Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Alright, Alison Neutron, A neutron walks into
Speaker 1: the bar, all right, and he asked the bartender for
Speaker 1: a drink. Bartender says for you, no charge. Hey, I'm
Speaker 1: Alison that the science how stuff Works dot com and
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Lamb, science writer How stuff Works dot com.
Speaker 1: And that joke came to us courtesy of listener Christian, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he submitted on our Facebook page. Yeah, thanks Christian. I
Speaker 1: like that one. That was a Some people might say
Speaker 1: that joke was a stinker um, but but I mean
Speaker 1: that's that's the great thing about cheesy jokes that they
Speaker 1: kind of stink. And we're gonna be talking about a
Speaker 1: number of things that stink, uh in today's podcast. Yes,
Speaker 1: because we're talking about science and it's varied smells and
Speaker 1: that's the name of the podcast. Smells like science. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And don't run away because we're not This is not
Speaker 1: going to be just a discussion of like how the
Speaker 1: nose works or something. We're gonna we're gonna come at
Speaker 1: it from a number of different angles. In fact, our
Speaker 1: first angle we're gonna hit is outer space and how
Speaker 1: doesn't smell. Well, Um, it's interesting. There's actually far more
Speaker 1: data on this than I possibly imagined. Um. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you've ever watched Futurama. I have, I've seen
Speaker 1: episodes yet. Okay, well, there's a there's an episode, I
Speaker 1: think a couple of different episodes where Professor Farnsworthy, ancient
Speaker 1: um often naked mad scientists, pulls out this thing called
Speaker 1: a smelloscope and it looks like a telescope except it
Speaker 1: has these two nostril plugs. Just drapes his nose over
Speaker 1: it and the plugs go up into the nostril, and
Speaker 1: then he can smell distant regions of the cosmos. And
Speaker 1: of course this is fantastic and ridiculous, but there's, like
Speaker 1: I said, there's a lot of information out there. For instance,
Speaker 1: space itself, according to some people who've smelt it has
Speaker 1: an odor, all right, And this is not just people,
Speaker 1: you know theorizing. This is coming from International Space Station
Speaker 1: Science officer Don petite Um. And Don did not spell
Speaker 1: smell the void directly. It's important to mention because he,
Speaker 1: you know, might be dead. Uh No, he was merely
Speaker 1: opening the airlock. So a couple of his crew members
Speaker 1: could come back in from a spacewalk, and he started.
Speaker 1: Every time we do this, he would notice this peculiar smell,
Speaker 1: you know. And at first he's like, it's just something
Speaker 1: weird with the ventilation system, and he's probably thinking it
Speaker 1: is it me, you know, do I smell kind of funny?
Speaker 1: But no, he kept noticing that it was. It was
Speaker 1: cleaning to the space suits in the gear, especially the fabrics,
Speaker 1: and uh, I actould just read the quote and this
Speaker 1: is this. He kept a little blog of his time
Speaker 1: up there. He says, quote. It's hard to describe the smell.
Speaker 1: It is definitely not the oldfactory equivalent to describing the
Speaker 1: the sensations of some new food as tastes like chicken.
