The Most Poo-tiful View On Earth

Climbing Mount Everest is a bucket list item for a lot of people. Deep down, even people who don't want to put themselves through the rigorous training necessary to climb the world's tallest mountain probably want to visit the summit and look down from the literal roof of the world. It's such an iconic landmark, and those who have reached the top probably consider climbing it the crowning achievement of their lives.

But to invoke an old idiom, "everything worth doing is worth overdoing." As hundreds of people clamor at the bit to climb Mount Everest every year, the waste around the summit builds. And because of the thin air and dangerous weather conditions, cleaning up Mount Everest is no easy task. If bodies last long enough in the open to become landmarks, trash certainly won't be picked up.

Of course, discarded granola bar wrappers aren't the only kind of waste deposited on Mount Everest. Which is why, from this day forward, all fecal material expelled during Mount Everest expeditions will have to be cleared and brought back to base camp for proper disposal, according to the local Nepalese municipality that governs the region.

It all comes down to Everest's extreme weather. At the high altitude, excrement doesn't degrade fully, and while in some places climbers bury their waste in the snow, there are other places on the mountain where there simply isn't enough snow to do that. The South Col in particular is a hotspot for accumulating poop, as it both serves as a final base before attacking the summit and is scoured clean by high winds. To be blunt, it stinks up there, and climbers are definitely noticing rocks stained with poop. Not exactly the bucket list experience people are hoping to have.

To get climbers through the roughly 2-week journey up and down the mountain from base camp, the Nepalese government will provide climbers with two bags filled with chemicals that will harden and de-stinkify deposited stool. Sounds more than a little gross, but these bags have been used in Antarctica and during expeditions up Denali, so they do work. It just goes to show you that Scrubs had it right: Everything does come down to poo.

A Post In Which I Write About Poop

You know, maybe it's because it's the beginning of the year, but I was completely stumped as to a subject to write about this week. There just isn't much cool or interesting science news floating around right now, since New Horizons is taking a break from beaming back new information. But you know what? For my actual job, occasionally I write things, and I'm kind of proud of what I wrote this week for our site's "Livin' on the MDedge" feature (The name of the feature was my idea too). So you can read that this week.

What’s Latin for ‘poop’?

The study of the human microbiota has become incredibly important in recent years, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it entails experimenting on poop. Remarkably, no one’s come up with a proper technical name for this unsavory activity. However, thanks to a collaboration between a gastroenterologist and a classics professor at the University of North Carolina, that deficiency is no more. You’ve met the in vivo and in vitro study. Now, please welcome the “in vimo” study!

Why in vimo? The term fecal or “in feco” might seem obvious. But the Latin root word never referred to poop, and if there’s one thing scientists can’t have, it’s improper Latin usage. The Romans, it turns out, had lots of words for poop. The root word of laetamen referred to fertility, richness, and happiness – a tempting prospect – but was mostly used to refer to farm animal dung. Merda mostly referred to smell or stench, and stercus shared the same root word as scatology, which refers to obscene literature. Fimus, which specifically refers to manure, was thus the most precise, and it was used by literary giants such as Livy, Virgil, and Tacitus. A clear winner, and the in vimo study flushed the rest of the competition away.

And just in case you think these researchers are no fun, the name they chose for the active enzymes collected from their in vimo samples? Poopernatants. Yes, even doctors enjoy a good poop joke.

You can see the full feature (my dad is also a contributor, he wrote the "Resistance is fecal" item) here.