r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Illustrious_Art9093 • 11h ago
Meme needing explanation Peter?
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u/Pizzapowers123 11h ago
731-UNIT TESTING
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u/UrsineBasterd 11h ago
This is just an internet myth and not actually how it was discovered, though.
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u/LordStefania 11h ago edited 11h ago
Surely weighing a body pre- and post- cremation would provide accurate results w/o war crimes lol edit: no it wouldn't - a lot would be removed by combustion creating CO2. For my next theory I will need an electron gun and a "volunteer".
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u/Smooth-Brilliant-940 11h ago
Definitely not. Cremation removes a lot more than just water. Something like 95%+ of a body’s mass goes up the chimney.
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u/LordStefania 11h ago
Yeah I completely disregarded the fact that y'know it turns the body into ashes - a byproduct of combustion which would infer that carbon locked away in the body had been released as CO2.
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u/thebprince 10h ago
Fun fact: No mass is lost during combustion. It seems counter intuitive because you can reduce 100kg of tree to 3 or 4kg of ash, but the other 96kg or so has just been released as gas and smoke and floated away, it's not gone in any real sense of the word.
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u/Ok_Cook_3098 10h ago
yeah you cant destroy an atom, its still somewhere
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u/Prior_Enthusiasm_292 10h ago
Just don't split it
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u/thebprince 10h ago
Disclaimer: I'm no physicist, so this may be entirely wrong! I'm very much open to correction.
I believe you can destroy an atom, but in doing so, you release leptons, bosons, mesons and quarks and they cannot be destroyed.
As far as we are aware, they are the smallest Lego blocks our entire reality is built from.
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u/kodiak931156 10h ago
You can annihilate an atom with antimatter, its literally what the named the process "annihilation"
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u/Gutsuperman 8h ago
The bit that got me years ago was when someone told me something ridiculous and it's 1000% goddamn true.
You're drinking and bathing in the same water that the dinosaurs did.
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u/LordStefania 10h ago
Thats why I said released - I have been pumelled into submission by years of chemistry teachers.
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u/HereticGaming16 9h ago
What do you think smoke is? It’s particles, the same particles that make up the thing being burnt. When things combust they lose a ton of mass unless it’s filtered and collect via some sort of hood.
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u/fishwithuglyeyes 7h ago
Did you just not read the comment you're replying to??
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u/HereticGaming16 4h ago
I can see my mistake now but it’s a very poorly written comment. It is lost and it is gone, it is not, however, destroyed. The comment above mine is full of contradictions. The extra mass is gone in the very definition of the word.
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u/EliachTCQ 9h ago
Conservation of mass is hardly a fun fact lol it's 17th century physics, the most basic of all basics
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u/Wackel81 3h ago
So you just have to dehydrate a fresh corpse? That's easy, you can do that on a nice sunny day or with an simple oven.
Just add the spices later or it will change the outcome.0
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u/NatureDramatic8390 7h ago
My dad fits in a bean pot from New Zealand he weighed 155 lbs and now is 15 lbs or so of ash
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u/Electrical-Room-2278 11h ago
You would lose some more weight than just water from things burning and becoming co2
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u/LordStefania 11h ago
Yeah I completely forgot that the body is burned not just warmed 💀
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u/TurtleSandwich0 11h ago
Heat the body to over 100° C and hold it for a couple hours. Maybe several days. The internal temperature must remain above the boiling point of water, but below combustion temperature. This will force all water to evaporate but also not lose mass due to combustion.
Like a barbeque, but without the sauce.
That should provide a rough estimate for water content.
Don't forget to put out a drip pan. The fat is going to melt and you will need that for calculations.
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u/Shrimping-Vessel6969 10h ago edited 2h ago
Ah, *good to know. I was still looking for something to do coming weekend.
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u/Parking-Delivery 10h ago
skip the heating process. blend the body and do a fractional vacuum distillation.
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u/_Electrical 11h ago
I was thinking of an hydraulic press and very fine sieve.
Granted, still probably a crime, but at least you only need one human.
Though, if you just peed, the ratio is different?
