pSYoniK 16 hours ago

Not sure how these are that "new" seeing as Toto (and I'm almost assuming other Japanese brands too) have had designs like the Nautilus for some years. One of the things that stuck with me a lot after a trip to Japan was exactly how thoughtful their toilet designs are. Public toilets with these tall urinals were amazingly clean in even the busiest stations and would allow you to get a good angle and not have splash on to the floor/shoes. Similar designs but scaled down were found in their newer Limited Express trains. Also, that angular design makes no sense, a human being will need to clean it and for anyone whos ever had to clean angular ceramics, they will know that that design will just be a pain to get proper clean...

I guess what I'm saying is, before we start researching new methods, why can't we be bothered to spend even a little bit of time to see what else is out there.

wileydragonfly 21 hours ago

We had that contemporary commercial in one office building, but it was slightly elongated. The splash back was horrific and unavoidable. Angle, distance, approach, absolutely nothing prevented it. It was so bad we finally had open conversations about it and many of us went to standing at the regular toilets.

The struggle is real.

  • potato3732842 21 hours ago

    At my employer we have an emergency location (glorified office) that we basically never operate out of except one afternoon a quarter to prove we can. The documentation about how to operate out of that site includes a warning to that effect.

    Edit: Now that I think about it building has been remodeled so I should really have someone confirm if the warning is still valid.

    • 0_____0 20 hours ago

      Why would you need an emergency location? Not bashing just curious on the rationale

      • potato3732842 20 hours ago

        Contractually required. Clients want assurance of continuity of business in case a meteor hits our office or an errant backhoe hits the fiber on our street. We use it for real about one day every 2-2.5yr. It's only enough space for the dozen key people we need to field urgent stuff.

        Previously we had clients required us cross train a handful of key employees on their specific stuff so they could acqui-hire those people to maintain their stuff in the event our company went tits up on short notice (we actually saw them exercise that with a prior vendor). They no longer do that as we're much bigger now.

        • harshitaneja 19 hours ago

          That's fascinating. What kind of work do you do that involves such disaster planning?

          • potato3732842 19 hours ago

            Finance stuff. Where I work it's more of an inherited checkbox than an actual mission critical requirement but I suppose it would help us if it really came down to it and the customers see enough value in it that they pay for it so...

      • tgsovlerkhgsel 20 hours ago

        It makes sense to have a business continuity plan for various scenarios that could render the primary office location unusable (power outage, natural disaster, police closing the area for some reason, ...).

        For many businesses, WFH or "everyone goes to the Winchester, we have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over" could be valid options, but if you want to have business continuity, having at least a small office where the disaster recovery team can meet and coordinate things from makes sense.

        A contract for guaranteed priority access with a coworking space would likely be the easiest option unless you need some custom infrastructure though.

  • raffael_de 20 hours ago

    > and many of us went to standing at the regular toilets.

    Did it occur to "some of you" that _sitting_ on a regular toilet might also be a viable option?

    Asking for a friend.

    • afsdfa 19 hours ago

      The thing is, for men, sitting pee is only viable if *everyone* do it. As soon as a minority break this rule, the toilet is freaking dirty and you need to pee standing again.

      At home though, 100%

    • Mawr 19 hours ago

      At home? Absolutely. In a public WC? Only in dire need.

    • steele 19 hours ago

      This is made a problem by people that insist on standing at a regular toilet or working through what I assume is a severe medical issue with reckless abandon for the next person

    • nsonha 18 hours ago

      just because some people have to sit peeing (cultural reason or otherwise) doesn't mean everyone else should do that when they don have to. The fact is that it has to "occur to" them instead of something they just naturally do.

    • lazide 20 hours ago

      Think of the quads!

    • jgyter 20 hours ago

      [flagged]

chasil 21 hours ago

So, from the article, instruction placards reduce cleaning costs by 8%.

Obligatory nod to the infamous sign:

"Gents Please Stand A Little Closer, It May Be Shorter Than You Think.

"Ladies Please Remain Seated for The Entire Performance."

  • janalsncm 20 hours ago

    I’ve seen one that said “one step forward for man, a giant leap for mankind”. Pretty amusing.

