Excrement is an unexpected hero. While not a subject discussed in polite company, in both medical and environmental arenas poop is coming to the rescue.

Take, for example, the positive buzz surrounding fecal transplants, which are heralded as possible cures for everything from asthma and depression to Crohn’s disease, MS, and the bacterial gut infection c. difficile.

Keep reading …

How many times have you ordered an entrée at a restaurant only to leave a pile of food on your plate, dump the remains into a doggie bag, or stagger out the door with your pants unbuttoned? The new program Halfsies hopes to cut portion sizes for a good cause.

Halfsies wants to break our toxic food attitudes with a wonderfully simple initiative. When at a participating restaurant, choose a menu item with the Halfsies icon next to it and receive a half-portion. You’ll combat food waste as well as eat a healthier amount. You’ll also fight hunger: You pay full price for the plate, and the resulting proceeds are distributed to local nonprofit partners (60 percent), global hunger organizations (30 percent), and back into the Halfsies budget (10 percent).

Keep reading …

What must it feel like to be an astronaut: weightless, rocketing farther and farther from home and country, gazing out your craft’s window at the deepness of space, wondering where you can get a good salad…

As astronauts set their sights on a not-so-distant mission to Mars, scientists are wondering what to put on spacecraft menus. Current packaged meal options, while far more advanced than the nutrition pills and pureed-food tubes of early space travel, aren’t practical for an extended trip, says Alexandra Witze in Science News. “Six astronauts eating 3,000 calories a day for three years, the length of a Mars mission, adds up to 20 tons of prepared food that would need to be launched.”

Keep reading …

Midwives Take On the World’s Most Dangerous Country for Women: Imagine that you are nine months pregnant and have to drive seven hours to reach the nearest hospital. You have never seen an obstetrician or midwife for prenatal care and emergency health services are miles out of reach. This is the situation in parts of Afghanistan, where the maternal mortality rate is the highest in the world.

As of 2008, it was estimated that 1 in 11 Afghan women die in childbirth. (In Greece, the country with the lowest maternal mortality rate, the statistic is 1 in 31,800.) With a fertility rate of 6.62 children per mother, the life expectancy for women in Afghanistan—recently ranked “the most dangerous country for women” by the Thomson Reuters Foundation—is less than 48 years.

Keep reading …

Did the United States poison tens of thousands of its own soldiers in Iraq with fumes from burning toxic trash? Before you consider it an outlandish suggestion, I suggest you read J. Malcolm Garcia’s moving account in the Oxford American of two American soldiers who made it back from their tours of duty having escaped insurgents’ shells, bullets, and improvised explosive devices—only to die slow, torturous deaths from the effects of garbage torched in open pits by the U.S. military.

Personal stories like those of Billy McKenna and Kevin Wilkins may only become more common in coming years, according to Garcia, since the U.S. military operated at least 23 burn pits in Iraq before combat operations ended this year, including a notoriously noxious one that often literally cast a pall over Balad Air Base.

Keep reading …

Chemists are trained to create new molecular compounds in a lab, where they work under fume hoods wearing goggles and gloves to protect themselves from their potentially toxic concoctions. When the experiments are successful, explains Laura Wright Treadway in OnEarth, the chemist often files a molecular patent and the new compound can be used to make consumer products: items like cleaning solvents, baby wipes, water purifiers, lipsticks, television sets, flame retardants, and, of course, all things plastic, from water bottles to rubber duckies to intravenous tubing.

One solution to this devil-may-care approach is green chemistry: the science of creating sustainable compounds that reduce or eliminate toxic substances while also taking into consideration a product’s entire life cycle. Green chemists ask commonsense questions: Will car mechanics be breathing it, as a brake-cleaning solvent, inside the poorly ventilated bowels of an auto shop? Will babies be stuffing it, as a plastic toy, in their mouths? Will everyone who washes clothes be scraping it, in the form of lint, out of their dryers?

Keep reading …

The word tuberculosis may evoke 19th-century tales of pale-faced, consumptive patients seeking respite on a mountaintop sanatorium. But a new story has emerged, writes Sarah Boseley at Guardian.co.uk. Millions of people worldwide have a powerful strain of the disease, termed multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), and 440,000 more acquire it every year.

Doctors Without Borders has come up with a novel way to update our TB education: a blog, in the patients’ own words. “I could try to paraphrase some of what my patients go through,” writes tuberculosis doctor Philipp du Cros, who conceived the TB&Me project last year with the UK medical department, “But never having taken the treatment myself, I don’t think I’m in the best position to do that.”

Keep reading …