July 27, 2010 • 27 mins
Smells surround us: Astronauts say that space and the moon possess unique aromas, and many animals also have their own unmistakable odors. In this episode, Robert and Allison explore the science behind smells, from space to your local cow pasture.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Works dot com. Alright, Alison Neutron, A neutron walks into
the bar, all right, and he asked the bartender for
a drink. Bartender says for you, no charge. Hey, I'm
(00:25):
Alison that the science how stuff Works dot com and
I'm Robert Lamb, science writer How stuff Works dot com.
And that joke came to us courtesy of listener Christian, Yeah,
he submitted on our Facebook page. Yeah, thanks Christian. I
like that one. That was a Some people might say
that joke was a stinker um, but but I mean
that's that's the great thing about cheesy jokes that they
(00:46):
kind of stink. And we're gonna be talking about a
number of things that stink, uh in today's podcast. Yes,
because we're talking about science and it's varied smells and
that's the name of the podcast. Smells like science. Yeah,
And don't run away because we're not This is not
going to be just a discussion of like how the
nose works or something. We're gonna we're gonna come at
it from a number of different angles. In fact, our
first angle we're gonna hit is outer space and how
(01:07):
doesn't smell. Well, Um, it's interesting. There's actually far more
data on this than I possibly imagined. Um. I don't
know if you've ever watched Futurama. I have, I've seen
episodes yet. Okay, well, there's a there's an episode, I
think a couple of different episodes where Professor Farnsworthy, ancient
um often naked mad scientists, pulls out this thing called
a smelloscope and it looks like a telescope except it
(01:30):
has these two nostril plugs. Just drapes his nose over
it and the plugs go up into the nostril, and
then he can smell distant regions of the cosmos. And
of course this is fantastic and ridiculous, but there's, like
I said, there's a lot of information out there. For instance,
space itself, according to some people who've smelt it has
(01:50):
an odor, all right, And this is not just people,
you know theorizing. This is coming from International Space Station
Science officer Don petite Um. And Don did not spell
smell the void directly. It's important to mention because he,
you know, might be dead. Uh No, he was merely
(02:10):
opening the airlock. So a couple of his crew members
could come back in from a spacewalk, and he started.
Every time we do this, he would notice this peculiar smell,
you know. And at first he's like, it's just something
weird with the ventilation system, and he's probably thinking it
is it me, you know, do I smell kind of funny?
But no, he kept noticing that it was. It was
cleaning to the space suits in the gear, especially the fabrics,
(02:33):
and uh, I actould just read the quote and this
is this. He kept a little blog of his time
up there. He says, quote. It's hard to describe the smell.
It is definitely not the oldfactory equivalent to describing the
the sensations of some new food as tastes like chicken.
The best description I can come up with is metallic,
a rather pleasant, sweet, metallic metallic sensation. It reminded me
(02:56):
of my college summers where I labored for many hours
with an arc welding porch, repairing heavy equipment for a
small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant, sweet swelling
smelling welding fumes, that is the smell of space. So
aside from him seemed to have kind of a weird
thing about welding. Um. It also like it reminds me
(03:17):
of my cat actually because because like I pick up
the cat and like smell the cat, you know, I
mean not in like a sick way, you know, but
just kind of the cats there and you know, you
bury your nose in the fur. I totally get it. Well,
maybe not buried, but you know, it's like, you know,
she's there, you smell, and I always think, like, she
doesn't really smell like anything, maybe batteries. You know. It's
funny you say that because we recently went to the
(03:37):
Atlanta Zoo and we go a lot, you know, we
have kids, and I've always noticed a peculiar smell at
the gorilla exhibit, and to me, maybe it does have
a little bit of a metallic odor to it, but
it is a distinctly animal smell and it but it
does have a metallic kind of but not a monkey
house odor. No, no, no, no, not monkey house. It's
(03:58):
just it's just a funky kind of metallic. But back
to space. Back to space. Okay, well, all right, so
that's outer space itself. So from there, let's head to
the moon. And here you have a number of the
different astronauts who went to the moon, came back, and
they had some some comments about especially how moon dust smells. Now, again,
they were not going out onto the surface of the
(04:18):
moon and sniffing moon dust, but but it's everywhere and
it gets all over you. And so they're coming back
into the in from their walk and it's you know,
it's all over their stuff, over the equipment, et cetera.