Speaker 1: The best description I can come up with is metallic,
Speaker 1: a rather pleasant, sweet, metallic metallic sensation. It reminded me
Speaker 1: of my college summers where I labored for many hours
Speaker 1: with an arc welding porch, repairing heavy equipment for a
Speaker 1: small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant, sweet swelling
Speaker 1: smelling welding fumes, that is the smell of space. So
Speaker 1: aside from him seemed to have kind of a weird
Speaker 1: thing about welding. Um. It also like it reminds me
Speaker 1: of my cat actually because because like I pick up
Speaker 1: the cat and like smell the cat, you know, I
Speaker 1: mean not in like a sick way, you know, but
Speaker 1: just kind of the cats there and you know, you
Speaker 1: bury your nose in the fur. I totally get it. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe not buried, but you know, it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: she's there, you smell, and I always think, like, she
Speaker 1: doesn't really smell like anything, maybe batteries. You know. It's
Speaker 1: funny you say that because we recently went to the
Speaker 1: Atlanta Zoo and we go a lot, you know, we
Speaker 1: have kids, and I've always noticed a peculiar smell at
Speaker 1: the gorilla exhibit, and to me, maybe it does have
Speaker 1: a little bit of a metallic odor to it, but
Speaker 1: it is a distinctly animal smell and it but it
Speaker 1: does have a metallic kind of but not a monkey
Speaker 1: house odor. No, no, no, no, not monkey house. It's
Speaker 1: just it's just a funky kind of metallic. But back
Speaker 1: to space. Back to space. Okay, well, all right, so
Speaker 1: that's outer space itself. So from there, let's head to
Speaker 1: the moon. And here you have a number of the
Speaker 1: different astronauts who went to the moon, came back, and
Speaker 1: they had some some comments about especially how moon dust smells. Now, again,
Speaker 1: they were not going out onto the surface of the
Speaker 1: moon and sniffing moon dust, but but it's everywhere and
Speaker 1: it gets all over you. And so they're coming back
Speaker 1: into the in from their walk and it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's all over their stuff, over the equipment, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So they end up sniffing it. They end up you know,
Speaker 1: it's getting in their mouths and their nose, etcetera. And
Speaker 1: so you had a number of different like a number
Speaker 1: from Paulo seventeen astronauts that we're within the stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that commented on it. One in particular, Yeah, Gene Cernan
Speaker 1: said that it smells like like spent gunpowder, and a
Speaker 1: number of the other astronauts backed him up on this, right, So, uh,
Speaker 1: paula seventeen astronaut Jack Schmidt and held some of it,
Speaker 1: and he said it gave him a few hours of
Speaker 1: hay fewer. Yeah, And when they asked him it was interesting.
Speaker 1: Their as was like, did any the other astronauts have this?
Speaker 1: And he said, well, they didn't say, they didn't own
Speaker 1: up to it. So it's sort of like this, like
Speaker 1: maybe that they had it too, but they didn't want
Speaker 1: to say anything. Tough guy. Yeah, I'll astronauts are tough guys,
Speaker 1: tough women in case maybe, well, yeah a lot of
Speaker 1: them were. Like the thing about the gunpowder is that
Speaker 1: these were guys who knew their way around some guns.
Speaker 1: This was not just a theoretical what gunpower. You know,
Speaker 1: these were gun toting Americans, you know of of the
Speaker 1: of the late sixties, early seventies. Well, the smell makes
Speaker 1: sense in a way when you think about what moon
Speaker 1: dust is made of, right, because almost half is silicon
Speaker 1: dioxide glass created by meteorites hitting the moon. So these impacts,
Speaker 1: which have been going on for billions of years, fuse
Speaker 1: top soil into glass and they shatter into tiny pieces.
Speaker 1: And it's also moon dust is also rich and iron,
Speaker 1: calcium and magnesium. It's bound up in the minerals such
Speaker 1: as olivine and pyroxy and so it's actually nothing like gunpara. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's but the impact thing makes sense to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it sounds plausible, Like you look like I didn't.
Speaker 1: I don't doubt it for a second. When they're like
Speaker 1: hunt smells like gunpowder, up there all right, you know,
Speaker 1: gray and dusty. But they said also some of it
Speaker 1: comes from gases evaporating off the moon dust, and these
Speaker 1: are gases that get there via the solar wind. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the Moon is constantly exposed to hot wind, this hot
Speaker 1: solar wind of hydrogen, helium and other ions blowing away
Speaker 1: from the Sun. So so a lot of that gets
Speaker 1: caught up in the dust as well. So we don't
Speaker 1: really have a firm answer of why these guys found
Speaker 1: it to smell this way, but you know, we we can.
Speaker 1: There's some commentary on the various elements at play there. Well,
Speaker 1: if I never get to the Moon at least have
Speaker 1: a fuller sensory picture. Yeah, it makes it a little,
Speaker 1: I don't know, stinkier. I don't know. The space thing
Speaker 1: was really surprising because you just think of space itself
Speaker 1: as being just kind of sterile, you know, right, totally
Speaker 1: I do. So let's talk about some many other planets
Speaker 1: out there and what their particular odors are. Yeah, well, Mercury,
Speaker 1: of course, closest to the Sun and doesn't really have
Speaker 1: much of an atmosphere at least not anymore very thin.