    • physicles 18 hours ago

      Here in China, I’ve seen this sign dozens of times: “向前一小步,文明一大步”

      One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization.

      • Cerium 18 hours ago

        I was going to mention - those signs are popular in Xiamen.

    • 93po 7 hours ago

      if your hose is short or your flow is weak, please stand close to not wet your feet - some toilet in rural texas

  • black6 7 hours ago

    "Attention pilots with short pitot tubes or low manifold pressure: please taxi up close, as the next pilot may not be float equipped."

    F Street Station, in Anchorage, AK

  • tass 20 hours ago

    Men can sit too

    • HideousKojima 18 hours ago

      And increase bathroom construction costs by 25-100% while reducing capacity by 50%! We don't have big shared troughs in sports stadium restrooms because of preference, it's purely cost and capacity. Urinals serve a similar purpose.

    • jillyboel 20 hours ago

      On a urinal? Gross, and you may be misunderstanding what they're meant for.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 20 hours ago

> We propose novel urinal designs that were generated by solving differential equations derived from the isogonal curve problem to ensure the urine stream impacts at or below this critical angle. Experiments validate that these designs can substantially reduce splashback to only 1.4% of the splash of a common contemporary commercial urinal. The widespread adoption of the urinal designs described in this work would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility.

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/80987...

The experiments aren't in real world scenarios or with real urethrae excreting urine.

> A pseudo-urethra nozzle matching the internal geometry of a human urethra was used to “urinate” a controlled jet of dyed water onto urinals and the subsequent splash was caught on a large paper on the floor.

  • samaltmanfried 20 hours ago

    Anyone else here appreciate that this article appeared in a journal called 'PNAS Nexus'?

    • schrectacular 19 hours ago

      I'm glad you put your head out there and had the balls to say it.

tgsovlerkhgsel 20 hours ago

I think the "Cornucopia" model is a great example of "blind" design that works a lot better in theory/fluid dynamics simulations than it would in actual usage. I would expect a significant percentage of users to find the "hole" design... uninviting, and as a result stand way farther back than the simulation assumed. (Exhibit 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669248)

The best way to validate such findings would likely be 3D-printing single use versions of different urinals, mounting them at the student pub for one Friday evening, and monitoring usage amounts + the amount of urine on the floor mats (compared with a regular urinal next to it to account for different inebriation levels). This also avoids identifying models that men prefer/avoid if given the choice.

(Also a great way to advertise that "90% of patrons preferred the new urinals" because you'll get that effect from the novelty value alone).

  • voidfunc 19 hours ago

    Yea the cornucopia model makes me uncomfortable... sharp and o pointy angles and blind corners are not things I want near my dick.

giantg2 21 hours ago

I hate to break it to you, but most of the urine on rhe floor isn't from splashback. Splashback is mostly solved with existing designs and splash screen/baffle inserts.

  • pcurve 20 hours ago

    I agree. The urine on floor is because people are generally less careful in public toilet when aiming, peeing, fully draining, and flicking.

    When we're outside, we are generally more in rush. We had to 'hold in' longer before peeing because of line. It's unfamiliar setting with weirdly shaped urinal.

    And in some parts of Europe, urinals are installed so god damn high, I almost have to tip toe and pee into the the air in projectile.

    • devsda 20 hours ago

      > I almost have to tip toe and pee into the the air in projectile.

      Sounds like an alternate origin story of your username.

      • pcurve 4 hours ago

        I'll be using that going forward ;-)

      • sambapa 17 hours ago

        Alternate? That's the origin.

BrenBarn 21 hours ago

Appropriate that it was published in "PNAS Nexus".

irrational 20 hours ago

> Around 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) of urine are spilled onto the floor and walls of public restrooms each day in the U.S.

Each day?! 165 million males in the USA. So, 16.5 males on average are peeing enough on the walls and floors that if it was collected it would be an entire liter? That seems unlikely.

What percentage of that 16.5 is not using public restrooms? What percentage is babies in diapers? Even if the number was as high as half, 8 men leaving behind a collective 1 liter seems way too high.

  • hn_throwaway_99 20 hours ago

    There is a "Daily Urine Splash Estimation in the US" section in their paper (I can't believe I looked this up). There equation basically makes these assumptions:

    1. 56 million non-residential urinals in the US.

