Nowhere To Go

In a recent appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Emmy-nominated actress Christina Hendricks of Mad Men fame said that although (as the daughter of a forest ranger) she'd grown up doing some hard-core camping, she liked having indoor plumbing too much to repeat the experience.

It may have worked for Star Trek, but going where no man has gone before has perils, as does going outdoors in the the same place everyone else does... On Monday 7/19/10, the BBC's Anna Lacey reported on a project to improve sanitation in rural areas of Kenya -- where 46% of the population are among the over one billion people in the world who only have access to pit latrines.

Problematic for anyone stuck in one of those Freudian phases.

If you see one of these, watch your step!

It's new British robot called Ecobot III, that can survive for seven days at a time by consuming biomass and excreting waste...
A lot of waste. The bot is only able to convert about 1% of the material it consumes into energy.

In the bid to create autonomous robots, researchers turned to biomass as an energy source. By being able to feed themselves, robots could be set to work for long periods without intervention.

Such food-munching robots have been demonstrated in the past, often generating power with the help of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) - bio-electrochemical devices that enlist cultures of bacteria to break down food to generate power. Until now, though, no one has remedied the messy but inevitable issue of finding a way to evacuate the waste these bugs produce.

"Whether you see the takeaway here as being a robot that eats or a robot that poops is up to you," said John Moe, host of American Public Media's Future Tense.

“Diarrhea-bot would be more appropriate,” conceded Bristol Robotics Laboratory director Chris Melhuish telling New Scientist, “It’s not exactly knocking out rabbit pellets.”