So they end up sniffing it. They end up you know,
it's getting in their mouths and their nose, etcetera. And
so you had a number of different like a number
from Paulo seventeen astronauts that we're within the stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(04:40):
that commented on it. One in particular, Yeah, Gene Cernan
said that it smells like like spent gunpowder, and a
number of the other astronauts backed him up on this, right, So, uh,
paula seventeen astronaut Jack Schmidt and held some of it,
and he said it gave him a few hours of
hay fewer. Yeah, And when they asked him it was interesting.
Their as was like, did any the other astronauts have this?
(05:02):
And he said, well, they didn't say, they didn't own
up to it. So it's sort of like this, like
maybe that they had it too, but they didn't want
to say anything. Tough guy. Yeah, I'll astronauts are tough guys,
tough women in case maybe, well, yeah a lot of
them were. Like the thing about the gunpowder is that
these were guys who knew their way around some guns.
This was not just a theoretical what gunpower. You know,
these were gun toting Americans, you know of of the
(05:25):
of the late sixties, early seventies. Well, the smell makes
sense in a way when you think about what moon
dust is made of, right, because almost half is silicon
dioxide glass created by meteorites hitting the moon. So these impacts,
which have been going on for billions of years, fuse
top soil into glass and they shatter into tiny pieces.
And it's also moon dust is also rich and iron,
calcium and magnesium. It's bound up in the minerals such
(05:48):
as olivine and pyroxy and so it's actually nothing like gunpara. Yeah,
it's but the impact thing makes sense to me. Yeah,
I mean it sounds plausible, Like you look like I didn't.
I don't doubt it for a second. When they're like
hunt smells like gunpowder, up there all right, you know,
gray and dusty. But they said also some of it
comes from gases evaporating off the moon dust, and these
(06:10):
are gases that get there via the solar wind. So yeah,
the Moon is constantly exposed to hot wind, this hot
solar wind of hydrogen, helium and other ions blowing away
from the Sun. So so a lot of that gets
caught up in the dust as well. So we don't
really have a firm answer of why these guys found
it to smell this way, but you know, we we can.
There's some commentary on the various elements at play there. Well,
(06:34):
if I never get to the Moon at least have
a fuller sensory picture. Yeah, it makes it a little,
I don't know, stinkier. I don't know. The space thing
was really surprising because you just think of space itself
as being just kind of sterile, you know, right, totally
I do. So let's talk about some many other planets
out there and what their particular odors are. Yeah, well, Mercury,
of course, closest to the Sun and doesn't really have
(06:56):
much of an atmosphere at least not anymore very thin.
Most of it was US long ago and what remains
is mostly sodium, which doesn't really have a smell, So
don't expect to find mercury just by using your smaller scope.
What would you expect mercury to smell, like, just off
the top of your head. Well, being a fiery world,
you kind of expect to get this like a sulfury
(07:17):
hell smell, which is we're going to see you actually
do get a very sulfury sulfury hell smell off of
some of these other planets. I'm thinking mercury maybe like peppers,
you know, spicy food sort of smell like a curry,
like a nice planet planetary curry kind of odor. Yeah,
like super tied chili hot. You know, that's what I
would think that mercury might smell. Like. Moving onto venus um,
(07:40):
this is supposed to be a sharp, pungent smell, and
then onlike on rotten eggs. Do the clouds of sulfuric
acid which you were just talking about and mars that
similar In a similar note, they say, you know, there's
sulfur acids, magnesium, iron, put that all together in a
carbon dioxide rich environment, and it's going to probably reek
like rotten eggs. Hidding, Yeah, bad smelling solar system. We
(08:03):
have it. Yeah, it's it kind of sucks for the
first Mars colonists to get there, right, but they do.
They're just going to get used to it. So Jupiter,
it kind of depends on the layer what you're sniffing
on Jupiter, So the lighter zones would smell like ammonia,
then ammonia and rotten eggs, and then you pass through
hydrogen sulfa, then bitter almonds, which is gonna be your
hydrogen cyanide, and then and that's really cool because it's
(08:24):
like a lot of these planets have some more odors,
but this is like this rich bitter almondy poison center.