Speaker 1: Most of it was US long ago and what remains
Speaker 1: is mostly sodium, which doesn't really have a smell, So
Speaker 1: don't expect to find mercury just by using your smaller scope.
Speaker 1: What would you expect mercury to smell, like, just off
Speaker 1: the top of your head. Well, being a fiery world,
Speaker 1: you kind of expect to get this like a sulfury
Speaker 1: hell smell, which is we're going to see you actually
Speaker 1: do get a very sulfury sulfury hell smell off of
Speaker 1: some of these other planets. I'm thinking mercury maybe like peppers,
Speaker 1: you know, spicy food sort of smell like a curry,
Speaker 1: like a nice planet planetary curry kind of odor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like super tied chili hot. You know, that's what I
Speaker 1: would think that mercury might smell. Like. Moving onto venus um,
Speaker 1: this is supposed to be a sharp, pungent smell, and
Speaker 1: then onlike on rotten eggs. Do the clouds of sulfuric
Speaker 1: acid which you were just talking about and mars that
Speaker 1: similar In a similar note, they say, you know, there's
Speaker 1: sulfur acids, magnesium, iron, put that all together in a
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide rich environment, and it's going to probably reek
Speaker 1: like rotten eggs. Hidding, Yeah, bad smelling solar system. We
Speaker 1: have it. Yeah, it's it kind of sucks for the
Speaker 1: first Mars colonists to get there, right, but they do.
Speaker 1: They're just going to get used to it. So Jupiter,
Speaker 1: it kind of depends on the layer what you're sniffing
Speaker 1: on Jupiter, So the lighter zones would smell like ammonia,
Speaker 1: then ammonia and rotten eggs, and then you pass through
Speaker 1: hydrogen sulfa, then bitter almonds, which is gonna be your
Speaker 1: hydrogen cyanide, and then and that's really cool because it's
Speaker 1: like a lot of these planets have some more odors,
Speaker 1: but this is like this rich bitter almondy poison center.
Speaker 1: You know, it's kind of like it's like what a
Speaker 1: bond bond or something, an enormous bon bon. But then
Speaker 1: it's also got its moon. Io was kind of interesting
Speaker 1: because it's highly volcanic, and guess what ye smells like
Speaker 1: rotten eggs due to all the sulfur and the volcanic
Speaker 1: eruptions satur and we're not so sure what it smells like.
Speaker 1: But the moon titan Um, so it's haze covered over
Speaker 1: nitrogen based atmosphere and a silled surface and a pungent
Speaker 1: odor reminiscent of a petroleum processing facility that's not very pleasant. Um.
Speaker 1: And oh, and then of course there's there's uranus yea,
Speaker 1: and the hydrogen and helium portions of the uranian atmosphere
Speaker 1: are essentially scentless. And then there's that two percent methane content,
Speaker 1: which I have to stress something here because we're also
Speaker 1: gonna discuss another planet has some some methane content to it.
Speaker 1: There's this idea that methane is stinky out there purely
Speaker 1: because of the methane component in various gases that um,
Speaker 1: you know, come out of cows and humans, etcetera. Right,
Speaker 1: farts essentially, but it's important to note that that farts
Speaker 1: also contain a number of other elements. All Right, these
Speaker 1: tiny amounts of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, methane, hydrogen, sulfide, um, ammonia,
Speaker 1: this is all mixing together and and this is this
Speaker 1: is all a recipe for for bad odor. Methane on
Speaker 1: its own is is not going to stink. Okay, So
Speaker 1: so again you're in this nothing really smell going on there.
