So yeah, as the title says. If you fart do you become lighter because you loose mass or does the loss of buoyancy make you heavier ?

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Farts are mostly particulate. So, you’d be lighter.

    Edit: I did not have “researching farts” on my dance card today, but here we are - I have inadvertently repeated a misnomer. While flatulence can be accompanied by aerosolized liquid, microbial elements, and particulate fecal matter, our gut is actually much more efficient than previously thought at separating gasses. Healthy farts do not contain a significant amount of non-gaseous material. A tiny bit of such material would weigh more than the gaseous content, hence the misnomer that farts are mostly liquid and solid material by weight.

    As the gasses contain hydrogen and sometimes methane, they are indeed lighter than air, on average. They may also contain sulfides and carbon dioxide that are heavier than air, but in smaller quantities.

    So, according to flatus experts (yes, that’s a thing), yes, farting on Earth likely makes you heavier.

    For those who want to suffer as I have, here is a fairly comprehensive article on the matter.

  • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    You get heavier, totally anecdotal evidence on my part but I’ve stepped on the scale in the morning, let a glorious one rip, and the number went up by 0.1.

    I am not saying that I gained 0.1 lbs, just that afterward the scale rounded it up instead of down.