The gases are then fed into solid-oxide fuel cells, which use chemical reactions to convert the methane into electricity. The process generates up to three times as much electricity as when the toilet paper is burned, making it about as efficient as a natural gas power plant. But it produces only about one-sixth the amount of greenhouse gases of a coal-fired power plant. The researchers estimate that if all the toilet paper in Amsterdam were converted to electricity using the process, enough energy would be generated to power 6,400 homes. (A different pilot project in the Dutch city of Alkmaar converts the toilet paper into cellulose pellets that can be added to asphalt and used to pave roads.)
If all the toilet paper in Amsterdam were converted to electricity using the process, enough energy would be generated to power 6,400 homes.
Recyclers: The Park Spark Project
Recycling: Dog poop, into light
Details: After a dog does its business, that “business” releases methane gas as it biodegrades. Normally the methane escapes into the air, but the Park Spark Project, which has been installed in a dog park in Cambridge, Massachusetts, traps the methane and uses it to power a gas street lamp. Dog owners deposit the waste into a large fiberglass tank called a “bio-digester” connected to the lamp, then turn a wheel on the tank to mix the new waste with the poop that’s already in there. This helps to release the methane, which flows through a pipe to the lamp, where it powers an “eternal flame.”
The fictional character Cyrano de Bergerac was inspired by a real person, the French novelist Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655).
Recyclers: Sanitation and Health Rights in India, a group that builds blocks of public toilets in communities that don’t have them already
Recycling: Human waste, into “safe, well-maintained and hygienic toilets”
Details: The waste that’s collected in the toilets is fed into a bio-digester, and the methane that’s created by the waste is used to power a pump that draws water from a well. The water is then filtered, bottled, and sold to the public for about 2¢ a gallon. The income generated pays about half the cost of maintaining the toilets and keeping them clean, increasing the likelihood that the community will put them to use.
Recyclers: GENeco, a wastewater treatment company in Bristol, England
Recycling: Household sewage and organic waste, into bus fuel
Details: GENeco collects the methane produced by decaying sewage and food waste in its wastewater plant and uses it to power its “Bio-Bus,” a city bus converted to run on natural gas. The bus can travel 185 miles on a single tank, and it produces considerably less air pollution than a bus powered by fossil fuels. If you visit Bristol and want to take a ride on the “Poo Bus,” as it’s affectionately known, it won’t be hard to find: look for the one decorated with a giant mural of people sitting on toilets, and the caption, “This GENeco Bio-Bus is powered by your waste for a sustainable future.” The bus serves Bristol’s Number 2 bus route. (Get it? Number 2!)
If you want to take a ride on the “Poo Bus,” as it’s affectionately known, look for the one decorated with a giant mural of people sitting on toilets.
Recyclers: Norrebro Bryghus, a Danish brewery
Recycling: Urine, into what the BBC says could be “the ultimate sustainable hipster beer”
Details: In 2015 the brewery collected 50,000 liters (about 13,200 gallons) of urine from the urinals at the Roskilde Festival, northern Europe’s largest music festival, held each summer in Roskilde, Denmark. They used the urine to fertilize fields where barley is grown, instead of using manure or chemical fertilizers. Then they used the barley to brew 60,000 bottles’ worth of a special pilsner beer called Pisner.
“When the news that we had started brewing the Pisner came out, a lot of people thought we were filtering the urine to put it directly in the beer and we had a good laugh about that,” Henrik Vang, Norrebro Bryghus’s chief executive, told the BBC. The brewery sells Pisner at the Roskilde Festival, where, presumably, it will be “beercycled” into the next batch of Pisner.
More marriages have resulted from The Biggest Loser cast members than…
Recyclers: A research team at the University of Ghent, in Belgium
Recycling: Urine, into fertilizer, drinking water…and more beer
Details: In 2016 the researchers developed a machine that uses solar energy and a special filter membrane to process the urine. The pee is heated in a boiler using only sunlight, then it is forced through the membrane to filter out potassium, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients. The nutrients are collected for use as fertilizer, and the filtered water that’s left over is safe to drink. The researchers hope to introduce the technology in developing countries where both fertilizer and safe drinking water are hard to come by. And in a nod to the Roskilde Festival, someone came up with the idea of using the recovered water to brew a batch of beer. “We call it ‘from sewer to brewer,’ ” University of Ghent researcher Sebastiaan Derese told Reuters.
“We call it ‘from sewer to brewer.’ ”
A STASH OF ’STACHE JOKES
Q: What did Sherlock say when his crime-fighting partner grew a mustache?
A: “Watson your face?”
Q: Where do mustaches go for a drink?
A: To the handle bar.
Did you hear about the guy who tried to grow a mustache? He didn’t like how it felt at first, but then it started to grow on him.
Q: What has two beards and rocks?
A: ZZ Top.
This guy told everyone on the internet that he had a beard, but then he posted a picture of himself, and he was totally clean-cut. What a bald-faced liar!
We had one more mustache joke to tell you…but we had to shave it for later.
…from people on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette combined.