Speaker 1: Same with Neptune, very similar environment. Yeah, but you know what,
Speaker 1: that doesn't surprise me because I think of Neptune and
Speaker 1: you're in a very similarly I feel like brothers in
Speaker 1: the Solar System. Yeah, I don't think of them as
Speaker 1: having very different traits, you know what I mean? And
Speaker 1: I know that's not true, brothers that hang out on
Speaker 1: the outskirts of the Solar System. And then for all
Speaker 1: of you guys who bemoaned the lack of Pluto amongst
Speaker 1: our Solar System, we do have some infra on Pluto,
Speaker 1: and that's a since it's such a thin atmosphere composed
Speaker 1: mostly of methane, so you mainly got nothing going on there. Interestingly, though,
Speaker 1: to be untrained, Iron knows, people would think, oh, but
Speaker 1: Pluto's got methane. Um, you know, atmosphere, it's gonna suck.
Speaker 1: You know, it's going to really stink. But it doesn't totally. Which, incidentally,
Speaker 1: if I can run through this real quick, I did
Speaker 1: run across, you know, all those different websites where people
Speaker 1: ask quite random people have questions and random people answer them.
Speaker 1: Somebody had asked the question like, what do the planet
Speaker 1: smell like? And somebody had had replied and I and
Speaker 1: these are completely not true, but they said the mercury
Speaker 1: smells like refried beans. Venus smells like gasoline or smells
Speaker 1: like unwashed socks, Mars smells like martians, Jupiter smells like
Speaker 1: muddy dogs, Saturn smells like burnt paper. You're You're in
Speaker 1: the smells like dead trees. Nepteine smells like a turtle,
Speaker 1: and Pluto smells like quaw squab? What squab? Again? I
Speaker 1: think it's like pigeon meat, like some sort of all right, right,
Speaker 1: I think you're right, which, so anyway, I just found
Speaker 1: that amusing. Yeah, so let's head back to the Earth
Speaker 1: for a second and check out some of our planets
Speaker 1: most pungent residents. Oh yeah, that's right, some animals and
Speaker 1: plants certainly do put out an odor. Yeah, here on Earth.
Speaker 1: And this section gave me a chance to revisit one
Speaker 1: of my favorite articles on the site, and that is
Speaker 1: why does the Stink Plants Think? And it was written
Speaker 1: by a freelancer, Jonathan Attebury. So in the article, att
Speaker 1: Abury takes us back to eighteen seventy eight and he
Speaker 1: imagines checking through the Launching rainforest alongside botanists Duardo Becari
Speaker 1: his Italian. Yeah, and so, as the Italian is exploring
Speaker 1: the forest, he gets a whiff of rotten meat. Next
Speaker 1: thing he knows, the wind shifts and a stench floods
Speaker 1: his nostrils. The smell is very, very bad, symphony of
Speaker 1: spoiled eggs, road kill, and dirty laundry. So imagine that
Speaker 1: Beccari looks towards the source of the odor and behold
Speaker 1: the stinct plant A. K. Tighten arum. And this is
Speaker 1: a This is a great U time to do a
Speaker 1: quick Google search to see the image, or go ahead
Speaker 1: and go to that article and look at the picture,
Speaker 1: because it just looks bizarre. It's just enormous and it
Speaker 1: kind of looks like a fountain and kind of looks
Speaker 1: like something from the set of like Classic Star Trek. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it's this massive plant sporting a massive pillar and it's
Speaker 1: it is kind of phallic. Thus the scientific name a
Speaker 1: morphox Phallus titanum or titanum. So the stinct plant is
Speaker 1: an inflorescence, and what does that mean. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a group of flowers clustered around a central column known
Speaker 1: as the spadix, and it's surrounded by this leafy structure
Speaker 1: called the space spath. And why does the corpse flower
Speaker 1: smell so terrible. Take a guess, I mean to attract
Speaker 1: in of course. And it's such a large plant that
Speaker 1: it can take a year or more for the plant
Speaker 1: to store enough energy to bloom. So even then the
Speaker 1: plant can only sustain its bloom for a couple of
Speaker 1: days though. So it's it's you know, it's has this
Speaker 1: really terrible smell, but it's it's fleeting. And because these
Speaker 1: plants are located so far apart from one another and
Speaker 1: they bloom, you know, on such an infrequent basis, they
Speaker 1: want as much insect attention as possible, so they get
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of like bees and beetles. They're crawling
Speaker 1: all over and spreading the pollen around, right, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's also interesting that scientists size that the overall
Speaker 1: appearance and smell helped the plant masquerade as a giant
Speaker 1: hunk of decaying meat. It does, it does look it
Speaker 1: doesn't look kind of fleshy. Again, you really need to
Speaker 1: check out the article because it's it's hard to imagine.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's like this giant pillar. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: as long as your arm if you're to hold your
Speaker 1: arm in the air right now. But even longer. I
Speaker 1: think it can be maybe a couple of feet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the stink plant is by no means the only mellower's plant.
