The toilet is a wonder of science and engineering: we deposit our bodily wastes, then turn a handle and send the waste away.
All fine and good, but only about half the world's population has access to a fully functioning toilet attached to a working sewage disposal system. And even the good ones use fresh water, a precious commodity growing more precious all the time.
Can this toilet be fixed? Efforts are underway, as science writer Chelsea Wald reveals in Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet. The author joins us for a discussion of a topic that is still taboo in many quarters.