You know, it's kind of like it's like what a
bond bond or something, an enormous bon bon. But then
it's also got its moon. Io was kind of interesting
because it's highly volcanic, and guess what ye smells like
rotten eggs due to all the sulfur and the volcanic
(08:46):
eruptions satur and we're not so sure what it smells like.
But the moon titan Um, so it's haze covered over
nitrogen based atmosphere and a silled surface and a pungent
odor reminiscent of a petroleum processing facility that's not very pleasant. Um.
And oh, and then of course there's there's uranus yea,
(09:09):
and the hydrogen and helium portions of the uranian atmosphere
are essentially scentless. And then there's that two percent methane content,
which I have to stress something here because we're also
gonna discuss another planet has some some methane content to it.
There's this idea that methane is stinky out there purely
(09:29):
because of the methane component in various gases that um,
you know, come out of cows and humans, etcetera. Right,
farts essentially, but it's important to note that that farts
also contain a number of other elements. All Right, these
tiny amounts of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, methane, hydrogen, sulfide, um, ammonia,
(09:55):
this is all mixing together and and this is this
is all a recipe for for bad odor. Methane on
its own is is not going to stink. Okay, So
so again you're in this nothing really smell going on there.
Same with Neptune, very similar environment. Yeah, but you know what,
that doesn't surprise me because I think of Neptune and
you're in a very similarly I feel like brothers in
(10:18):
the Solar System. Yeah, I don't think of them as
having very different traits, you know what I mean? And
I know that's not true, brothers that hang out on
the outskirts of the Solar System. And then for all
of you guys who bemoaned the lack of Pluto amongst
our Solar System, we do have some infra on Pluto,
and that's a since it's such a thin atmosphere composed
mostly of methane, so you mainly got nothing going on there. Interestingly, though,
(10:41):
to be untrained, Iron knows, people would think, oh, but
Pluto's got methane. Um, you know, atmosphere, it's gonna suck.
You know, it's going to really stink. But it doesn't totally. Which, incidentally,
if I can run through this real quick, I did
run across, you know, all those different websites where people
ask quite random people have questions and random people answer them.
(11:02):
Somebody had asked the question like, what do the planet
smell like? And somebody had had replied and I and
these are completely not true, but they said the mercury
smells like refried beans. Venus smells like gasoline or smells
like unwashed socks, Mars smells like martians, Jupiter smells like
muddy dogs, Saturn smells like burnt paper. You're You're in
the smells like dead trees. Nepteine smells like a turtle,
(11:23):
and Pluto smells like quaw squab? What squab? Again? I
think it's like pigeon meat, like some sort of all right, right,
I think you're right, which, so anyway, I just found
that amusing. Yeah, so let's head back to the Earth
for a second and check out some of our planets
most pungent residents. Oh yeah, that's right, some animals and
plants certainly do put out an odor. Yeah, here on Earth.
(11:45):
And this section gave me a chance to revisit one
of my favorite articles on the site, and that is
why does the Stink Plants Think? And it was written
by a freelancer, Jonathan Attebury. So in the article, att
Abury takes us back to eighteen seventy eight and he
imagines checking through the Launching rainforest alongside botanists Duardo Becari
his Italian. Yeah, and so, as the Italian is exploring
(12:08):
the forest, he gets a whiff of rotten meat. Next
thing he knows, the wind shifts and a stench floods
his nostrils. The smell is very, very bad, symphony of
spoiled eggs, road kill, and dirty laundry. So imagine that
Beccari looks towards the source of the odor and behold
the stinct plant A. K. Tighten arum. And this is
(12:31):
a This is a great U time to do a
quick Google search to see the image, or go ahead
and go to that article and look at the picture,
because it just looks bizarre. It's just enormous and it
kind of looks like a fountain and kind of looks
like something from the set of like Classic Star Trek. Yeah, well,
it's this massive plant sporting a massive pillar and it's
it is kind of phallic. Thus the scientific name a
(12:53):
morphox Phallus titanum or titanum. So the stinct plant is
an inflorescence, and what does that mean. It's a it's
a group of flowers clustered around a central column known
as the spadix, and it's surrounded by this leafy structure
called the space spath. And why does the corpse flower
smell so terrible. Take a guess, I mean to attract
(13:14):
in of course. And it's such a large plant that
it can take a year or more for the plant
to store enough energy to bloom. So even then the
plant can only sustain its bloom for a couple of
days though. So it's it's you know, it's has this
really terrible smell, but it's it's fleeting. And because these
plants are located so far apart from one another and
they bloom, you know, on such an infrequent basis, they
(13:36):
want as much insect attention as possible, so they get
a whole bunch of like bees and beetles. They're crawling
all over and spreading the pollen around, right, yeah. Yeah.
