› added 7 years ago

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You’re in luck. For their senior project, two Cornell University computer-engineering whizzes recently built a machine that does just that. After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical.

GAXo1 TIL that Victoria's Secret was named in reference to Queen Victoria and the associated refinement of the Victorian era, while the "secret" was hidden underneath the clothes.
kNmE TIL Seinfeld theme song was redone for each episode in order to match the pacing of Jerry Seinfeld’s monologue in the beginning
woZvM TIL Fireflies produce light in special organs in their abdomens by combining a chemical called luciferin, enzymes called luciferases, oxygen and the fuel for cellular work, ATP. Entomologists think they control their flashing by regulating how much oxygen goes to their light-producing organs.
1BWr TIL America’s deadliest school violence was not Columbine, but Bath, Mich., in 1927 - CSMonitor.com
d86kr TIL that the ceremonial gavel of the US Senate, in use since at least 1789, was broken in 1954 during a heated debate on nuclear energy by VP Richard Nixon