SCIENCE REPORT

You flushed the toilet; they made the bricks

It might be unpleasant to contemplate the material from your own body that you flush down the pipes. But let’s talk about biosolids — the disinfected leftovers from the water-treatment process.

The sandy material contains nutrient-rich organic content that’s good for agriculture. But it also makes nice bricks.

“Biosolids bricks look the same, smell the same and have similar physical and mechanical properties as normal fired clay bricks,” said Abbas Mohajerani, a civil engineer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia.

Mohajerani and a team of researchers have collected and mixed biosolids with soil to make hybrid bricks of varying proportions. They fired them for 10 hours, at nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and cooled them, then compared them in tests to normal bricks.

The researchers proposed that incorporating just 15 percent of biosolids into all the bricks made around the world each year would eliminate all biosolids not used in agriculture.

Obesity causing cancer at even younger ages

The risk of developing obesity-related cancer is increasing in successive generations.

Researchers studied the incidence of 30 of the most common cancers from 1995 to 2014 in people ages 25 to 84 — more than 14.6 million cases.

Using five-year age cohorts, they found that for six of the 12 obesity-related cancers (multiple myeloma, colorectal, uterine, gallbladder, kidney and pancreatic) the risk for disease increased in adults 25 to 49, with the magnitude of the increases steeper with younger age.