And it's also interesting that scientists size that the overall
appearance and smell helped the plant masquerade as a giant
hunk of decaying meat. It does, it does look it
doesn't look kind of fleshy. Again, you really need to
(13:59):
check out the article because it's it's hard to imagine.
It's it's it's like this giant pillar. Um, you know,
as long as your arm if you're to hold your
arm in the air right now. But even longer. I
think it can be maybe a couple of feet. Yeah,
the stink plant is by no means the only mellower's plant.
In fact, a whole group of them are called carryon flowers,
(14:20):
which is kind of an interesting name for a flower.
I mean that you don't necessarily go together when you
think about flower carryon carrying flowers. Yeah, we have a
we have a great botanical garden here in town um
and some lovely smelling flowers. I almost kind of want
them to put on like a carrion flower exhibit, you know,
just just you know, just so I can run through
real quick at least and sniff these and really the
full experience. Yeah, I have no doubt that would be
(14:41):
a big hit with the ladies of the garden club set.
So not only do these carrying flowers smell like we're
just saying, but they also tend to look the part right. So,
for instance, the Stipilia asterious flower is coated with fine hairs,
and that's handy because it makes the flower resemble moldy meat.
And then we have the rough roughly see you are
no oldie, And that's the world's largest flower. And that's
(15:03):
another fleshy carrion flower located in Sumatra. Sumatra is just
ripe with this stuff, like literally right with this stuff.
So what about animals? I assume you know, naturally, not
every animal's gonna smell as nice and metallic as our
cats and gorillas, right right, right right? Um. So I
had fun researching this part of the podcast, and I
(15:24):
came up with a couple of candidates for the most
pungent animal on Earth, and one of the candidates I've
never heard of before. And this is called the zarilla.
See now that just makes that just sounds made up,
it kind of does. I mean, it's like I'm picturing
like maybe a gorilla with zebra stripes. Is that what
it does? Yeah? Well no, Robert, it's a striped pole cat, okay.
(15:44):
And it's a it's a skunk like animal, and it's
a member of the weasel family. Okay. I see. I
was wondering when when we were going into this, and like,
is the skunk going to be the stinkiest animal, because
that's the one that instantly comes to mind. It does,
it definitely does. But we're going with the skunk like
in this case, and I'm I'm weighing in on the zailla.
You want to know why you want to we want
to know why this convinced me that that Zarella's might
take the prize. Is that because they can ward off
(16:08):
lions with their stink, they can ward off lions, the
King of the Jungle, Yeah, the grassy plaint whatever, but
but still, yeah, warding off the lion. These guys are ferocious.
You think they wouldn't shy away from a slightly stinky meal. Well,
I read one editorial about the Zorella that said it's
anal glance can be smelled from a half mile away. Yeah, okay,
(16:34):
I have another. Are you ready? Are you ready for
the next nomination? You know what, I'm finding something to
be true in this podcasting series we've been doing. I
think I have a stronger stomach than you do. Maybe
so that mean they're yeah, I mean, if you listen,
I mean with the worm and the woman's foot and listener, man,
that was worms and a woman's foot. That was kind
(16:54):
of gross. That was pretty cool and it was cool,
but it was you know, it's a pretty grim image. Right.
