toilets

That virus likely came from a single employee who happened to be shedding an enormous quantity of a very weird variant. The researchers would desperately like to find that person. But what if that person doesn’t want to be found? A few years ago, Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri, became obsessed with weird covid variants he was seeing in wastewater samples. The ones that caught his eye were odd in a couple of different ways: they didn’t match any of the common variants, and they didn’t circulate.…

A woman has become an internet sensation as a result of her passion for hygiene. But most recently, the diligent woman went viral for her unconventional and upbeat approach to cleaning a neglected grave, sparking online controversy and scrutiny.Known by her 1 million TikTok followers as “_the-clean_girl,” the influencer left her viewers particularly unsettled by her unusual speaking style, reminiscent of the automated voice on TikTok, which was seemingly inappropriately upbeat for a video of this nature.The video in…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeWim Wenders’s new film Perfect Days is perhaps the only Oscar nominee in history to be based on a series of Japanese public toilets. Just when you thought we’d exhausted every conceivable type of intellectual property, here comes the German auteur to offer a whole new definition of IP. In 2022, Wenders was approached by the Tokyo Toilet art project, which had commissioned leading…

Not all movie heroes wear capes, it is said, but only the rare, cherished few don rubber gloves and blue overalls. Perfect Days, the gorgeous new drama from the German director Wim Wenders, is about one such man of action: a lone wolf in crowded modern-day Japan. Middle-aged Hirayama is employed by Tokyo Toilet and drives a small van from one public convenience to the next. Like Travis Bickle and Dirty Harry, he’s on a mission to clean up the city. Unlike them, Hirayama means literally: he comes with brushes, squeegees…

“Hey, Google, warm up my toilet.” Image: KohlerCES is about more than just the gadgets you hold in your hand or sit at the desk to use. It’s about the stuff in your bathroom, too, which is why Kohler is using the annual trade show to debut its latest in connected fixtures. The new items include a new shower sprayer, a ventilation fan that helps with humidity after a long shower, and my favorite, the PureWash Bidet Seat with Google and Alexa built-in.Google’s Antitrust Case Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to AIThe…

If you take a morning shower at the voco Brussels City North hotel, the water that you see trickling down the drain as you wash your hair might visit you again later — when you flush the toilet in the evening.  However, before that shower water returns to swirl around your toilet bowl and dash, at last, towards the city’s sewers, it will go through a special treatment process enabled by a chain of fridge-like machines in the hotel’s basement. “Every time you flush your toilet, you actually…

When you push the button or press the handle to flush a toilet, you probably don't give much more thought to whatever is swirling down — but a Kitchener, Ont., engineer thinks maybe you should.Barbara Robinson says she wants to change the national plumbing code so that all washrooms have a trash can in each stall. This would encourage people to throw out sanitary products and wipes instead of flushing them, which in turn can clog the sewers."It's a huge problem," Robinson, founder of Norton Engineering, said in an…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain A new hate crimes bill is inching closer to the possibility of becoming law in South Africa. The bill entrenches human dignity as a foundational value of the country by providing for penalties for explicit acts of violence and discrimination motivated by prejudice and intolerance. However, prejudice and…

EA has just revealed a lot of stats for its recent game Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, for the last month, detailing the choices players have made in the game's customization options and how they're dying the most.Thanks to the official EA Star Wars account, we know that one of the most popular things to do is unclogging Greez's toilet, because over 861,000 players have done it so far. On top of that, Rick The Door Technician somehow managed to kill 489 players.In addition to Rick killing nearly 500 players,…

The toilet seat taken from the House of Ahiel, excavated in the Old City of Jerusalem. A domestic building made up of seven rooms, it would have housed an upper-class family at the time. Date of construction is hard to pin down, with some placing it around the 8th century BCE. Credit: F. Vukasavovic A new analysis of ancient feces taken from two Jerusalem latrines dating back to the biblical Kingdom of Judah has uncovered…