Speaker 1: In fact, a whole group of them are called carryon flowers,
Speaker 1: which is kind of an interesting name for a flower.
Speaker 1: I mean that you don't necessarily go together when you
Speaker 1: think about flower carryon carrying flowers. Yeah, we have a
Speaker 1: we have a great botanical garden here in town um
Speaker 1: and some lovely smelling flowers. I almost kind of want
Speaker 1: them to put on like a carrion flower exhibit, you know,
Speaker 1: just just you know, just so I can run through
Speaker 1: real quick at least and sniff these and really the
Speaker 1: full experience. Yeah, I have no doubt that would be
Speaker 1: a big hit with the ladies of the garden club set.
Speaker 1: So not only do these carrying flowers smell like we're
Speaker 1: just saying, but they also tend to look the part right. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, the Stipilia asterious flower is coated with fine hairs,
Speaker 1: and that's handy because it makes the flower resemble moldy meat.
Speaker 1: And then we have the rough roughly see you are
Speaker 1: no oldie, And that's the world's largest flower. And that's
Speaker 1: another fleshy carrion flower located in Sumatra. Sumatra is just
Speaker 1: ripe with this stuff, like literally right with this stuff.
Speaker 1: So what about animals? I assume you know, naturally, not
Speaker 1: every animal's gonna smell as nice and metallic as our
Speaker 1: cats and gorillas, right right, right right? Um. So I
Speaker 1: had fun researching this part of the podcast, and I
Speaker 1: came up with a couple of candidates for the most
Speaker 1: pungent animal on Earth, and one of the candidates I've
Speaker 1: never heard of before. And this is called the zarilla.
Speaker 1: See now that just makes that just sounds made up,
Speaker 1: it kind of does. I mean, it's like I'm picturing
Speaker 1: like maybe a gorilla with zebra stripes. Is that what
Speaker 1: it does? Yeah? Well no, Robert, it's a striped pole cat, okay.
Speaker 1: And it's a it's a skunk like animal, and it's
Speaker 1: a member of the weasel family. Okay. I see. I
Speaker 1: was wondering when when we were going into this, and like,
Speaker 1: is the skunk going to be the stinkiest animal, because
Speaker 1: that's the one that instantly comes to mind. It does,
Speaker 1: it definitely does. But we're going with the skunk like
Speaker 1: in this case, and I'm I'm weighing in on the zailla.
Speaker 1: You want to know why you want to we want
Speaker 1: to know why this convinced me that that Zarella's might
Speaker 1: take the prize. Is that because they can ward off
Speaker 1: lions with their stink, they can ward off lions, the
Speaker 1: King of the Jungle, Yeah, the grassy plaint whatever, but
Speaker 1: but still, yeah, warding off the lion. These guys are ferocious.
Speaker 1: You think they wouldn't shy away from a slightly stinky meal. Well,
Speaker 1: I read one editorial about the Zorella that said it's
Speaker 1: anal glance can be smelled from a half mile away. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I have another. Are you ready? Are you ready for
Speaker 1: the next nomination? You know what, I'm finding something to
Speaker 1: be true in this podcasting series we've been doing. I
Speaker 1: think I have a stronger stomach than you do. Maybe
Speaker 1: so that mean they're yeah, I mean, if you listen,
Speaker 1: I mean with the worm and the woman's foot and listener, man,
Speaker 1: that was worms and a woman's foot. That was kind
Speaker 1: of gross. That was pretty cool and it was cool,
Speaker 1: but it was you know, it's a pretty grim image. Right.
