CRAPPY FACTS

Poop may be disgusting, but it’s part of everyone’s lives, so why not embrace it? Okay, maybe not embrace it—maybe just learn a little more about it. Here are some facts about a fascinating subject.

Poop is referred to as “solid waste,” but that’s misleading, because it’s actually about 75 percent water. The remainder is stuff like undigested food, fats, matter the body can’t digest and, of course, bacteria.

Sloths poop just once a week. They have to climb down from trees to do it, and it can be dangerous. More than half of all sloths are killed during their weekly “constitutional.”

Regular people: Studies show that about half of Americans move their bowels once per day. About two-thirds of those do it in the morning. (So if you’re reading this right now, we hope you have a great day!)

What’s the Mariko Aoki phenomenon? The sudden urge to hit the restroom when you’re inside of a bookstore. No, it’s not because of the coffee you just grabbed at the nearby Starbucks. The theory is that the smell of paper and ink has a laxative effect in certain people (such as Mariko Aoki, the scientist who first wrote about the concept in 1985). It could also be why people like to read in the bathroom.

Have you ever experienced defecation syncope? That means you pooped so hard you lost consciousness.

The reason your poop is (usually) one shade of brown or another: bile. That’s generated by the liver, which helps in the digestion of fat. The mixture of bile and fat is (usually) brown.

A lot of people refer to poop (or the act of pooping) by an unprintable “S” word. That’s derived from the Old English word scitte, which technically means “diarrhea.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has helped fund the development of the Omni Processor, a machine that extracts the water from human fecal matter, and then purifies it.

Among the impossible-to-process substances that appear in trace amounts in food: precious metals. The average person poops out about $13 worth of those valuable materials (mostly gold and silver) every year.

Across all of the Apollo Moon missions, astronauts left 96 bags of poop on the Moon. (Neil Armstrong, the first man up there, personally left four.)

What’s tinnuculite? It’s a substance that forms when a falcon—specifically, a European kestrel—flies over a burning coal fire and drops its poop into the flames.

In Mary Shelley’s original novel, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is a vegetarian.