All farts are like snowflakes, beautiful and unique. If you never thought you’d read a sentence like that before, it’s possible that you’re not familiar with ASAP Science, the video series that teaches you all the magical things your high-school science teacher likely never did. (Like why we’re so obsessed with breasts.) Today’s lesson is all about farts. But it’s not about how or why we fart (duh, because it’s fun and annoys others), but whether we could outrun a fart if we wanted to (like in middle school when that one weird smelly kid would just set one off and we’d all cringe at our desks, trying not to bathe in the smell and doing our best not to worry about whether farts contain fecal particles).
The easy answer is that outrunning farts is near impossible. Even Usain Bolt, the video explains, wouldn’t be able to outrun the sound of a particularly loud fart he had produced if he wanted to. He might be gone before you’d know it was him, but he’d certainly hear the sound of the fart escaping as he high-tailed it out of the room. But the issue of smell makes it more complicated. That’s because not only are all farts unique (just the reminder you needed that you were special on this Wednesday!) but because so are our noses, meaning that while some of us might feel the full flavor of a particularly pungent expulsion of gas, sensing it violating the very core of our being, others might just be all “whatever. Farts.” Even then, though, ASAP Science points out that the “smelliest” part of the fart moves at more than 243 meters per second, meaning that we can’t really escape, we can just hope our noses aren’t sensitive.
Good to know. Let’s hope ASAP Science’s next video addresses another of life’s most important questions: Is the one who smelled it also the one who dealt it?