Speaker 1: So my next nomination, getting back to pungent animals, is
Speaker 1: is a beetle? The bombardier beetle. I've seen clips of
Speaker 1: these guys. Yeah. Yeah, So these beetles, when physically assaulted, um,
Speaker 1: they squirt out this hot quininoid spray from their abdomens,
Speaker 1: and the African bombardiered beetle can aim its spray and
Speaker 1: pretty much any direction. So I was reading about this
Speaker 1: in the journal Proceedings in the National Academies of Science,
Speaker 1: and UM, the reason why this beetle has evolved such
Speaker 1: an olfactory defense is if you can remember that can't
Speaker 1: instantly take to the air, so it has to right, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it can eventually take to the air, but
Speaker 1: not instantly, and you know, an instant can be you know,
Speaker 1: life or death, as we all know. And so I
Speaker 1: like this. I really like this beetle. And according to
Speaker 1: authors of the paper and the proceedings will just call
Speaker 1: that for short, it can discharge upwards of twenty times
Speaker 1: before depleting its glands. And this is this is kind
Speaker 1: of cool. The discharges are accompanied by audible audible detonations,
Speaker 1: so it's like it's setting off these little smell bombs
Speaker 1: and they do deter predators. Yeah, I've seen some. I
Speaker 1: think this is one of the ones that some scientists
Speaker 1: were interested in in the you know, in the field
Speaker 1: of bio mimicry, like looking how how nature is evolved
Speaker 1: to carry out certain processes that we might want to
Speaker 1: carry out. And you know, they're very interested in like, um,
Speaker 1: like like being able to take this squirting mechanism and
Speaker 1: apply it to some sort of gizmo or another. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just one of the amazing little evolutionary traits it's
Speaker 1: come around. That's cool. Yeah, So those are two of
Speaker 1: my nominations for most punching Animal. Of course, if you
Speaker 1: guys have ones that you'd like to send us, please
Speaker 1: do feel free to email them on over a post
Speaker 1: m on Facebook. But let's talk about when it doesn't
Speaker 1: smell so bad. Well, you know, and this is of
Speaker 1: course subjective because smell is subjective. Um, like a koala.
Speaker 1: Really they're so adorable and yet they stink. Well, a
Speaker 1: lot of people have talked about koala smelling like cough drops,
Speaker 1: and do they in fact smell like coughdrops. I've never
Speaker 1: heard this particular, like they're addicted to cough drops or
Speaker 1: oh no, I guess it's their their diet, right, right.
Speaker 1: So if you remember, kuala is the furry Australian marsupial
Speaker 1: that sleeps all day and it's a cradled up in
Speaker 1: the tree branches, and it wakes up maybe you know,
Speaker 1: for a few hours, much as a couple of eucalyptus leaves,
Speaker 1: and it conks out again. Yeah, probably all that time
Speaker 1: digesting food. It's probably not that easy to digest. It
Speaker 1: reminds me of the panda in that their digestis they
Speaker 1: have such a specialized diet, right, you know, the qualitists
Speaker 1: eats these eucalyptic eucalyptus leaves and then you know, maybe
Speaker 1: eats a couple of other random things, but mainly eucalyptus,
Speaker 1: you know, in the panda with the bamboo, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all specialists, right, and but their digestive systems have
Speaker 1: such a hard time accommodating that specialized diet. So it
Speaker 1: just doesn't really make sense to me. Yeah, well that's
Speaker 1: why you don't see any any specialist um species like
Speaker 1: building cities and ruling the planet, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: we're we're more generalists. We can eat just about anything,
Speaker 1: you know. Okay, so you're saying that pandas can't rule
Speaker 1: the planet because they exactly. Yeah. And and also it's
Speaker 1: like you go, you look around a city, what's running everywhere? Raccoons? Rats, uh, foxes?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know if fox is canna. I
Speaker 1: don't think foxes are running everywhere anyway. Oh yes they are.
Speaker 1: London foxes are everywhere in London. Seriously, like you don't
Speaker 1: see him as much because then I'm not making this.
Speaker 1: It sounds like something I would make up. But but no,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of foxes, uh in especially in
Speaker 1: the London area. Well, So, getting back to coals and
Speaker 1: cough drops for a sex off thea the British foxes. Um,
Speaker 1: so do thesemart supiles actually smell a cough drops? All right?
