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New Ingestible Pill Can Track Your Farts In Real Time (arstechnica.com)
A group of Australian researchers have developed an ingestible electronic capsule to monitor gas levels in the human gut. "When it's paired with a pocket-sized receiver and a mobile phone app, the pill reports tail-wind conditions in real time as it passes from the stomach to the colon," reports Ars Technica. The invention has been reported in the journal Nature Electronics. From the report: The authors are optimistic that the capsule's gas readings can help clear the air over the inner workings of our intricate innards and the multitudes of microbes they contain. Such fume data could clarify the conditions of each section of the gut, what microbes are up to, and which foods may cause problems in the system. Until now, collecting such data has been a challenge. The capsule is 26mm in length, with a 9.8mm external diameter -- like a large vitamin. Its polymer shell surrounds sensors for temperature, CO2, H2, and O2, as well as a button-size silver oxide battery and a transmission system. One end of the capsule contains a gas-permeable membrane that allows for fast diffusion of gut gases.
The main utility of such a pill + phone app would be to let everyone else around me know when I'm about to fart. I will know anyway.
Also, it would make excuses like "It wasn't me!" completely moot.
Naturally the article is on arstechnica!
We're Creating a Perfect Storm of Unprecedented Global Warming
I thought it was because they were using pH to which would be affected by H2 and CO2. But it turns out they're actually interested in H2, O2 and CO2
https://www.nature.com/article...
Researches have previously shown that the microbial community of the intestine can be rapidly and reproducibly modulated by food19. Our data are complemented by the analysis of the microbial community of the faecal samples and metabolomic analysis of faecal short chain fatty acids (SCFA). The focus of our discussion is on the O2, H2 and, to some extent, CO2 profiles. O2 is chosen due to the fact that different segments of the gut have very different O2 concentration levels. Furthermore, and because the movement of the capsules through the gut is governed by the type of dietary intake, we examined whether the O2 profile can be used to identify the location of the capsule and the speed of food passage through each segment. This process of localizing the position of the capsule in the gastrointestinal tract is benchmarked with ultrasound31.
To investigate fermentation of the food intake in the gut both CO2 and H2 profiles were obtained. However, the H2 profiles are of more interest here, as CO2 profile can still be interfered with the respiratory production. H2 plays an important role in understanding the microbial fermentation of the food in the gut as it appears in their metabolic pathways. Gut fermentation is the anaerobic process by which most small bowel and colonic microbes gain energy from unabsorbed food. From previous flatus and measurements in vitro, it is known that H2 excretion varies markedly with different food substrates. H2 by-production is critical for initiating and continuous fermentation, while excessive H2 is thermodynamically counterproductive, restricting further fermentation. This is naturally mitigated as H2 concentration is regulated by its simultaneous oxidation, which is conducted by three main groups of H2-utilizing microbes: reductive acetogens, methanogens and sulphate-reducing bacteria10. These microbes, together with flatus and breath excretion, dynamically reduce H2 concentration. Overall, the first step to understand the food fermentation in the gut is measuring the dynamics of H2 in situ, which has so far not been possible. The capabilities of our gas capsule in measuring H2 are explored in this work through modulating the dietary fibre content (excluding readily fermentable carbohydrates) of the food intake of the subjects in various scenarios.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
sounds like a load of guff to me.
it is about fats, am I right? I bet if it was measuring temperature, acidity, pressure, anything other than farts.. it would not have made it on the front page.
I have been able to track mine in real time for most of my life, the only exceptions being when I had particularly bad colds.
It's a suppository!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Unless the tracking data can be auto posted to facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram and blogger it is useless.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What a time to be alive!
Like a large vitamin? Have you even seen a vitamin 1cm in diameter? If this is what you call a "large" vitamin, call me when they make a device the size of a regular vitamin.
Actually if they could make a version of this for cows (and "persuade" the cows not to chew it on the way down) it might be able to retrieve some important data on their methane production.
For those who don't know, methane is a much (20x) "stronger" greenhouse gas (and that's not even counting the smell). Ruminants are supposedly a large source of the gas (and I guess leaks from oil production and distribution) and so if a way to reduce their "emissions" were found that still allowed them to digest their food that could play a small but not insignificant role in reducing climate change. Perhaps genetically engineering the microbes so that they are not so methanogenic or adding some methane consuming microbes to their intestinal flora would do the trick.
Or perhaps either 1) reducing the amount of "meat" eaten (not for me) or 2) perhaps growing the meat in tissue cultures or 3) making really good substitute "meat" using genetically engineered plants that taste like meat (through the inclusion of hemoglobin like iron associated proteins that give meat its taste).
Underneath all of our fancy gadgets, clothing, titles, money, and neurosis, we are still giggling monkeys in the bush, lighting our farts and hoping that the resulting glee will somehow diminish the pain of eternal darkness after death. No wonder our society is so neurotic.
Alternative Right.
Didn't the McKenzie brothers have prior art: "It wasn't me, eh. It was the chair"; "Check the machine, he's lying, eh?"; "He's lying alright!"
Cows get all the blame but termites emit more methane than cows.
I have been reading Slashdot for years in the hopes of a real, practical, cutting edge technology with real world applications. FINALLY!
Has its own soundtrack:
I go to your land down under
Where wind blows and then chunders
It's like scientists are now TRYING to win Ignobel Prizes.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
"Vegeta, what does the pill say about his flatulence level!?"
"It's over NINE THOUSAAAAND!!!"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...Someone blows smoke up your ass?
Last time I used the word fart was in the 3rd grade.
What do you say now, two years later?
Or have you become so repressed that you pretend it does not happen and that there's never a reason to talk about it?
methane itself is odorless.
While it's described as odorless, and that the odor in most cases is due to an additive to make it smell for safety reasons, methane gas has a faint smell because a small amount of it will create methyl inside your nostrils, which in turn reacts in the carbon and sulphur rich moist environment, turning into all sorts of fun compounds.
Seems to me that Arstechnica really earned their name with this article...
Methane doesn't smell.
Farts smell because of the organosulfur compounds that go along with them.
Natural gas smells because the utility adds stinky mercaptans (also organosulfur compounds, like most smelly stuff) so you can smell dangerous gas leaks.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Jeez, I need to get out more.
Yeah, for those who don't know:
Can We Reduce Cow Methane Emissions By Breeding Low-Emission Cattle?
Carbon, Methane Emissions and the Dairy Cow
Here's an idea. Let's invent a small device that measures water, and then toss it into the nearest lake, to see what it finds.
Man, that's a lot of water!
There are journals these days that would even publish your final report.
What surprises me is they don't include a sensor that picks up sulfide gases like H2S.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
The one who tracked it.. cracked it.
Or have you become so repressed that you pretend it does not happen and that there's never a reason to talk about it?
I'd mod you up if I could.
Fecal humor exists in every human culture for a reason: We can't escape our biology.
Humanity is united in knowing that even Emperors and Kings can't escape it. It doesn't take much of a Google search to see the POTUS doing it. (I don't think it matters which POTUS...)
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
For you.
Cows don't generate most of their methane from farts, it comes out of their mouths as burps. We also already have massive information about their methane production and even ways to massive reduce it through feed, however those feeding methods tend to only be viable in feedlots where you can control what they eat.
So... you're saying this story is a bunch of hot air?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.