We may like to keep our bathroom habits private, but it turns out they’re surprisingly interesting.
Since everybody poops, here are 27 really good poop facts to keep your brain entertained.
1. There are four bags of astronaut poop on the moon, left behind by Neil Armstrong on his Apollo mission to the moon.
2. Some of the shooting stars we see are actually astronaut poop burning up in the atmosphere.
3. Fecal matter is found on 72 percent of grocery carts.
4. And soda fountains too.
5. Wombats have cube shaped poop, which they use to remember where they live.
6. Sloths only poop once a week and its called the poop dance.
7. Scientists were monitoring whale stress levels by analysing their poop and found that their stress plummeted immediately following the 9-11 attacks. It turns out this was due to all air traffic being halted, which calmed the oceans of low frequency noise which whales use to communicate.
8. The Parrotfish eats coral and poops sand. This has led to the creation of many small islands and beaches off the Caribbean.
9. The smell of books make some people need to poop. The Mariko Aoki phenomenon consists of the urge to defecate while visiting a bookstore. Originating in Japan, it is named after the woman who first publicised such an urge.
10. Doctors are transplanting poop from healthy people into the stomachs of people with certain illnesses and it is healing them at a rate of 91-98.
11. In 2009, a man on trial in San Diego brought a bag of poop into the courtroom, smeared feces on his lawyer and then threw the remainder at the jury. He was charged with robbery and two counts of assault by poop and was sentenced to 31 years in prison.
12. There is a pill that makes you poop gold and it is sold for $275.
13. Pandas can poop up to 48 pounds per day.
14. Mozart had an extremely off-colour, absurd sense of humor, often exchanging letters with friends and family verses such as: Oui, by the love of my skin, I sh*t on your nose, so it runs down your chin.
15. Salvador Dali smeared himself with goat dung before meeting his wife for the first time.
16. In 1961, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni filled 90 tin cans with his feces, labeled it Artist’s Sh*t and sold them according to their equivalent weight in gold. Many of the cans have since exploded due to decomposition producing gas inside the sealed tins. Apparently this makes the price of the remaining cans go up because they are rarer, so it’s worth way more than its weight of gold now, each containing 30g of poop is worth $100,000 today.
17. In the early years of the 20th century, horses were causing so much pollution with their poop that automobiles were seen as the green alternative.
18. All the poop generated on the US Navy’s newest Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier will be vaporized by plasma.
19. In WWII, German tank drivers in Africa would drive tanks over camel poop for luck. Allies responded by planting land mines disguised as camel dung. Germans got wind of this and began riding over dung that was already overrun with tank tracks. In turn, Allies made mines looking like overrun dung.
20. The 3.6 million year old Laetoli footprints, one of the most important finds concerning human evolution and evidence of upright bipedal walking, was discovered by paleoanthropologist Andrew Hill when he dove into the ground in the middle of an elephant dung fight with his colleague.
21. Ancient Egyptians used pessary made of dried crocodile dung as a form of contraception.
22. 3 billion people around the world still rely on charcoal and dung to cook their food.
23. In India, a company makes paper products out of elephant dung.
24. Paula Radcliffe, the winner of the 2005 London Marathon, pooped on the side of the road in full view of spectators and cameras.
25. Larry Izzo of New England Patriots NFL once took a poop while on the sideline and got the game ball for his trouble because he did it without anyone noticing.
26. George Clooney once cleaned his roommate’s cat’s litter box for four days then crapped in it himself, causing the roommate to think it was from his constipated cat.
27. After analyzing water in holy springs and fonts in Vienna, Austrian researchers discovered that 86 percent of the water samples contained fecal matter, and every milliliter of holy water contained up to 62 million bacteria, none of it safe to drink.
Holy sh*t, right? Share these crazy poop-related facts with others below.