Science confirms whose farts are smellier—women’s or men’s—and what that means for Alzheimer’s.
Finally, the science news we really need.
Everybody farts. Upwards of 23 times a day, in fact. It’s one of the most universal human experiences, cutting (the cheese) across age, culture, and personality. Yet for something so common, it somehow feels very different coming from a woman than it does from a man.
But according to research highlighted in a now-legendary study, there indeed is a difference between man farts and lady (sic) farts. This unexpected fact about the battle of the sexes carries an even more unexpected health benefit.
Yes, this is a story about farts. But stay with us.
Back in 1998, Dr. Michael Levitt, a gastroenterologist known among colleagues as the “King of Farts,” set out to understand where that unmistakable scent of human flatulence comes from. To answer the question, he recruited 16 healthy adults with no gastrointestinal issues. Each participant wore a “flatus collection system,” described as a rectal tube connected to a bag.
After eating pinto beans and taking a laxative, the volunteers provided samples that were then analyzed using gas chromatographic mass spectroscopic techniques. Levitt and his team broke down the chemical components inside each bag and invited two judges to help evaluate the results. The judges did not know they were sniffing human gas (which in retrospect sounds diabolical). They rated each sample on an odor scale from zero to eight, with eight meaning “very offensive.”
Their assessments pointed clearly to one culprit. Sulfur-containing compounds were responsible for the strongest and most memorable odors, especially hydrogen sulfide, which produces that classic “rotten egg” smell.
So where does the gender difference come in?
Here is the twist researchers did not expect: although men tended to produce larger volumes of gas, women’s flatulence contained a “significantly higher concentration” of egg smelling hydrogen sulfide. When the judges rated the odor of each sample, they consistently marked women’s gas as having a “greater odor intensity” than men’s. (snip-MORE, but not much.)
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When the mail carrier can’t read your handwriting the USPS calls in these experts to save the day
“Master keyers” can decipher a new address roughly every four seconds
Our handwriting is getting worse. More and more of our writing and communications are being done digitally, and young people, in particular, are getting a lot less practice when it comes to their calligraphy. Most schools have stopped teaching cursive, for example, while spending far more time on typing skills.
And yet, we still occasionally have to hand-address our physical mail, whether it’s a holiday card, a postcard, or a package.
We don’t always make it easy on the postal service when they’re trying to decipher where our mail should go. Luckily, they have a pretty fascinating way of dealing with the problem.
The U.S. Postal Service sees an unimaginable amount of illegible addresses on mail every single day. To be fair, not all of it comes down to sloppy handwriting. Labels and packaging can get wet, smudged, ripped, torn, or otherwise damaged, and that makes it extremely difficult for mail carriers to decipher the delivery address.
You’d probably imagine that if the post office couldn’t read the delivery address, they’d just return the package to the sender. If so, you’d be wrong. Instead, they send the mail (well, at least a photo of it) to a mysterious and remote facility in Salt Lake City, Utah called the U.S Postal Service Remote Encoding Center.
According to Atlas Obscura, the facility is open 24 hours per day. Expert workers take shifts deciphering, or encoding, scanned images of illegible addresses. The best of them work through hundreds per hour, usually taking less than 10 seconds per item. The facility works through over five million pieces of mail every day.
Every. Single. Day. (snip-MORE, but again, not too much more)
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