Speaker 1: So do you se these leaves from the eucalyptus street?
Speaker 1: And remember that eucalyptus is are grown for their gums,
Speaker 1: their resins, their oils in their woods. And then you
Speaker 1: can lift to soil acts as an expectorant. So it
Speaker 1: loosens the flegm and the respiratory passages and that's that's
Speaker 1: great for those cold. It can be an antiseptic and
Speaker 1: it can also function as a dearnorant. But according to
Speaker 1: freelancer Julia Layton and the Australian Quala Foundation. Mostly it's
Speaker 1: the young ones that smell like eucalyptus. As they get older,
Speaker 1: the small fades, and a mature koala will smell muskie
Speaker 1: or like urine and uh, not so much like a
Speaker 1: drug store cough drop, more like an old person's m
Speaker 1: I guess, I guess so, So when cuddling up to
Speaker 1: a koala, go for the young ones, grab the babies. Well,
Speaker 1: I I did look around a little bit, um to
Speaker 1: see whether kuala breath smelled like eucalyptus or perhaps a quala.
Speaker 1: A kuala passing gas smelled like what a day of
Speaker 1: research you've had? It was pretty fun. So what do
Speaker 1: you have? Oh? Um, well, this is pretty interesting. Um.
Speaker 1: So I was looking at some we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: leave the animal kingdom. Well, most of the animal can
Speaker 1: get back into the human world of scent. And I
Speaker 1: was reading a couple of studies that had to do
Speaker 1: with the way suggestion plays into our our sense of smell. Uh.
Speaker 1: For instance, there is a two thousand five study from
Speaker 1: Oxford University. Okay, and this one, this one sound reminds
Speaker 1: me a lot of in our wine episode, we talked
Speaker 1: about the neuroscientists who had everybody come over a wine
Speaker 1: testing and started having all these crazy little experiments to
Speaker 1: see if people could tell like good wine from bad wine,
Speaker 1: or or you know, white red wine from white wine
Speaker 1: has been dyed red. Well, this guy, um right, Professor
Speaker 1: Edmund Rowels invited volunteers over and had them smell cheese,
Speaker 1: except sometimes he labeled the cheese cheddar and other times
Speaker 1: he labeled it body odor, just to see what their
Speaker 1: reaction would be. And then of course his team scanned
Speaker 1: the volunteers brains, so you know, it wasn't like a
Speaker 1: great dinner party, I guess, um uh. You know, so
Speaker 1: they scan their brains to see what the what's going
Speaker 1: on in their in their heads when they're smelling these things,
Speaker 1: right a right, So when the cheddar cheese was labeled correctly,
Speaker 1: when it's cheese that's labeled cheese, higher areas of the
Speaker 1: brain that interpret smell were activated. Okay uh. Then they
Speaker 1: would give him a whiff of just clean air labels
Speaker 1: with jeddar cheese, and it activated the same areas but
Speaker 1: to a lesser extent. So it's kind of like that,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's the suggestion is still doing a
Speaker 1: lot of work, but but not as much as that
Speaker 1: the real thing you know, would would do. Okay, And
Speaker 1: the researchers also made sure to check how big a
Speaker 1: sniff they were taking to see if that was playing
Speaker 1: an effect that that didn't have any effect on on
Speaker 1: the results. So anyway, the results of the result of
Speaker 1: this experiment was they found that the pleasantness of the
Speaker 1: odor um is being Mardu modulated in a part of
Speaker 1: the brain called the and I make it this wrong,
Speaker 1: the orbito frontal cortex, which is involved with emotions. All right,
Speaker 1: So this is like a high level influence on on
Speaker 1: on how you're smelling things. Uh. And for instance, this
Speaker 1: is the same area the brain that sometimes damaged and
Speaker 1: dementia cases or if someone's in a severe accident, and
Speaker 1: that can alter your It alters your appetite in some cases.
Speaker 1: Um it can apparently even make you more prone to obesity.