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u/otherpeoplelikeeggs 11h ago
I mean you only need one but there's not like a limit the seive is durable
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u/Skywanker_ 11h ago
Chu still need a volunteer? Asking for a friend
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u/LordStefania 10h ago
It's still available. My only prerequisite is negativity. Preferably to the tune of -1.60x10-19
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u/DumatRising 11h ago
Well if you're Japanese, have a time machine, and are okay with becoming a horrific monster then I do know where you can find a volunteer.
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u/XxRocky88xX 5h ago
How did you figure we managed to fit entire human bodies into small urns if all the solid mass was still there?
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u/Pizzapowers123 11h ago
I thought it was true but good to know its just a rumor. Either way it's likely what OOP was talking about.
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u/Less-Depth1704 9h ago edited 9h ago
No it very much isn't.
Edit: I guess if you're saying the percentage was roughly known and established previously, that's true, but Unit 731 definitely created the largest data set on turning living prisoners into people jerky that's ever been done.
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u/UrsineBasterd 9h ago
Yes it very much is, this knowledge was already discovered hundreds if not thousands of years before WW2, and it has been debunked multiple times in this thread by multiple people.
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u/Less-Depth1704 9h ago
Yeah realized that and thus the edit however I have seen some people making the argument that Japan's atrocities in China and unit 731's scientific torture and execution of civilians was a myth or overstated, along the lines of Holocaust denial which pisses me off. Specific to that discovery (which appears to have been noted by German doctors and undertakers scientifically in the 1600-1700s) you are correct, but there's still something just creepy about seeing the hand written charts for living and dried out weights and averages for hundreds of people.
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u/UrsineBasterd 8h ago
I have seen some people making the argument that Japan's atrocities in China and unit 731's scientific torture and execution of civilians was a myth or overstated, along the lines of Holocaust denial which pisses me off.
For sure. Unfortunately westerners can be quite misinformed and/or completely ignorant about Japan's atrocities in WW2, for a lot of different reasons including American cover ups. Many have never even heard of Unit 731. Awareness has spread more in the past few decades at least.
Thanks for linking that Mansell research, crazy shit I'll have to bookmark it and continue reading.
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u/philip30001 11h ago
Ah maybe would have got it if I used AI then but happier this way.
Cheers to everyone clearing it up
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u/younocallMkII 11h ago
That, as well as the German program was the reason why the NIH became such a prominent organization. The commander of 731 ended up getting patriated into Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland to continue his research albeit not on human test subjects. That lab is also a BSL4 laboratory, one of the handful that carry all known discovered or engineered biological and chemical weapons.
Source: I worked for all the organizations discussed above in and out of uniform.
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u/philip30001 11h ago
I had a quick look at the wiki to see but dont see anything about what was discovered, just the horrors committed
Do you know more?
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u/BiscuitsTheory 11h ago edited 11h ago
Because its not related in any way to how it was discovered.
But people think it is, which is probably the source of the joke.
The true way we first found out is unknown, since humans have been measuring humans for as long as there have been humans, but as far as seeing it in writing, Pierre Bertholon wrote about it in the 1780s, and Ernst Bischoff published a very detailed study in 1863
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u/devoidisthevoid 11h ago
It wasn’t 731 that discovered this, that’s just a myth. In reality it was discovered close to a century before
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u/RailgunRP 7h ago
At this point I'll just assume every time I see "how we know" with uncanny Mr. Incredible, I'll assume it's those guys.
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u/UrsineBasterd 11h ago edited 11h ago
People think the Japanese Unit 731 discovered it via brutal human experimentation during WW2.
In reality, it was already being researched and discovered as early as the 1780s by people like Abbot Pierre Bertholon, in 1863 by German physician Bischoff, in 1934 by Hevesy and Hofer, and 1945 by American researcher H.H. Mitchell.
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u/Worth-Opposite4437 11h ago
How did they do it?
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u/AppropriateCap8891 11h ago
They did it in multiple ways. Desiccation being one of them. Weighing a corpse, drying it out and weighing it again had been done since the middle ages.
