Your gut may be busier than you think. In a small University of Maryland experiment, a hydrogen sensor snapped into volunteers' underwear detected extra gas in 22 of 24 adults who appeared to be lactose intolerant after they drank a dose of milk sugar. Only 12 of them said they had noticed anything.
The results, presented in May at Digestive Disease Week 2026 in Chicago, come from the lab of microbiologist Brantley Hall, whose Smart Underwear device made headlines in February for suggesting that healthy adults pass gas about 32 times a day. The new data point to a different puzzle: producing gas and feeling it are not the same thing.