Speaker 1: But like the appetite thing is key because of course
Speaker 1: scent plays a key role and you know what we'd
Speaker 1: like to eat, so um. So anyway, that's a really
Speaker 1: interesting case um of just you know, just somebody telling
Speaker 1: you how something smells. And this is this actually goes
Speaker 1: and I don't know if you've found this with kids,
Speaker 1: but I've often heard people talk about like when you're
Speaker 1: feeding kids like new foods, like you never let them
Speaker 1: say it smells bad or you know, you certainly never
Speaker 1: refer to something as stinky. That makes sense you come
Speaker 1: across that. Do you let your kids say food is stinky?
Speaker 1: I don't know if they know the words stinky, yet
Speaker 1: they wow, you were doing great. I think miss some
Speaker 1: other words they shouldn't know, but stink he's not among them.
Speaker 1: Yet another interesting case that I that I came across,
Speaker 1: uh goes back to April fool stand in nineteen Yet
Speaker 1: this is like a obviously an April Fool's joke on
Speaker 1: BBC TV, and uh, they had a guy, did it
Speaker 1: involve Foxes? No fox Um, But a professor from Lendon
Speaker 1: University comes on and they go through this whole thing
Speaker 1: where they're gonna unveil smell a visions, right, and they
Speaker 1: they you know, they unveil some sort of hokey kind
Speaker 1: of um you know, kind of like a look around
Speaker 1: you esque explanation about how they're going to transfer the
Speaker 1: scent molecules and like in like into like smaller like
Speaker 1: digital molecules or something like transfer it through the screen,
Speaker 1: So basically you'll be able to get close to your
Speaker 1: TV and smell. Hilarious image of everybody getting close and
Speaker 1: sniffing their TVs. Yeah, And apparently people fell from it
Speaker 1: were like, you know, calling it like they put some
Speaker 1: coffee or something up there, and people were like, they
Speaker 1: were like, yeah, I can totally smell it. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then in nineteen seventy seven Bristol University psychology lecture named
Speaker 1: Michael O'Mahoney tried the same thing all right, and he
Speaker 1: uh he told viewers that they were they were going
Speaker 1: to smell hey and grass and no like cow crap
Speaker 1: or anything, but just like a nice field, you know,
Speaker 1: a pleasant kind of you know, um, you know, outdoor environment.
Speaker 1: And people people again like people claim to have smelled it.
Speaker 1: They like wrote in you know, some of these people
Speaker 1: may have been lying or just wanting to you know,
Speaker 1: you know, that's they kind of factored that into it.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people said, hey, I can I
Speaker 1: can totally smell. One person apparently even complained of hay fever,
Speaker 1: just like that astronaut. Yeah, maybe who smell in the
Speaker 1: Mondes may. Yeah. So anyway, so we've touched on stinky animals,
Speaker 1: how space might smell, how they how things smell differently
Speaker 1: depending on what kind of other sense data we're combining
Speaker 1: with it. Um. I enjoyed this podcast. Yeah, I had
Speaker 1: a lot of fund researching it. Yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 1: a smart guess board, but I think it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of like you you put all the elements together, it
Speaker 1: really shows you how how vary the world of of
Speaker 1: at least our own you know, sense perception really is. Yeah, definitely. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you guys want to tell us about your your
Speaker 1: favorite smells or your favorite bad smells, or what you
Speaker 1: think Uru might smell like. Yeah, and I'm especially interested
Speaker 1: to anybody out there who's like really really knows what
Speaker 1: they're talking about with with the like the atmosphere of
Speaker 1: other planets has additional ideas, even contrary ideas out with
Speaker 1: some of these plow these places might smell like I'd
Speaker 1: love to hear about. Yeah, send us an email at
Speaker 1: Science Stuff at how stuff frix dot com, or you
Speaker 1: can always uh hang out on Facebook. We're on Facebook
Speaker 1: two with us stuff from the Science Lab or Twitter
Speaker 1: as well with a lab stuff handle yeah, and give
Speaker 1: us a cool science joke and gives your name and
Speaker 1: where you're from, and we'll throw it up at the
Speaker 1: front of the podcast. All right, cool. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics because
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
Speaker 1: check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com home page.