KING OTTO THE CRAZY
You’ve heard of Ivan the Terrible, but have you heard of Carlota, the Wench of Queluz? More rulers with odd nicknames are on page 63.
MICHAEL the CAULKER (1015–1042)
Today we think of caulk as the stuff that carpenters put around doors and windows to keep the cold air out (or in), but for much of history the term referred to the materials that made a ship’s hull watertight. Michael gets his nickname because his father, Stephen, started out as a caulker of ships in the Byzantine Empire. (The Byzantine Empire is what the Eastern Roman Empire was called after the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in 474). Stephen rose from that lowly position to become an admiral, and then married Maria, the sister of Emperor Michael IV.
Michael the Caulker was the product of Stephen and Maria’s union, and he became a favorite of the emperor’s wife, Zoe. The emperor had no children, so Zoe maneuvered to have Michael named heir to the throne. When the emperor died in 1041, Michael succeeded him as Michael V. He reigned for four months with Zoe as his co-emperor…and then he tried to banish her to the island of Prinkipo and rule the empire by himself. He found out the hard way that she was a lot more popular than he was: An angry mob surrounded the palace and forced him to restore her to power. The next day, Michael was deposed. He fled to a monastery and took vows to become a monk in an attempt to save himself, but it didn’t do any good. He was captured, blinded, and castrated by an angry mob. He died a few months later.
CARLOTA, the WENCH of QUELUZ (1775–1830)
Carlota, the eldest daughter of King Charles IV of Spain, was only 10 years old when her parents arranged her marriage to her 18-year-old cousin, Prince John, the infante of Portugal, in 1785.
In 1799 John became the de facto ruler of Portugal when his mother, Queen Maria, was incapacitated by mental illness. Once he was in charge, Carlota tried to meddle in state affairs and slant the government’s policies in favor of Spain. When Prince John resisted, she conspired to have him declared insane as well, so that she could rule the country in his place. But the plot was discovered and Carlota was banished to the Queluz palace (the source of her nickname) while Prince John lived in another p
alace.
You’ve got company: There are roughly 10 times as many bacterial cells in your body as there are human cells.
Two years later, in 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Portugal and the royal family, Carlota included, fled to Brazil, then a Portuguese colony. There, Carlota schemed with Spanish officials and South American nationalists to create a kingdom of her own, either by carving out territory from what is now Argentina and Uruguay, or by overthrowing Prince John and becoming queen of Brazil. That plot failed too.
Napoleon fell from power in 1815, and in 1821 John returned home to Portugal. While he’d been away, liberal reformers had passed a new constitution limiting the king’s powers, a situation that John accepted but that Carlota was determined to reverse. This time she schemed with her son, Prince Miguel, in two separate plots to depose King John and restore an absolute monarchy with Miguel as king, but John foiled these conspiracies as well. When Queen Carlota was caught plotting yet again to overthrow her husband, he finally had enough. Carlota was placed under house arrest in Queluz palace. She was still confined there when she died, possibly by suicide, in 1830.
OTTO the CRAZY (1848–1916)
Many kings and queens have battled mental illness; it’s perhaps one of the unfortunate consequences of so many marriages between royal cousins. King Otto of Bavaria is an unusual example of a king who was so insane that he was never allowed to rule his kingdom at all. He was the younger brother of Mad King Ludwig (1845–1886), who ruled from 1864 to 1886. Ludwig’s erratic behavior and penchant for squandering his family fortune building one castle after another (including Neuschwanstein, the inspiration for the castles in Disney theme parks) led the Bavarian government to depose him in 1886. He and his personal physician drowned under mysterious circumstances three days later.
Crazy Otto was Mad Ludwig’s successor, but because of his mental illness, the Bavarian government appointed his uncle, Prince Luitpold, to rule in his name as regent until Otto was well enough to take the throne. That day never came: 26 years later, he was deposed in favor of a cousin who became King Ludwig III in 1913. Otto died three years later. Today historians can only guess at the source of his mental illness. It may have been post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his fighting in both the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. It’s also possible that his condition was caused by having contracted syphilis, or that he was schizophrenic.
Odds of a perfect deal in bridge (all four players receive a complete suit): 1 in 2,235,197,406,895,366,368,301,559,999.
LARGEST AMERICAN
BUSINESS LAYOFFS
These mega-companies may specialize in manufacturing, retail, and finance…but they’re also industry leaders in handing out pink slips.
IBM
Big Blue’s long list of business innovations is proof that they’re one of the most important tech companies ever. The ATM, the PC, the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic strip card, and the bar code are just a few of them. But the company’s decision not to build a proprietary operating system or microprocessor in the early 1980s gave Microsoft and Intel free reign to grow, and that proved nearly fatal for IBM. The PC revolution quickly rendered IBM’s core business of selling mainframe computers obsolete. By 1992, it was a bloated company of 400,000 that posted a loss of $8.1 billion. In 1993, for the first time in its history, IBM looked outside the company to hire a new CEO, Louis Gerstner. Gerstner immediately initiated the company’s first-ever layoffs and axed 60,000 employees. This is still the American record for the most layoffs at one time. Now, more than a century after its founding, IBM is thriving as a smarter, leaner company…but it came at a huge cost.
