The white, polished marble bench seats with a row of holes in them, foricae remains may look beautiful and clean to us today, but that was hardly the case when these facilities were operational, Koloski-Ostrow says. They had low roofs and tiny windows that let in little light. People sometimes missed the holes, so the floors and seats were often soiled and the air surely stunk. Overall Koloski-Ostrow thinks the facilities were so unwelcoming that the Roman elite would use them only under great duress. The upper-class Romans, who sometimes paid for the foricae to be erected, generally wouldn’t set foot in these places. This cookie is used for load balancing purposes. The cookie does not store any personally identifiable data. CHRISTINA WARINNER: Well, although we tend to just flush it away without thinking about it, they’re actually incredibly rich sources of information about ourselves, about our lives, and about our activities. So for example, our feces contain our own DNA. So you can reconstruct a person’s genome from a fecal sample. Steven Dowshen, MD (September 2011). "Stool Test: Bacteria Culture". Kidshealth. Archived from the original on 19 February 2012 . Retrieved 11 February 2012. a b Meyer-Rochow, Victor Benno; Gal, Jozsef (2003). "Pressures produced when penguins pooh?calculations on avian defaecation". Polar Biology. 27 (1): 56–58. doi: 10.1007/s00300-003-0563-3. ISSN 0722-4060. S2CID 43386022.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, archived from the original on 25 September 2015 , retrieved 17 March 2015. Johnson, Steven (2006). The ghost map: the story of London's most terrifying epidemic--and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world. New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN 1-59448-925-4. OCLC 70483471. Archived from the original on 4 March 2022 . Retrieved 21 February 2021. The Origin of the Feces is the second studio album by the American gothic metal band Type O Negative, released in 1992. Dung Throwing contests". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on 11 October 2007. Whitehead, T. R.; Price, N. P.; Drake, H. L.; Cotta, M. A. (25 January 2008). "Catabolic pathway for the production of skatole and indoleacetic acid by the acetogen Clostridium drakei, Clostridium scatologenes, and swine manure". Applied and Environmental Microbiology. 74 (6): 1950–3. Bibcode: 2008ApEnM..74.1950W. doi: 10.1128/AEM.02458-07. PMC 2268313. PMID 18223109.But what we’re really after with this study is we’re trying to understand the evolution of the gut microbiome. We know that the communities of bacteria that live in our gut are highly responsive to the diets that we eat. And we know that industrialized diets have really changed the way that our microbial communities are structured.

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. The fossil record is littered with countless interesting things. Ancient bones of giant beasts, the remains of long extinct plant life, to name a couple. For some researchers, though, nothing is more exciting than finding fossilized feces. Yes, you heard me right. CHRISTINA WARINNER: So the oldest ones we looked at date to around 7,000 years ago and come from Neolithic China. The youngest ones that we looked at are actually just a few centuries old and come from Surrey, England. Where we had a really unusual case where there was a house that was constructed in the 18th century. And someone had taken a chamber pot that had a turd in it and walled it up into the house. Casias A, Newton L. Functional constipation: A case report. J Pediatr Health Care. 2021;35(1):99-103. doi:10.1016/j.pedhc.2020.07.014

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Panda H, Andrews CN. Constipation in a 40-year-old woman. CMAJ. 2016;188(4):277-278. doi:10.1503/cmaj.150761 So overall, while the Cloaca Massima solved Rome’s sewage removal problems, it didn’t solve the city’s health issues. It carried the filth out of the city and dumped it into the Tiber, polluting the very water some citizens depended on for irrigation, bathing, and drinking. And so, while the Romans no longer had to see, or smell, their excrement, they hadn’t done much to eliminate its hazardous nature. Through the next several centuries, as humankind kept concentrating in cities, it would find itself in a bitter battle with its own waste, seemingly with no way to win.