    2. average of .22 L per "void" (a void is one pee session)

    3. I think how they estimated average usage per urinal was weird and frankly wrong - they estimated each person would have between 3 and 6 "voids" per day, and each urinal would be used by between 1 and 2 people per day. Anyway, in any case that leads to an estimate of each urinal being used between 3 and 12 times per day. I think this estimate is way, way too high, because at the low end 3 X 56 million = 168 million, so on the low end they are estimating that, on average, every male in the US makes at least one public urinal pee (and, on the high end, 4 public urinal pees!)

    4. Based on their data they calculate a value of ~1% (0.965%) of pee gets splashed onto the floor.

    So you multiply that all together: 56 million * .22 * (3 on the low end, 12 on the high end) * .965% = about 350,000L on the low end, or 1,400,000L on the high end, so they said "on the order of a million liters".

    Again, I can't believe I spent time looking this up and writing this comment.

  • dgacmu 20 hours ago

    I think you mean 165, not 16.5?

    But probably, what, only 50m use public restrooms, but some use multiple times, so 150 uses / liter seems reasonable.

    That's under 10ml of spray / spill per use, which is maybe a little high but not too crazy? I've seen some pretty bad spill results at work...

    • tgsovlerkhgsel 20 hours ago

      I think you drastically underestimate how much 10 ml are.

      That's not achievable with backsplatter, that's called "missing".

      • thfuran 18 hours ago

        It's almost but not quite exactly two teaspoons, which is certainly a plausibly achievable amount, but as you say, likely not by splatter.

    • whythre 20 hours ago

      If you consider bar restrooms, that is probably skewing the average higher…

leoh 20 hours ago

If only folks at Google’s Bayview Campus could learn to not piss all over the single occupancy bathroom’s toilet seats..

  • 0_____0 20 hours ago

    Bit of a tangent but occasionally I wonder how close we are to people disappearing into cyberspace for 10 hours at a time and thus using a Texas catheter à la Neuromancer. It seems like there are a notable minority of tech people who regard meat and meat space as an annoyance to be dealt with.

    How many of you would be happy at this moment to upload yourself to the cloud if it meant low latency, unmitigated access to computers, the internet, LLMs etc?

    • kadushka 19 hours ago

      upload yourself

      You mean “upload a copy of yourself”, right? I guess I would be happy for my uploaded copy to live forever while I continue to age.

      • 0_____0 7 hours ago

        From the perspective of each consciousness, the other is the copy...

      • thfuran 18 hours ago

        Perhaps that depends on your position on the you of Theseus.

  • tgsovlerkhgsel 20 hours ago

    Not sure if that's the cause of the problem here, but this is why having urinals is a good idea and even legally required in some countries.

    I couldn't care less about whether the sit-down toilets are mixed or separated by gender, but replacing most/all urinals with gender-neutral sit-down toilets yields results that suck for everyone involved.

pbhjpbhj 9 hours ago

The cone over the drain, and/or the spiked mats (both inside the urinal) seem to have stopped all splashing and be widely used in UK without need to change the urinal itself.

What one does find now is dyson-style hands dryers leave a massive area of spray. They seem to spray the water from your hands - and the water retained on the device - up into the air and across a wide area.

At our work place there are bench style sinks that spray water everywhere too.

And the sit-down toilets are terrible. I'm not an especially large man but it's almost impossible to use them without unnecessary contact. Sit-down toilets seem to be 'designed' by people who have no idea about their use by men.

  • BobaFloutist 7 hours ago

    A fun variation on sit-down toilets is when they're automatic and tuned such that they flush if you lean forward.

petee 11 hours ago

This seems to be an engineered-only solution without real world testing.

A person teetering wildly 3 feet above are still going to miss that narrow design. Or you have to hover and let your pants touch the rim, which also probably puts you closer to the inevitable splash back.

The only clear solution is to direct all splash back to the user so they can take it with them.

rr808 20 hours ago

Even those dont solve the drip problem. The only solution is the ones with the grate you stand on.

kevin_thibedeau 20 hours ago

Ants have recently invaded the men's room at my office where the first floor is dug in a meter below ground level. They are loving the section in front of the urinals where the diabetics have left an ample food supply.

