Have you ever wondered about the exact number of times you let it rip during the day? Wonder no more because now the scientists have developed smart underwear that can send the exact number to your phone. And who knows, maybe one day we could all get one and have a little competition here on AF.
Quote:How Often Do You Fart? This ‘Smart Underwear’ Can Keep Track, Because Figuring Out a Baseline Is Important for Science
Studying flatulence has medical value, however, and measuring how frequently someone passes gas is harder than you might expect.
“Up until now, studying flatulence meant either asking people to count their own farts—which doesn’t work well—or bringing them into a clinical setting and using extremely invasive techniques like rectal tubes for short, controlled measurements,” Brantley Hall, a biologist at the University of Maryland, tells Gizmodo’s Gayoung Lee.
Hall and his colleagues created the first wearable continuous fart-measuring device. This “smart underwear” is a coin-size gadget that snaps into any pair of undies right around where you’d imagine a fart-measuring tool should go.
Now, the researchers want adults all over the country—and fart spectrum—to try it out. Hall has launched the Human Flatus Atlas, a research study recruiting smart underwear users to learn about people’s flatulence patterns and align them with what they eat and the makeup of their microbiomes.
No accurate fart baseline exists, so it’s hard for doctors to know when a patient’s numbers are off, which could be caused by an underlying health problem. Estimates often cite that people tend to pass gas about 14 times per day.
Most people’s farts are mainly made of hydrogen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The smart underwear measures hydrogen, specifically, because it’s produced only by the wearer’s gut microbes.
“It tells you how active your microbes are, how much of the food you eat is being metabolized by your gut microbes,” Hall tells WTOP News’ John Domen. “So, someone who farts more is either eating a lot of high fiber food, which is reaching the microbes, which turn into flatus, or maybe they have a condition like small intestine bacterial overgrowth. … So, it tells us a lot about how your digestion is working.”
For the Human Flatus Atlas project, the researchers are seeking individuals from various groups established in previous work: zen digesters who fart very little despite eating lots of fiber, hydrogen hyperproducers who experience frequent flatulence and normal farters who are in between.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180988198/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
