Michigan State University have been looking at cow poo, and have come up with a system which safely extracts the water from it. Let’s be straight about this right at the start: this is not earth-shattering news. Cow slurry is 90% water and the process they’re describing here is no biggie. They’ve put together a few things in a way that possibly haven’t been seen before on a dairy farm, but is hardly earth-shattering.

Their website says:

Imagine something that can turn cow manure into clean water, extract nutrients from that water to serve as fertilizer and help solve the ever-present agricultural problem of manure management.

Technology that has its roots firmly planted at Michigan State University is under development and near commercialization that can do all of that. And then some.

Known as the McLanahan Nutrient Separation System, it takes an anaerobic digester — a contraption that takes waste, such as manure, and produces energy as a byproduct — and couples it with an ultrafiltration, air stripping and a reverse osmosis system.

Yeah. OK, well that’s all very nice and everything, but not really newsworthy.

Unless you are The Independent, Wired UK, HuffPo UK, Alternet, Mailonline and others.

Read a few of those. Go on, I’ll wait.

What did you notice? Was it the same quotes recycled from the press release? Was it the total lack of actual news or content beyond what the university put out on their website? Was it the same collection of lame photographs — because the journalists couldn’t even be bothered to go to stock image providers for a photo of a cow? Was it the total lack of informed discussion of importance of the science?

Analysis by churnalism.com shows that the Mail and Independent have simply cut-and-pasted much of their articles, but if you’ve read the Michigan State University press release you don’t really need to know that.

This is so not-news that I didn’t even bother tweeting about it. But it is so not-news that it ended up being content of some of the UK’s most important news sites. I despair.