Question: Are hotter farts smellier?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: This is a question that we are frequently asked, as most people have the intuition that warmer things are generally stinkier. The intuition is not unfounded: Summer increases the frequency of smelly activities like construction, and apparently the human nose is generally less sensitive to odors when the air is cold. But what about farts?
Our measurements of high-resolution flatodynamics allow us to track the smell and heat associated with each fart. In previous investigations, we have seen that farts generally produce very little heat, but it is clear that some farts are hotter than others. So we turned to our database to determine if there is a relationship between heat and stink. The answer is surprisingly clear:
Warmer farts are far smellier than colder ones. Indeed, from these results, we can estimate that a 0.1o C increase in the temperature of a fart is, on average, associated with an increase in stinkiness of 7.41 ppm VOC. We can therefore say that fart temperature is the greatest predictor of fart smelliness that we have been able to identify.
The reasons for this will have to be the subject of future investigations. It might be that warmer gasses simply diffuse more effectively into the surrounding environment, therefore becoming more noticeable. Or it could be that slightly warmer body temperatures are associated with more of the bacterial activity that give farts their characteristic smell. This second possibility is of interest to the medical community, as hot farts have been implicated in various disease states. In any case, it appears that heat can somehow be converted into stink, just as fart gas can be used to produce heat.