Scientists have made a tiny model of a new, incredibly slippery toilet that poop shouldn't stick to.
A slippery new toilet bowl material is resistant to the stickiness of synthetic poop with different moisture contents.
The invention of the flushing toilet revolutionized the way we live, but the innovation came at a cost: namely, 37 billion gallons of water flushed per day globally, the researchers wrote in their recent paper, published Aug. 5 in the journal Advanced Engineering Materials. And often, there's another problem: Even all that flushing isn't enough to remove all of the excrement in the bowl.
"When the contaminants fall on to the surface, they first encounter the lubricant film rather than the surface [itself], which can greatly reduce adhesion," the study authors wrote. Because the lubricating oil is stored throughout the whole toilet, thanks to the porous structure, any oil lost from the surface is quickly replenished from deeper within the material, enabling the bowl to maintain its super-slippy properties. Even intense mechanical abrasion — like that caused by an overenthusiastic scrub with a toilet brush — doesn't diminish the slipperiness, because the material quickly self-heals by shuffling oil to the newly exposed surface.
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