COMMUNITY URINALYSIS

Everyone knows how a drug test works: You urinate into a cup and your
employer (or prospective employer) has the sample tested to see if
you've been using any illegal substances. This year, though, Jennifer
Field, an environmental chemist at Oregon State University,
experimented with an unusual variation on this process. She found out
what illicit drugs the population of an entire city was ingesting.

How? By collecting and then testing water from the city's
sewage-treatment plant. Since all drug users urinate, and since the
urine eventually winds up in the sewers, Field and her fellow
researchers figured that sewer water would contain traces of whatever
drugs the citizens were using.

Sure enough, when Field's team tested a mere teaspoonful of water from
a sewage plant -- which it ultimately did in many American cities --
the sample revealed the presence of 11 different drugs, including
cocaine and methamphetamine.

The research team called this technique community urinalysis. From a
privacy standpoint, it's a very clever approach to monitoring drug
usage, because while it is involuntary -- drug users can't help
urinating -- it also manages to preserve the public's anonymity. "It's
the closest to the urinal you can get without violating privacy," says
Field, who presented her findings at an August meeting of the American
Chemical Society.

Because it allows for sampling on a daily basis, community urinalysis
can track a drug epidemic in real time, showing the police and doctors
how the popularity of a particular drug is waxing or waning. For
instance, Field says that the use of methamphetamine was constant from
day to day -- because "once you're hooked, you're hooked" -- whereas
the usage of cocaine sometimes peaked on weekends.

One affluent community that Field tested showed very few drugs except
cocaine; by contrast, methamphetamine levels varied widely from city
to city. And the single most popular drug? Caffeine.

[Introduction Sidebar]

THE 7TH ANNUAL YEAR IN IDEAS

For the seventh consecutive December, the magazine looks back on the passing year through a special lens: ideas. Editors and writers trawl the oceans of ingenuity, hoping to snag in our nets the many curious, inspired, perplexing and sometimes outright illegal innovations of the past 12 months. Then we lay them out on the dock, flipping and flopping and gasping for air, and toss back all but those that are fresh enough for our particular cut of intellectual sushi. For better or worse, these are 70 of the ideas that helped make 2007 what it was. Enjoy.