TL;DR: No. The half-life of hydrogen-sulfide (one of smelliest constituents of a fart) reacting with the oxygen in the jar from just your fart is 12-37 hours. The article gives an example of a particularly potent hypothetical fart that would only retain any distinguishable odor for 9 days tops.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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This guy farts
My dreams have been shattered.
*sharted
There is a reasonable amount of oxygen in farts? Really?
4% of a fart is oxygen, according to the article, which is enough to react with all of the hydrogen-sulfide, since 1 mole of oxygen is enough to react with more than 1 mole of hydrogen-sulfide (H₂S makes up around 1% of the total volume).
What if we add oxygen absorbers in the jar as well ?
Persumebly not but there is oxygen in the air, usually.
Dammit I wanted to breathe in only farts
So if I farted into a vaccum sealed bag... I could save it then?
Sadly, the fart itself comes with oxygen included
So i have to design an attachment to take oxygen out of the fart before sealing it? I better start watching some TED talks this could be some work.
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That reminds me of when I was a kid, farting in the bath. As I saw the bubbles coming up to the surface, I wanted to catch them.
So I took whatever plastic container I could find around the bath - most likely the cap of a shampoo bottle - submerged it, and held it close to my butt when I felt the next fart coming.
I succeeded in catching some of the fart in the cap. Then I claimed my prize by sniffing directly from the cap. It was so much worse than any fart I've ever smelled.
As a true scientist, I've repeated the experiment on a few later occasions, and without a doubt : bath farts captured in plastic containers smell much worse than normal farts.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I remember sitting in the hall during school as a second grader taking to a friend. I said, "I wonder if you farted in a balloon if it would float." A teacher overheard me and scolded me about it, for some reason.
That was the perfect opportunity to teach the first step of The Scientific Method. The next step was the Hypothesis - what do you think will happen, based on the scientific knowledge you already have?
Then you have to Plan The Experiment, which in this case, would probably really energize the students' brain power. They'll LOVE figuring out this experiment. I would bet that EVERY student would be engaged in this one.
It's the Doing The Experiment that might be problematic, and end up with the teacher explaining themselves to the School Board: "All I can say is, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess you had to be there."
Your teachers sucked. Mine would've told me to try at home
That's the same way they did it on Mythbusters.
My brother used to fart in a tennis ball can and hold me down and make me smell it. I agree, contained farts are awfuler.
Thank you for your contributions to science
I think its because while its under water it doesn't have a chance to diffuse into a larger volume of air -- normally farts are pretty dilute by the time it makes it to anyone's nose.
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They've chosen the worst jar to put in the picture
Why does the fart jar in the picture have a spoon in it?
To agitate the fart in 20 years.
You know why.
why is the jar brown to start with, what kind of a fart are we dealing with here sir?
A better question might be what kind of farts did they have to laminate the inside of that jar so thoroughly that only a spoon could extract it?
Who do you think you are?
Runnin' round leaving scars
Saving your jar of farts
Tearing love apart
I say that every time I hear this song too hahaha.
You're gonna catch a cold,
From the ice inside your hole.
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It'd probably smell like flowers based on where the world is going
Farting in jars is dangerous business. You don't want to end up like that lady from 90 Day Fiancé do you???
Something about that story smells fishy.
$1k / jar and brought in $100k... so that's 100 jars total. Maybe a little extra in case of an accident during shipping. So why did she need to fart 50x per week? Shit, that would be $2.4 million per year of she could actually sell that.
So the way I see it, she was farting in a jar 50x per week but only selling 2 of them... that's not a business, that's a fetish she managed to squeeze a whiff of money out of.
Wouldnt the poop particles have rotted away in that time and maybe turned into fertiliser? Maybe some interesting fungi would be growing. Ah, the circle of life.
I guess it dependson how you store it?
Yes, funny, but methane falls apart if exposed to UV light. Then again, glass blocks most UV...
methane does not have a smell. most hydrocarbons don't. that's why they put smelly stuff (mostly thiols, which are very smelly sulphur compounds) into butane, gasoline, etc.
What? This isn't even remotely true. Standard glass blocks half of UV at best (UVB), and it's the less harmful half.
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