In June 2013, a maintenance engineer at a Hampton Inn in Duncan, South Carolina noticed something strange: a septic truck kept backing up to a closed Denny’s restaurant. His 911 call would crack open one of the largest environmental crimes in...
What if the future of water came down to bubbles you’ll never see? Nanobubbles—thousands of times smaller than a grain of salt—are invisible, powerful, and already changing how we treat water, grow food, and even package beverages. In this episode...
What if bubbles were secretly running the world? In this episode, we uncover how these tiny spheres are doing everything from helping shrimp fire plasma blasts to scrubbing ocean plastic, with help from a bubble-obsessed scientist and an artist...
In this episode, we’ll shed light on an often-overlooked hero of our urban landscapes: sewers. These sewers are living entities, silently at work beneath our feet. They might lack a certain amount of dazzle but are silently monumental in...
Today we’re going to Antarctica, one of the world’s coldest and most pristine places. Specifically, we are going to The US McMurdo Station, the largest science station on the continent. It also has over three hundred toilets. So, where...
David brings us a 5-minute water short about a wastewater treatment plant that smelled like turkey. Yes, turkey.
Was it for real or was it a myth?
In the spring, we published an episode where we talked to two researchers where they described how wastewater testing can act as a coronavirus early warning system. Since this show, this research has rocketed from a handful of labs at an...
In this story episode of The Outfall, we talk to two researchers on the front lines of using wastewater to analyze the epidemiology of a community. Wastewater surveillance for the Coronavirus has huge potential. Data suggests that each person...