Thaxll 21 hours ago

After 3 pints the design does not matter much...

  • tyre 20 hours ago

    brother if you can’t drink three pints and still keep it in a urinal, you shouldn’t be drinking three pints.

    urinals are not small targets.

  • amelius 21 hours ago

    Yeah, but at that point your pee is beer.

  • jppope 21 hours ago

    came here to say this... I'd wager more urine ends up on the floor due to accuracy than urinal design. Still... glad they are focused on some of life's most difficult problems

ordersofmag 20 hours ago

Do they really use 90% less water cleaning the floors of women's restrooms than men's currently? Cause that's one implication of the 'new design will save cleaning' claim. Places with public restrooms that I'm familiar with seem to get their floors mopped with identical frequency (and similar apparent rigor) regardless of whether they have urinals or not.

sebazzz 14 hours ago

We have the Fountaine at work, and it works just fine, as long as you don’t aim towards the fly but instead aim towards the drain hole of the water at the bottom.

Funny btw, if you hold the flush button too long, the entire thing overflows.

112233 18 hours ago

I wonder how many pounds of feces and gallons of urine are breathed in because of the Dyson airblade and similar dryers.

(and when I thought that was a peak bottom design, they made blowers integrated in the faucet, to blow around all the yuck from the sink.)

dustbunny 20 hours ago

I've actually made a joke for years that we're gonna put boots on mars before we figure out how to not piss on our pants. I've been trying to ask Elon on Twitter to design a urinal for years as a joke. This is amazing.

Isamu 20 hours ago

Why doesn’t Dyson create a vacuum urinal? We could use that for space stations anyway.

  • 0_____0 20 hours ago

    Total addressable market for space station lavatories is pretty small I reckon

  • steele 19 hours ago

    Usage time and throughput

zabzonk 21 hours ago

Put a grill drain in the floor under the porcelain as the Victorians did.

  • schneems 21 hours ago

    Pee drains still smell bad and require extra cost to plumb more drains.

    Nasty urinals are a compounding problem as the grosser the bathroom the further people stand from the urinal which means the aim is worse and the bathroom gets worse.

    You know the saying, an oz of prevention…

    • potato3732842 21 hours ago

      You already need bathroom floor drains in most commercial facility bathrooms because code. Might as well make it do something useful.

      • zabzonk 21 hours ago

        Yeah, I was meaning commercial, not home. Home, just sit down and manipulate your dong so it can't miss! Well, mostly.

jwr 21 hours ago

Most urinals in Japan look like the "Nautilus" design already.

  • s0rce 21 hours ago

    I haven't been to Japan and just looked at some photos and it seems they are different than the design proposed in the paper. The paper shows a much more angular "V" shaped cross-section with steep sides ending in a point vs a rounded back where splashes occur.

notjoemama 19 hours ago

I hope when they do their testing they cover a diverse age range. Um, it’s not the same when you get older. ;p

  • 0cf8612b2e1e 19 hours ago

    Also real world installation. I am an average height dude, but have encountered several urinals which are barely useable. No idea how shorter men or children are supposed to operate them.

potato3732842 21 hours ago

Why can't we go back to the (what I now know after Googling) is the Kohler Derry or something along those lines?

We had them in middle and high school and while I understand they might not be ideal for the inebriated or exceptionally careless you could piss anywhere in them as hard as you wanted without splash back.

Decades later I encountered one in a maintenance facility nestled in the corner of maintenance shop, obviously not a code compliant install, spare me the hand wringing) and casually mentioned that I didn't know they still made them like that and was told that this is the 3rd facility it has been installed in, the guys like it enough to uninstall it and reinstall it each time.

  • _JamesA_ 21 hours ago

    A picture for anyone else curious what a Kohler Derry looks like.

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/101034470@N04/52044489934/

    • devsda 20 hours ago

      May be it's the angle, but it looks a little too closer to a toilet bowl than a urinal.

      Occasional spills are probably easier to manage compared to a misunderstanding over it's purpose.

    • koolba 20 hours ago

      What direction do you use that from?

  • jillyboel 20 hours ago

    Too much risk of lower deckers

PessimalDecimal 19 hours ago

How would one clean the inside of the "Cornucopia" design?

