Mooning This Particular Crowd Might Have Been a Mistake
Just as a jet engine turns fuel into a loud roar, we create farts by converting undigested food in our lower colon into intestinal gas. We then blow that gas through a narrow opening, the b-u-t-t-hole, which is surrounded by fatty flaps and folds. As the gas exits, those flaps and folds vibrate, creating a fleshy clamor – the fart. Oddly, over 99% of our farts does not smell. On average, a fart is 59% nitrogen, 21% hydrogen, 9% carbon dioxide, 7% methane, and 4% oxygen – all of which are odorless. However, a minute fraction of less than 1% is made up of other stuff such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and skatole (from the Greek skatos, meaning… the less appropriate word for poop) that seriously stinks.
Stinks so bad, in fact, that people can smell fart particles even when they comprise only 1 part per 100 million parts of air. Not all farts are the same, and some are way worse than others. Take history’s deadliest, which was let go around the time of Passover in 44 AD, in Jerusalem, not long after the death of King Herod Agrippa. As thousands of Jews gathered to partake in the Passover feast and festivities, a Roman soldier stationed above the temple turned around, bared his butt, mooned the crowd, and cut a fart. As seen below, that turned out to be a mistake.
