"Better out than in I always say."

topic of the day 059 & video of the day 052

it's okay to fart

It's Okay to be Smart

What, who, when, how, why? Then, so?

Everyone farts. Yes, everybody, no matter how much they tell you otherwise.

Just about anything in the animal kingdom with a rear end can and does fart, and passing gas can have a lot of different purposes.

Herring fart to communicate, coral snakes fart as a defense mechanism, the West Indian manatee uses farting to regulate its buoyancy and so on and so forth.

Fart is typically caused by either trapped, swallowed air or gasses as a byproduct from friendly microbes digesting food in your gut.

When complex carbohydrates make it to your colon, they're broken down by a rich ecosystem of billions of microbes, passing digested bits between one another, creating gasses in the process.

Human typically squeeze out about ten to twenty farts every day, each around the volume of a golf ball, totaling about a liter of gas daily. All of our combined butt babbles add up to about seven billion liters of human gas released every day!

The compounds that make farts stink make up less than one percent of the volume, with about a quarter is comprised of gases like oxygen and nitrogen. The vast gas majority is a mixture of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane. With two of them being flammable gasses, the Mythbusters did light up farts with a lighter. Yup.

If everybody does it, and it's a natural byproduct of our inner biology, why do we feel disgust or react strongly to farts?

In that aforementioned one percent we find various forms of sulfur, the chemical that gives rotten eggs their odor. These chemicals are harmful in large amounts and are often a sign of toxicity or disease, so it makes sense our noses tell us that's bad but there's probably not enough in a couple of farts to do any damage. Farts do also contain a small number of bacteria, shown in a scientific experiment where a subject farted with and without pants onto a petri dish. Yeah ...

Why do we laugh at the sound though?

Laughing is a social behaviour that helps us bond with each other. We may laugh as a way to make the farter fell less embarrassed (or more depending on the person really).

Incongruity theory says we laugh at unexpected things, which farts usually are.

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