GiorgioG 21 hours ago

Can I get one at home? Seriously - I just painted our bathroom and it's just disgusting how much splashing winds up splashing out of the bowl and onto other surfaces.

  • fsckboy 21 hours ago

    just sit down. nobody will know, except your bathroom will be cleaner, you will be cleaning less and gfs will consider you more civilized.

    also, both hands free for phone.

    • shipman05 21 hours ago

      Yeah. I joined the sit-to-pee club after I started having to clean my own bathroom and toilet. It really is a win-win-win

      • fortran77 19 hours ago

        With an enlarged prostate, I find it much easier to pee standing up than sitting down.

        • fsckboy 19 hours ago

          that mileage varies

    • UberFly 21 hours ago

      Agreed. I have a wife and two daughters. Out of respect for them I sit (or camp hover) and thus they don't have to wade through my piss splatter. Even if I lived by myself I'd still do it for the sake of not wanting my pee all over my own bathroom.

    • fmxsh 16 hours ago

      And... Try having a stool, like a one-step folding stool under the feet while sitting. Drastically changes the experience for the better while sitting. There was a post on HN long time ago on it with research on it. It aligns more with how the body is designed to preform the other need for elimination, and my suspicion is it applies to the first category of elimination too.

    • xboxnolifes 20 hours ago

      > just sit down. nobody will know...

      People don't pee standing because of some sense of masculinity or something. It's just more convenient. Only those over 50 or so by now grew up with that stigma.

      • tgsovlerkhgsel 20 hours ago

        It's only more convenient if someone else does the cleaning.

        • xboxnolifes 16 hours ago

          Without being too crude, there's still cleaning to be done even after sitting down. Body hair doesn't pick itself up.

      • fsckboy 19 hours ago

        unless the flag of this enlightened masculinity you are flying means "real men leave the door open", it is still true, nobody will know.

        • xboxnolifes 4 hours ago

          There's no flag. Saying "nobody will know" in thus context implies that one would care if they did know. Thus, my response.

    • n8cpdx 20 hours ago

      Standing is drastically more time efficient. You just have to look at the snaking queues at the women’s restroom compared to the men’s in any particularly busy public space.

      Who wants to bother with undoing their pants just to pee?

    • wruza 20 hours ago

      also, both hands free for phone

      That really depends on the design at both sides.

      Edit: Otherwise, it's a civilized way to do it and nothing to be ashamed of. Men who think it's not manly can go clean their toilet again.

    • xboxnolifes 20 hours ago

      > just sit down. nobody will know...

      People don't stand pee because of some sense of masculinity or something. It's just more convenient.

    • jgyter 20 hours ago

      [flagged]

steele 19 hours ago

Sitting would be preferable if the savages lifted seats to urinate and more toilet bowls shapes were steeper. A surprise dip in the devil's fondue is enough to make fella want to remove it and leave it there.

wordofx 21 hours ago

Since when is this a new design? Looks the same as a lot of existing designs.

modzu 21 hours ago

yeah im not putting my dingdong in that cornucopia

  • tgsovlerkhgsel 20 hours ago

    Same thought, and great example of design that only works in a lab.

    And once the puddle underneath has formed, everyone else will stand even further back...

  • wruza 20 hours ago

    This is a valid concern, as a stranger you can't know if this design doesn't have a surprise. And then there's this potential contact point at the bottom of V.

whiddershins 21 hours ago

argh, just have the back wall recede away from you as it gets lower. tilt it the other way. you could even use a curve.

jtbayly 21 hours ago

I love the environmental savings BS.

Cleaning a floor with urine on it uses a certain amount of water, no matter what. You can get away with cleaning it less often, but you can’t get away with using 90% less water!

  • xboxnolifes 4 hours ago

    If you clean the floors 10 times less often you can.

  • Spooky23 20 hours ago

    I’m with you. Being able to maintain sanitary facilities with less effort is justification enough. The amount of water used to mop a floor doesn’t vary by how much urine spills.

    At least they didn’t try to make a carbon impact pitch.

upghost 21 hours ago

They should've called it the Tesla Cyberinal.

  • margalabargala 21 hours ago

    Not patentable, there's prior art of blocky, angular Tesla brand products that people pee on.