Tootfinder

Opened up YouTube, got nerd sniped with a math problem. After a bad morning, it was the perfect thing to take a break working on. Still haven't watched the actual video, just the thumbnail...will do that once I get off of work to see if we got to the answer the same way (well, the proof that is). #math

Bookmark this for when you ask yourself why skepticism turns to hatred on the use of unconstrained LLMs.
https://infosec.exchange/@dvandal/114638324336575392

So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

$\textit{Grahak-Nyay:}$ Consumer Grievance Redressal through Large Language Models
Shrey Ganatra, Swapnil Bhattacharyya, Harshvivek Kashid, Spandan Anaokar, Shruti Nair, Reshma Sekhar, Siddharth Manohar, Rahul Hemrajani, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04854

$\textit{Grahak-Nyay:}$ Consumer Grievance Redressal through Large Language Models
Access to consumer grievance redressal in India is often hindered by procedural complexity, legal jargon, and jurisdictional challenges. To address this, we present $\textbf{Grahak-Nyay}$ (Justice-to-Consumers), a chatbot that streamlines the process using open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Grahak-Nyay simplifies legal complexities through a concise and up-to-date knowledge base. We introduce three novel datasets: $\textit{GeneralQA}$ (general con…

I tried using top LLMs for research and it was disastrous. o3 result looked appealing and did not make up studies titles, but the info allegedly extracted from them was completely hallucinated. Gemini 2.5 pro, while less bad, constantly made up a study title. Claude Opus 4 did not try to answer and just redirect me to PubMed.

Class groups of imaginary quadratic points on $X_1(16)$
Maarten Derickx
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04604 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.0…

Class groups of imaginary quadratic points on $X_1(16)$
The main result is to show that if $K \ncong \mathbb Q(\sqrt{-15})$ is an imaginary quadratic field and $E$ is an elliptic curve over $K$ with a torsion point of order 16, then the class number of $K$ is divisible by 10. This gives an affirmative answer to a 12 year old question by David Krumm. This is done by setting up a more general framework for studying divisibility of class groups of imaginary quadratic points on hyper-elliptic curves and applying it to $X_1(16)$.

Beyond Retrieval: Ensembling Cross-Encoders and GPT Rerankers with LLMs for Biomedical QA
Shashank Verma, Fengyi Jiang, Xiangning Xue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05577

Beyond Retrieval: Ensembling Cross-Encoders and GPT Rerankers with LLMs for Biomedical QA
Biomedical semantic question answering rooted in information retrieval can play a crucial role in keeping up to date with vast, rapidly evolving and ever-growing biomedical literature. A robust system can help researchers, healthcare professionals and even layman users access relevant knowledge grounded in evidence. The BioASQ 2025 Task13b Challenge serves as an important benchmark, offering a competitive platform for advancement of this space. This paper presents the methodologies and results …

If you teach your niece to answer, "Superior, it's said, never gives up her dead," when her mother asks what happened at school today, you may be put on godparent probation.

pH-Dependent Zeta Potential Induces Diffusiophoretic Focusing in an Acid-Base Reaction
Ethan Coleman, Ankur Gupta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05731 https://…

pH-Dependent Zeta Potential Induces Diffusiophoretic Focusing in an Acid-Base Reaction
Diffusiophoresis of charged particles in the presence of electrolytes has been extensively studied in the literature. However, in these setups, particles typically move in a single direction, either up or down the electrolyte gradient. Here, we theoretically investigate the conditions under which a particle can reverse its diffusiophoretic direction within the same setup, leading to the formation of a focusing band under steady-state concentration gradients. Using multi-ion diffusiophoresis cal…

Can you see circles or rectangles? And does the answer depend on where you grew up?
We may believe we see the world exactly as it is – but as studies of optical illusions show, it’s far more complex than that
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/