Over the last few years, scientists have turned to a new source to discover statistics about everything from diet to drug usage: your poop. Taking samples from sewers is a fantastic way to find out more about a population, bypassing the difficulty of getting people to answer surveys and peeling back the layers of stigma that prevents people from being honest about their habits. As MIT engineer Carlo Ratti says, "the sewage system is the great aggregator."

MIT Senseable City Lab

MIT's program Underworlds is now taking sewage sampling to a new level, creating a robot named (what else) Luigi that will hang out in sewage pipes and measure the amounts of various chemicals it finds there. This could be hugely helpful, even for real-time events like a disease outbreak, which the robot would be able to pick up on more quickly than health professionals.

"It's dangerous to be leaning over a manhole holding a 20-foot sampling pole," Mariana Matus, an Underworlds researcher, told Wired. Luigi will enable researchers to collect this data more efficiently and safely than before.

The project will expand to Boston and Kuwait City later this year, allowing MIT to see a diverse range of data from those populations. "Often, data from the people with the most problems isn't recorded, because they don't go to the doctor," Matus says. But everyone contributes to the biology of the sewage system, whether they think about it or not.

Source: Wired

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