Hey, smart people-- fart!

Uh, I know what you're thinking: "This is click bait.

"I used to respect you, Joe.

Now you're just making fart videos?"

tooot!

Well, I can assure you, this is not click bait, but this is a fart video-- a science fart video!

No hot air.

Well, maybe a little.

toot.

[laughs] [intro music] blast!

Everybody farts-- you, your mother, kittens, the Dalai Lama... probably regular llamas too.

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--they fart to communicate.

Coral snakes fart as a defense mechanism.

The West Indian manatee uses farting to regulate its buoyancy.

And beaded lacewings make death farts-- a gas that specifically evolved to paralyze and ultimately kill termites, who also fart... a lot!

Like, termites fart enough to contribute maybe a few percent to global greenhouse gas emissions.

That's a lot of gas.

Flatulence is a natural, common thing.

It's typically caused by either trapped, swallowed air or gas produced as a by-product from friendly microbes digesting food in your gut.

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

Your farts are really just billions of tiny microbial toots.

Humans typically squeeze out about 10 to 20 farts every day, each around the volume of a golf ball, totaling about a liter of gas daily.

All of our combined butt babble adds up to about 7 billion liters of human gas released every day.

The compounds that make farts stink make up less than 1% of the volume; about a quarter is comprised of gases like oxygen and nitrogen; but the vast majority is a mixture of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane-- two of which are, yes, flammable gases.

I know what you're asking: Could these billions of liters of human fart be burned to generate energy for our civilization?

I don't know.

I didn't go to MIT.

But paging Elon Musk, right?

Better get a tweet over to that guy.

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

[nasal] They don't exactly smell like roses.

In that less than 1% of smelly stuff in a toot, we find various forms of sulfur-containing chemicals, like the ones that give rotten eggs their odor.

These chemicals are harmful in large amounts and are often a sign of toxicity or disease, so it makes sense that our noses would 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.

This was shown in a scientific experiment where a subject farted, with and without pants, on a Petri dish... for science.

Dare to dream, kids.

So if farting is natural to do, and it's natural to find it a little gross, then why are fart noises so funny?

We've been letting out fart jokes nonstop since at least the Bronze Age.

There are a couple of different thoughts on why we giggle at this bodily function.

Laughing is a social behavior that helps us bond with each other.

So we may laugh as a way to make the farter feel less embarrassed.

Something called incongruity theory says we laugh at unexpected things, which farts usually are.

toot!

Our brains' response to confusion is often laughter, like when you see a T-Rex head on a seahorse's body.

[laughs] "Sea-Rex!"

But scientists don't exactly know why anything is funny.

[laughs] But--"butt scientists."

Nice!

Farting hasn't always only been perceived with disgust or giggles, though.

Ancient philosophers going back to Pythagoras believed your breath contained your soul.

Farts were considered a form of breath, and they thought excessive farting could make you fart out your soul, which, trust me, you can't do.

Martin Luther, the guy credited for starting an entire branch of Christianity, was said to chase away the Devil and sin with his "butt blasphemy."

toot!

And in the 1700s, founding farter Benjamin Franklin wrote the essay, "Fart Proudly"-- seriously, he did-- in which he wished he could eliminate the "disagreeable odor" from a fart, thus allowing one to fart proudly in public and alleviate the pain that can accompany holding one in.

toot!

Holding in a fart probably won't injure you, but it may be uncomfortable, and they'll likely just come out in your sleep anyway.

So better out than in, I always say.

toot!

Fart noises may be funny, but they're also another example of the crazy, awesome way that our bodies work.

I mean, everybody does it, so everyone should know a little more about it.

Tootles.

[laughs] Stay curious.