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Fitness & Health

31st May 2016

The sound of a knee cracking up close is the worst thing you’ll hear today

Turn the volume up. It's horrible.

Kevin Beirne

Do you like to crack your knuckles?

Maybe your knee makes a popping sound when you stretch it out after sitting down for a while, or you get a nice crunching sound when your neck gets a bit stiff.

If you do this regularly enough, you’ve no doubt been told it’s disgusting and that it will just lead the arthritis later on in life.

But no matter how much pain it might cause in the future, we just can’t seem to stop.

knee

By now you’ve hopefully realised that our bodies are actually pretty horrendous when you study them up close. And if you hadn’t already figured that out, then we’re sorry to be the ones to break it to you but your body is just a terrible meat costume that will betray you and then you die.

If you don’t believe us, just listen to this. Some researchers from Georgia Tech University in the States have discovered a way to record the sound of your knee bending up close.

Rather than measure sound through the air, they use piezoelectric strips to measure the vibrations directly and convert that into sound.

That doesn’t seem so bad, until you actually hear it yourself and your skin tries to crawl off your body. Check it out for yourself (and remember that you’re listening to the sound of a healthy knee). Turn the volume up.