CITIGROUP
The Great Recession of 2008 resulted in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and it spared very few, including the financial giants responsible for causing it. In November 2008, with the financial collapse of American business looking frighteningly imminent, in November, Citigroup announced that it was laying off more than 50,000 employees. Combined with previous layoffs at the start of the crisis, the financial giant eliminated nearly 15 percent of its workforce, while its stock price plummeted to less than $1 per share. To prevent further damage to the global economy, the U.S. government deemed Citigroup “too big to fail” and bailed it out with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.
SEARS ROEBUCK
Sears was once America’s largest retailer, but few people born after the 1990s even recognize the brand today. Sears’s retail troubles go back to 1993. That was the year the company ended production of its famous “Wish Book”—the phone book–sized catalog that was a staple of American homes. It was also the year the company laid off 50,000 employees in an attempt to stave off competition from companies like Walmart. It didn’t work. In 2004, Sears underwent a merger with K-Mart, which had filed for bankruptcy two years prior to the purchase. Since 2006, Sears has gone from more than 3,000 stores to fewer than 600.
Collectively, commuters in Los Angeles drive 300 million miles a day, the equivalent of driving to the Moon and back more than 600 times.
DID YOU KNOW?
According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, it costs an employer $2,746 for every $25,000 of the old employee’s salary to recruit, hire, and train their replacement. (That doesn’t include severance pay.)
GENERAL MOTORS
For years, American car companies refused to adapt to changing consumer needs and international competition. And when the Great Recession hit in 2008, the curtain nearly closed on America’s automobile industry. In order to qualify for a $50 billion government bailout, in 2009 GM underwent a massive restructuring that resulted in the elimination of approximately a third of its brands and the layoffs of 47,000 employees, including 35 percent of its executives. The government’s unprecedented investment in GM was a success: by 2010, the company paid back its loan, and in 2013, the federal government sold off the rest of its GM stock. While the loss of jobs was tremendous, many economists feel it was inevitable, because without the bailout, the company would not have survived.
AT&T
In 1996 AT&T announced its shocking decision to lay off 40,000 employees. The reason it was so shocking: unlike the rest of the companies on this list, AT&T was doing extremely well at the time. But the layoffs were part of the company’s plan to divide its telecommunications equipment, communication services, and computer divisions into separate companies. Wall Street cheered the news as AT&T’s stock went up $2.63 per share in reaction to the announcement. (AT&T’s employees did not have the same reaction.)
BOEING
The 9/11 attacks forever changed the aviation industry. Air travel was limited, planes were grounded, airport security became super-tight, and people weren’t flying. Boeing, which built the four planes that were hijacked by al Qaeda terrorists, was jolted immediately. Within a month of the attacks, America’s largest aerospace business laid off 31,000 workers—a third of the company. Boeing wasn’t alone. The attacks caused nearly every major airline to dismiss at least 10,000 employees, and the entire industry had to be bailed out by the federal government at the cost of $15 billion.
Unlike most birds, the female albatross lays only one egg per year.
STRANGE CRIME:
SELFIE-INCRIMINATION
These days, it’s not enough to just accomplish a goal. People need to know about it! That’s where selfies come in handy. Hold the phone at arm’s length, snap the pic, and hit the “share” button. However, if your goal was achieved by breaking the law, you might want to skip that last part.
ONE CLICK TOO MANY
Brazilian convict Brayan Bremer was one of over 100 inmates who escaped from prison during a 2017 riot. He’s also the only one who stopped long enough to take a photo of himself and a fellow escapee giving a thumbs-up. The clicks he heard shortly after posting the selfie on Facebook weren’t “likes,” they were handcuffs.
OUTLAW IN-LAW
When Amanda Taylor’s husban
d, Rex, hanged himself in 2014, she blamed her father-in-law, Charles Taylor. After all, Rex was strung out on drugs and it was Charles who had introduced his son to drug use when he was still a teen. The hate and anger built up for months until Amanda released it by stabbing her 59-year-old father-in-law in the chest with a knife so long that she claimed she barely got any blood on her clothes. The knife, however, dripped with it. How do we know? From the selfie she took next to her father-in-law’s dead body. “I was just really excited,” Amanda said later, “and I was like hey, I’m gonna take a picture so I can post it and show everyone.” The photo earned her life in prison.
BUT…WHY?
There are some things you just shouldn’t do in Thailand. That’s what American tourists Joseph Dasilva, 38, and Travis Dasilva, 36, discovered when they took a selfie in front of Bangkok’s Temple of the Dawn. They were arrested at the Bangkok airport while trying to board a flight to the United States, fined 5,000 baht ($154), and detained awaiting possible charges of violating Thailand’s Computer Crime Act. If that seems harsh, consider that the photo was posted to their Instagram account: traveling_butts. Yes, it was a photo of their bare bottoms. The act of exposing themselves at a religious site in this conservative country could have resulted in 12 years in prison. And a second photo they’d posted, taken at another Thai temple, left no ifs, ands…or butts…about their guilt. (Lucky for them, the charges were dropped.)
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