[NTARelix]

I performed a similar experiment in high school (~2007) but stored it in a plastic bag. After a few months it smelled absolutely horrible so I wrapped it in more bags and kept it hidden in an enclosed space. I decided to open it on the final day of high school about 2.5 years later and to this day I can recall the horrible smell and the texture. It has turned into a black slime as if it had retained or even gained lots of moisture; completely unrecognizable from its original form. Might be the worst smell I can remember to this day. I always heard people say that McDonald's burgers don't decompose, but after that experiment I never believed it because I had proven that it does decompose.

That miscommunication wasn't apparent to me back then, but seems more relevant than ever now. People often like to make bold claims without giving the relevant context or even without actually understanding the context. I see this all the time with news articles or videos making some claim, showing a small bit of evidence, then the information spreads quickly through social bubbles. If I decide to dig through the sources from which the article was derived, I find that there's often a very important piece of context missing. Whether that context was intentionally removed to twist a narrative or if the context was overlooked is not always clear, but it makes it hard to trust so many people and news articles today.

The best remedy for me so far has been to attempt to identify gaps in the knowledge of the people and articles that I'm observing, then try to fill in those gaps.

This article puts to rest my dissatisfaction with the simple claim that they don't decompose because it reveals the primary difference in testing between the conclusions formed by the 2 opposing experiments.