much more difficult or like in hospitals and stuff where you just never know. You just never know if a patient in the hospital is going to just put their face into the toilet bowl.

Well, one thing I was reading about when I was researching was that they found some bidets in a Japanese hospital that were spraying out like some really virulent thing. And now people are kind of like, maybe we need to rethink bidets. And since those are more common in the rest of the world,

it might be helpful to have a cleaner toilet environment. I was feeling like they were pretty dang equal until I found out that Sam's weird toilet spray might save like a tenth of the water used by households in america yeah but the lemur toilets save the lemurs

and the lemurs aren't using any water toilets use no water is that tree coated in a super slick spray that means that the lemurs don't have to worry about getting sick no they're gonna lick that shit to worry about getting sick? No, they're going to lick that shit. They're going to lick it with their mouths. They're going to slide down while they're pooping. Yeah. Whee! I think if you combine our facts, you have the perfect fact.

But since Sam was already in the lead, I've got to give this episode to Sam because he's looking out for science and the environment while these lemurs are just looking out for themselves, as far as I can tell. And that means it's time to ask the science couch. We've got a listener question for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from AtHappily, who asks, Would it be more water saving for everyone to switch to those airplane sucking toilets? And would that even be viable as a public system? That's an interesting question.

I feel like it would certainly use less water, but I think there might be more to it than that. So there's the blue water ones where they just like use the blue water. And I feel like that's just there's going to be a lot of that's just like recirculated blue water yeah but then the sucker ones i feel like that would certainly save water but uh you'd need some way of creating the suction yeah so the way it works like so our i mean our normal toilets are non-airplane toilets use gravity to basically when you're flushing it's like part of what's happening is the gravity is carrying your water into like the sewer system. But on planes, you don't want a bowl full of water while you're going to the bathroom because it's going to slosh around. Same if you're like on a bus or anything, like it's just it's not particularly comfortable.

So that's why instead they use vacuums. So they're called vacuum toilets. You'll use the vacuum to basically suck everything into the tank after you flush. So one thing I found where they were comparing the amount of water that these different systems use, older toilets would use up to five gallons of water per flush. Water-saving toilets that are, I think, more recent will use about 1.6 gallons of water per flush. And then vacuum systems use about half a gallon. So what you're saying is we don't need Sam's Super Spray anymore.

Yeah. Or you might be able to make a combo. Because there are actually vacuum-assisted toilets out there where they are flush, but they have an additional kind of vacuum assist to basically help not use as much water but there's just not a lot of uh buying options out there i guess the market's just not great but in terms of like using vacuum toilets overall there are actually places that have not necessarily a lot of vacuum toilets but they have vacuum sewage systems um or vacuum sewers instead of like our water sewers and apparently they do particularly

well in places that have flat terrain because for our gravity systems, you kind of need a certain angle to be able to get things to keep flowing. Also, the water sewage systems don't work great in places where you need to protect the water, places that get really cold seasonally, places with low or seasonal population density, because like those kinds of places, you're not getting regular use of the toilet. So like people might be flushing a lot one time of the year and then the rest of the year, it's pretty infrequent. So that can lead to sedimentation.

So in some of these places, they've turned to vacuum sewer systems because they're a lot easier to maintain. They have smaller pipes and they're like a lot shallower. So you actually don't even need manholes for them. And so even though they're more prone to breaking, they're also easier to fix because they're super shallow. It's very easy to replace things. So people generally seem to like them. But I think because we have a lot of places with the sort of existing sewer infrastructure, it's just sort of a matter of like, well, is it worth it to completely take

out the current sewage system and then replace it? Well, I had not ever thought about that being used outside of the traveling vehicle circumstance. I had always assumed, and I guess probably somewhat rightly, that there are reasons why they do it that way on buses and planes, but not on houses. Because it works pretty well. We've got it right now. Yeah. Especially if we could get a special poop stick coating spray. We just need slipperier toilets. Thank you, Sam, for saying it the way I should have said it in the first place.

If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us at SciShowTangents on Twitter. slipperier toilets. Thank you, Sam, for saying it the way I should have said it in the first place. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us at SciShow Tangents on Twitter, where we're going to tweet out the topics

for upcoming episodes every single week. Thank you to at Pat Kelly Teaches at XBree Ash and everybody else who tweeted us your questions

for this episode. Deboki, thank you so much for coming on SciShow Tangents. Deboki is often operating behind the scenes making our games and making our trivia facts and making sure that we don't lie to you. Or except for when we're supposed to lie.

Yeah, right. Unless we're supposed to lie. And it is a pleasure, as always, to have you pop in and out sometimes and share your wit and wisdom with us. Thank you for having me. I've heard that you're also on another podcast that is about to happen or just came out. Yes. So this week, the week that this podcast is coming out on Friday, August 6th, I have a four-episode series coming out each week of August for Scientific American's Science Talk podcast. In each episode, I'm going

to be talking about basically science books. I'm going to be talking about two science books at a time that are on like a similar kind of topic and just talking about like what I learned from reading them and what I enjoyed about them. So if you like reading about science or you're looking for some science books to get you through all your science needs. Tune into that and we can talk about science books together. I do love science books. What's the first one you're talking about? So the very first episode, we're going to be talking about fishes. So I'm going to be talking about The Book of Eels by Patrick Svensson

and Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller. God, that one's weird. Oh yeah, it is. I loved it. It's so good i thought it was going to be a very different book than it was yeah yeah i thought it was going to be a book about why fish don't exist yeah if you like this episode and you want to help us out it's super easy to do that you can go to patreon.com slash scishow tangents to become a patreon patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes.

For example, our first episode of Poopy Peepypedia came out today. Our only episode of Poopy Peepypedia. It's our first episode of Poopy Peepypedia. I'm like, look, it went fine and there's more to cover. As this very episode makes clear. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, you can just tell people about us.

Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sam Schultz. I've been Deboki Chakravarti. And SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakrabarty. With additional research this week from Sari Reilly. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna Medish. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you.

And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. We are trained from a young age on how to use a toilet. You put your butt on the seat and then you do the thing. We are trained from a young age on how to use a toilet. You put your butt on the seat and then you do the thing. But in 1982, William O. Holmes patented an invention that connects the other end of your digestive system to the bowl. This is a fresh air breathing device method, and it was for emergencies. Like if you're trapped in a fire or in danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. It's basically a toilet snorkel. It's a long tube that you stick into the toilet bowl until you reach the air gap in the water trap.

And that air gap may be filled with some residual farts, but it's better than breathing in smoke while you are being slowly asphyxiated before the rescue team gets to you. That's the wildest shit. Well, I mean, I got to admit, it's a pretty ingenious thing to think of. Yeah, well, now if I'm ever like dying in a burning building, I'm going to be like, there's fresh air right on the other side of this toilet. I can't get to it. Well, you could bring a hose. You could put a hose by your toilet.

I mean, I guess there's no reason not to just use a hose, but I don't have a hose by my toilet. Well, okay. I'm bringing one over right now.