Feces

A fight is brewing over the practice of feeding chicken feces and other poultry farm waste to cattle. A coalition of food and consumer groups that includes Consumers Union and the Center for Science in the Public Interest has asked the Food and Drug Administration to ban the practice. McDonald's Corp., the nation's largest restaurant user of beef, also wants the FDA to prohibit the feeding of so-called poultry litter to cattle. Members of the coalition are threatening to file a lawsuit or to push for federal legislation establishing such a ban if the FDA doesn't act to do so in the coming months.

A hotel room was left in such disgusting condition after February's NFL scouting combine that the manager took pictures and sent them to the event's organizer. National Football Scouting president Jeff Foster confirmed to Yahoo!Sports that a room in the Crowne Plaza in Indianapolis was found after the combine with feces and urine scattered in the bathroom, toothpaste on a mirror and garbage, including uneaten food, all over. "I can confirm that a room was left in an inappropriate condition and we're disappointed by both players who occupied the room," Foster said.

A former Compton high school teacher who apparently soiled herself and then accused students of dumping human urine and feces on her was sentenced Thursday to a year of probation and a four-month suspended jail term for filing a false police report. Shannan Michelle Barron, 29, also was sentenced to 90 days of electronic monitoring and 12 Saturdays working with a highway transportation crew and was ordered to pay $1,000 restitution.

A new study has found that an infusion of feces from a healthy person into an ailing patient's gut was significantly more effective than a traditional antibiotic treatment - raising hopes that the unconventional approach could one day help combat obesity, food allergies and a host of other maladies. The study, published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrated that the fecal transplant cleared up a recurrent bacterial infection far more reliably than the routinely prescribed medication.

A Compton teacher who claims that four students doused her with human excrement this summer was charged Thursday with one misdemeanor count of filing a false police report. Shannan Barron, a 28-year-old teacher at Dominguez High School, could face six months in jail and a $1,000 fine if found guilty. Her arraignment is set for Sept. 17. Responding to the charge, Barron's lawyer said she would sue state education officials if her client is found not guilty.

Thousands of Asian bees leave their nests together to defecate--producing "yellow rain" that the U.S. government once claimed was a Soviet biological weapon--to cool themselves and their nests, scientists say. By relieving themselves of hot feces equal to one-fifth of their body weight, the honeybees are able to cool their nests more efficiently and help their offspring grow, the researchers said in last week's issue of Nature, a British science journal.

It doesn't pay to mess around on South Bay beaches. Or rather, it doesn't pay to let your dog mess around unless you plan to clean up afterward. Hermosa Beach is poised to join neighboring Redondo Beach as the places with the priciest civil fines in all of Los Angeles County for people who violate pooper-scooper laws.

A high school teacher's account of being drenched with excrement by students became tangled in bitter political infighting within the Compton Unified School District on Friday. Two members of the Compton school board, which has had its authority virtually eliminated since state education officials took over the beleaguered district in 1993, lashed out at district administrators who they said tried to discredit the teacher's reputation.

Dumping animal waste into storm drains is now illegal here. Concerned about potential health problems and pollution when pet owners dispose of animal excrement in gutters, the City Council this week banned the practice. Officials said they were concerned about the possible spread of disease as well as the potential for polluting the area's beaches. The city already requires owners to clean up after their pets.

A teacher in central China was sentenced to two years in jail for forcing his students to eat cow dung, according to an official news report. The fourth-grade teacher forced his students to eat dung when they handed in assignments late, didn't pay attention in class or fought. Of his class of 34, only two with good grades and five who were related to him escaped punishment, the report said.

A woman with a history of fighting New Jersey's controversial annual black bear hunt scored a court victory this week when a judge ruled that the pile of bear-friendly food and bear feces found in her front yard did not prove she had violated state laws against feeding the animals. It was the second time Susan Kehoe has faced criminal charges since New Jersey in 2003 permitted its first black bear hunt in 33 years.  Kehoe, 61, was acquitted in a court in Vernon on Tuesday night, the Star-Ledger reported , despite testimony from state wildlife officials that they found dog food, sunflower seeds and bear feces in the front yard of Kehoe's home in a rural area of northern New Jersey.

A fight is brewing over the practice of feeding chicken feces and other poultry farm waste to cattle. A coalition of food and consumer groups that includes Consumers Union and the Center for Science in the Public Interest has asked the Food and Drug Administration to ban the practice. McDonald's Corp., the nation's largest restaurant user of beef, also wants the FDA to prohibit the feeding of so-called poultry litter to cattle. Members of the coalition are threatening to file a lawsuit or to push for federal legislation establishing such a ban if the FDA doesn't act to do so in the coming months.

For about 85 years, homesteaders, pot hunters and archaeologists have been digging at Paisley Caves, a string of shallow depressions washed out of an ancient lava flow by the waves of a lake that comes and goes with the changing climate. Until now, they have found nothing conclusive -- arrowheads, baskets, animal bones and sandals made by people who lived thousands of years ago on the shores of what was then a 40-mile-long lake but is now a sagebrush desert on the northern edge of the Great Basin.

DNA from fossilized human feces found in an Oregon cave is 14,300 years old, at least 1,200 years older than previous evidence for humans in North America, researchers said Thursday. The find provides the strongest evidence in an archaeological controversy about whether people of the Clovis culture, which manufactured distinctive stone tools and weapons, were the first to populate the Americas. The new evidence, reported online in the journal Science, indicates they were not.

State and federal officials probing the recent E. coli outbreak linked to spinach said Thursday that they have found the genetic match of the bacterium in cattle feces near a farm suspected of supplying the tainted greens. The discovery represented a major breakthrough for investigators, who in years of tracking outbreaks have never before found a matching E. coli sample in the environment near where the tainted spinach or lettuce was grown.

The fast-sinking feces of an obscure sea creature play a significant role in removing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to a new study. Salp -- transparent, jellylike animals about the size of a human thumb -- are filter-feeders that spend their lives vacuuming up phytoplankton from the ocean's surface. The phytoplankton assimilates carbon dioxide from the air and water as it grows.

While the folks on Balboa Island say they like the "doggie walk bag" dispensers the city installed, they wish the city would help pay for the bags, Councilman John E. Noyes said. Noyes, a Balboa Island resident, said he will propose Monday that the city use part of the dog license fees it collects to refill the dispensers. "I think it is a really nice service to people, but I think the city should help pay for the bags," Noyes said.

Piles of goose waste at a city lake have officials struggling to clean up the mess for picnicking park-goers. Full-time resident Canada geese arrived at the city's Lake Merritt in 1954 when several injured birds were introduced to the refuge. Their numbers have exploded in the last 20 years to at least 200 regulars, with about 2,000 geese descending on the park each summer, according to the National Audubon Society.

Researchers from Columbia University have devised a technique to procure pure DNA from the dung of animals, which eliminates the need to capture, sedate and draw blood from wild, endangered or aggressive animals.