Grossology

The Saturday morning after Shannon's birthday, Shannon, Nancy, and I went to Fernbank's "Grossology" exhibit. What is grossology, you ask? It's the impolite science of the human body. There were factoids and activities about why our bodies sometimes do gross things.

We simulated puke, walked through a giant nose, and learned the difference between short and high-pitched "toots" (as the sign read) and the silent but deadly ones -- it's all about the tightness of the anus, really. Ewwwww. Gross. One of my favorite things was a larger-than-life-size model of the digestive system. It was created as a sort of jungle gym. So kids were entering the mouth, crawling through the stomach, and exiting through the rectum. Darn it . . . wish I had a picture of THAT!

As it is, I don't have any pictures because I left my camera in the car. So I will just say that we had fun. Maybe not as much fun as the kids because that's who the exhibit was geared to, but I learned some interesting things, like:

• It takes a whole day to digest a PB & J sandwich.
• We slough off about 2 million skin cells per hour.
• Most people release 1 cup to a half-gallon of gas a day.
• Hair cells are dead so that we won't be in pain when our hair gets cut. Cool. Man, God thought of everything, didn't He?
  
• Your mouth is the most unsanitary part of your body, with more than 100 million microbes residing there.
  
• Sleeping on your right side helps gas escape easier from your stomach so you can burp while you snore. (My mom tells me that sleeping on the left side helps gas escape from the other end!)
• A sneeze is air exiting our mouth at 100 mph.
• Fresh urine is cleaner than spit or the skin on your face because healthy pee does not contain bacteria.
• If you are right-handed, you sweat more under your left arm. If you are left-handed, you sweat more under your right arm. (Ummm, I think I was supposed to be left-handed.)
  

Wait a second . . . I just visited the Fernbank website and thought I'd just steal their images . . . Here's that jungle gym I was telling you about:

There was also a burping simulation:

There was a guess-the-smell activity. We didn't want to guess all the smells, though; some of them were really sick. Notice the giant nose in the background.



Anyway, overall it was okay. The best part was going with Nancy and Shannon. The exhibit I'm REALLY looking forward to is the one dedicated to chocolate, which opens in February 2006. YUMMY!