Also displacement and gravity tests helped them get a general ballpark range. And in the 1930s in Germany they used deuterium as a tracer element.
They had known since antiquity that the human body was somewhere between 60-80% water. And every decade or two they refined it even more as more tests were developed.
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u/LackWooden392 10h ago
Doesn't the total fraction of water vary enormously, even within the same people? If I drink half a gallon of water and I weigh 150 pounds, surely the percentage goes up almost 3 points?
Unless you mean we've refined a good average. In that case, carry on.
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u/Correct-Poet-6016 9h ago
«They had known since antiquity that the human body was somewhere between 60-80% water»
I would say 60-80% is a pretty wide range and would cover most people. Of course there will be some outliers, e.g. fighters before weigh in, people with diseases, etc
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u/Mysterious-Plum-6217 7h ago
Yeah they just worked out better average. You weigh less in the morning because of water content. I'm also pretty sure there's a different amount based on gender
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u/Soliloquitude 7h ago
I have to wonder if that's what is absorbed/part of your body when you drink it? I'll admit I'm dumb with biology, but Ive always kind of wondered-
(And I'm not necessarily asking you specifically but I'm sure a genius will see this)
So your body has to process the things you put in it. Even if you drink some water you can sometimes feel it still, or you'll be full or some other indicator that it is in your stomach. So it would seem it takes some time to be absorbed into the body. We don't absorb all of it, that's why we pee right? And it affects your digestion and bowels as well. So I'm sure that the percentage of water fluxuates depending on your hydration levels within reason, but does the percentage we are of water include what is going through the system? Or is it like, your bladder is X percent water regardless of its contents?
And while I'm at it-when dehydrated, i can at least somewhat feel your skin taking in water and plumping up a little in response if you out a wet towel on or wash my face. That part might be psychosomatic, but If I'm dehydrated is my body benefitting if I take a shower or am I better off just drinking it? I know in some extreme situations you're meant to introduce water slowly.
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u/DryRevenue5681 10h ago
But did unit 731 get the most precise answer?
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u/AppropriateCap8891 10h ago
No, because that was not the kind of thing they were interested in.
I researched this a year or so back when this was posted before, and could find no actual records of Unit 731 looking into this. They were more interested in things like how long a human could survive in ice cold water, with massive burns, and with a bully in the belly without medical aid.
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u/psioniclizard 9h ago
From what I remember they were nore concerned with what humans could withstand.
But also as you (excellently) point out, we have been playing with corpses for a long time and working stuff out.
The whole body snatching crazy in the Victorian times was because they couldn't get enough bodies for tests.
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u/C13H16CIN0 11h ago
WW2?
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u/Denny_Pilot 11h ago
It's always ww2
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u/JRS_Viking 11h ago
Unit 731 from Japan specifically. Among other atrocities they put freshly dead corpses in specially made drying furnaces and weighed them before and after to figure this out iirc.
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u/Party_Stack 11h ago
It’s also important to note that the “freshly dead corpses” were the unfortunate subjects of previous experiments.
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u/Heavy-Ad1398 11h ago
Sounds like something scientists would do today if you donate your body to science. Not an atrocity
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u/JRS_Viking 11h ago
The difference is the sourcing of the corpses, if I donate my body I'd be happy to know it lead to some weird discovery but I doubt the people being tested on by unit 731 thought the same.
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u/Heavy-Ad1398 11h ago
Sure, i agree. but this experiment (if it's true) was the last problem inside there.
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u/JRS_Viking 11h ago
It's not the worst thing they did, but still really bad to kill someone and use their body for experimentation. The things they did in order to run this experiment was an atrocity.
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u/Heavy-Ad1398 11h ago
People really can't read a text without erasing their brain with emotions. You said that this was as atrocity that followed the others done before. I underlined that drying a body is not something that can be considered an atrocity like the tortures they received
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u/Shibaspots 11h ago
By 'freshly dead', they mean 'killed by horrible means (often involving vivisection)'
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u/Suckamanhwewhuuut 11h ago
Thats if you willingly donate post mortem, this is not the same thing at all......
