Oh Shit! Science Museum in Trouble for Not Fact-Checking Its Poop Exhibit

ByElizabeth Licata

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(Via Giphy)

Oh shit! Someone at the Niigata Science Museum was not paying attention when preparing the display copy for the museum’s big exhibition on poop, because some erroneous information actually made it onto the walls, and then onto the Internet.

While it sounds odd, an exhibit on poop is virtually guaranteed to be a big draw for any science museum. I mean, do you know any little kids who do not want to go to that? So the Niigata Science Museum in Niigata, Japan, had a surefire hit on its hands with its new “Human Waste and Earth’s Future” exhibit, which opened this week, according to Rocket News 24.

The place was full of informative wall signs full of interesting factlets guaranteed to stick in any kid’s head. It even included informative signs about poop in the stalls of the restrooms, which is a pretty clever place for them. The only problem is that some of them were apparently full of shit.

One Twitter user posted a photo of a wall panel explaining the difference between two kinds of poop, called unchi and unko, in Japanese.

”According to the Japan Medical Association, unchi is what’s excreted after meat and fish proteins have been absorbed through digestion, and unko is what’s excreted when only vegetables and grains have been digested. Since humans are omnivores, we excrete unchi,” the sign says, according to Rocket News 24.

 

That’s a pretty interesting distinction! People who saw the sign on Twitter were fascinated. Except some of the more skeptical Twitter users opined that the “fact” sounded like a bunch of poop.

It turns out the museum had gotten the information off the Internet, and the Japan Medical Association had said nothing of the sort. (The museum probably should have gotten on the phone to check. Or at least sent a text.)

Now the museum is in the embarrassing position of having to apologize for having published unresearched information to the public. On the plus side, however, now everyone knows there’s a big poop exhibition going on over in Niigata, and everyone’s going to want to go check it out.

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