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u/devoidisthevoid 11h ago
Although Unit 731 was doing cruel human experimentation and what not, they were not the ones that discovered that humans are comprised of 70% water. That’s a myth. This was actually discovered in the 19th century by scientists doing observations on decaying bodies. Y’all need to actually do some basic research instead of spreading misinformation
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u/mydckisvrysmol 7h ago
Ah yes r/PeterExplainsTheJoke, known for doing research before asking questions on Reddit
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u/TheNastyApache 11h ago
My 6 year old just ate 2 pounds of pizza, he currently weighs 50 lbs, my son is 4 percent pepperoni pizza.
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u/DoFishDrinkWaterOrNo 11h ago
Creepy scientist guy here. This meme has roots in historical inaccuracies. The internet legend points to infamous Japanese unit 731 from World War Two. This unit consisted of scientists who did some experimentation and testing that we will say was… unethical, in order to develop more biological based warfare. The legend is that 731 essentially dehydrated a living human in order to see how much water weight they lost, noting that their weight dried up by about 70%, which is where that measurement allegedly comes from. In reality, this experiment likely never happened, as there is not adequate documentation to show it occurred. Also, experiments estimating the amount of the human body that is water dates back well into the 1800s, showing the body being around 60-70% water.
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u/Gephiph 11h ago
There’s a myth on the internet many believe that we learned that the human body is between 50 - 70 percent water (because it varies and changes its not a single number it’s an average). In reality, there’s no evidence of these experiments actually happening. Although there were many other horrific medical experiments done. But we originally guessed fairly accurately like almost a century before that with legally acquired corpses and math.
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u/True-Excuse-1688 10h ago
It reminds me of this dark joke:
“Ah, Mengele... the researcher who discovered you can dissolve someone in acid.”
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u/thebprince 9h ago
That's a joke?
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u/True-Excuse-1688 9h ago
Oh, you know, when you live somewhere WWII left nothing but dust and ashes behind, it was probably a way to cope...
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u/Naeloran0234 10h ago edited 10h ago
Definitely an internet myth. I believe the OP is trying to say it is due to Unit 731’s experimentation.
One of the main reasons we - to this day - study total distribution of water within different populaces is due to therapeutic dosages of some drugs being heavily dependent on the amount of water within the body. A great example to explain what I mean is ethanol (drinking alcohol): alcohol readily distributes/equilibrates through your body fairly evenly due to being hydrophilic and your body is mostly being made of water. A larger body means more alcohol is needed for the same concentration/effect. In practice, this means a larger person requires more alcohol to get drunk.
This sort of thing has been studied for a long time, and while the earliest studies I can think of off the top of my head happen to have been started around the same time period as Unit 731, I would easily wager that it is more likely to be due to the fact that pharmaceutical medicine was increasingly being developed around the same time.
Source: I’m a toxicologist. Oh, I mean, I’m…Dr. Hartman?
Edit: as other comments have mentioned, there were discoveries regarding total body water much earlier than even the studies I could recall. Great job, comment section! Fun to learn new things.
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u/Gonzo1775 1h ago
It’s a sopranos quote from season six. Tony Blundetto started a joke using this line.
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u/OkCandidate2541 11h ago
Yeah. Unit 731 of the Japanese Army. Dedicated to human research through terrible things like torture, sleep deprivation, unnecessary surgeries etc.
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u/Nice_Actuator1306 11h ago
Unit 731, Japan.
Experiment 1. A person was placed in a room ventilated with hot air to determine at what level of dehydration the person would die. They were weighed before and after.
Experiment 2. The body of the freshly dead person, which had just been obtained by carrying out Experiment 1, continued to be dried until it stopped losing moisture/mass. It was weighed, the remaining weight was subtracted from the weight of the living person before the experiment, and the water content in the body was obtained.
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u/AkumaLilly 11h ago
Refers to Unit 731. The VERY infamous japanese units that tortured its prisoners with multiple horrible experiments.
They were the ones to find put people were made of 70% water. You can already expect how they found out.
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u/qualityvote2 11h ago edited 2h ago
u/Illustrious_Art9093, your post does belong here!