So my next nomination, getting back to pungent animals, is
is a beetle? The bombardier beetle. I've seen clips of
these guys. Yeah. Yeah, So these beetles, when physically assaulted, um,
they squirt out this hot quininoid spray from their abdomens,
(17:16):
and the African bombardiered beetle can aim its spray and
pretty much any direction. So I was reading about this
in the journal Proceedings in the National Academies of Science,
and UM, the reason why this beetle has evolved such
an olfactory defense is if you can remember that can't
instantly take to the air, so it has to right, right,
I mean, it can eventually take to the air, but
(17:37):
not instantly, and you know, an instant can be you know,
life or death, as we all know. And so I
like this. I really like this beetle. And according to
authors of the paper and the proceedings will just call
that for short, it can discharge upwards of twenty times
before depleting its glands. And this is this is kind
of cool. The discharges are accompanied by audible audible detonations,
(17:59):
so it's like it's setting off these little smell bombs
and they do deter predators. Yeah, I've seen some. I
think this is one of the ones that some scientists
were interested in in the you know, in the field
of bio mimicry, like looking how how nature is evolved
to carry out certain processes that we might want to
carry out. And you know, they're very interested in like, um,
(18:22):
like like being able to take this squirting mechanism and
apply it to some sort of gizmo or another. You know,
it's just one of the amazing little evolutionary traits it's
come around. That's cool. Yeah, So those are two of
my nominations for most punching Animal. Of course, if you
guys have ones that you'd like to send us, please
do feel free to email them on over a post
m on Facebook. But let's talk about when it doesn't
(18:44):
smell so bad. Well, you know, and this is of
course subjective because smell is subjective. Um, like a koala.
Really they're so adorable and yet they stink. Well, a
lot of people have talked about koala smelling like cough drops,
and do they in fact smell like coughdrops. I've never
heard this particular, like they're addicted to cough drops or
(19:05):
oh no, I guess it's their their diet, right, right.
So if you remember, kuala is the furry Australian marsupial
that sleeps all day and it's a cradled up in
the tree branches, and it wakes up maybe you know,
for a few hours, much as a couple of eucalyptus leaves,
and it conks out again. Yeah, probably all that time
digesting food. It's probably not that easy to digest. It
(19:26):
reminds me of the panda in that their digestis they
have such a specialized diet, right, you know, the qualitists
eats these eucalyptic eucalyptus leaves and then you know, maybe
eats a couple of other random things, but mainly eucalyptus,
you know, in the panda with the bamboo, right. Yeah,
they're all specialists, right, and but their digestive systems have
such a hard time accommodating that specialized diet. So it
(19:47):
just doesn't really make sense to me. Yeah, well that's
why you don't see any any specialist um species like
building cities and ruling the planet, you know, I mean,
we're we're more generalists. We can eat just about anything,
you know. Okay, so you're saying that pandas can't rule
the planet because they exactly. Yeah. And and also it's
like you go, you look around a city, what's running everywhere? Raccoons? Rats, uh, foxes?
(20:10):
You know, I don't know if fox is canna. I
don't think foxes are running everywhere anyway. Oh yes they are.
London foxes are everywhere in London. Seriously, like you don't
see him as much because then I'm not making this.
It sounds like something I would make up. But but no,
there are a lot of foxes, uh in especially in
the London area. Well, So, getting back to coals and
(20:30):
cough drops for a sex off thea the British foxes. Um,
so do thesemart supiles actually smell a cough drops? All right?
So do you se these leaves from the eucalyptus street?
And remember that eucalyptus is are grown for their gums,
their resins, their oils in their woods. And then you
can lift to soil acts as an expectorant. So it
loosens the flegm and the respiratory passages and that's that's
(20:53):
great for those cold. It can be an antiseptic and
it can also function as a dearnorant. But according to
freelancer Julia Layton and the Australian Quala Foundation. Mostly it's
the young ones that smell like eucalyptus. As they get older,
the small fades, and a mature koala will smell muskie
or like urine and uh, not so much like a
(21:15):
drug store cough drop, more like an old person's m
I guess, I guess so, So when cuddling up to
a koala, go for the young ones, grab the babies. Well,
I I did look around a little bit, um to
see whether kuala breath smelled like eucalyptus or perhaps a quala.
A kuala passing gas smelled like what a day of
research you've had? It was pretty fun. So what do
(21:38):
you have? Oh? Um, well, this is pretty interesting. Um.
So I was looking at some we're gonna we're gonna
leave the animal kingdom. Well, most of the animal can
get back into the human world of scent. And I
was reading a couple of studies that had to do
with the way suggestion plays into our our sense of smell. Uh.
(21:59):
For instance, there is a two thousand five study from
Oxford University. Okay, and this one, this one sound reminds
me a lot of in our wine episode, we talked
about the neuroscientists who had everybody come over a wine
testing and started having all these crazy little experiments to
see if people could tell like good wine from bad wine,
or or you know, white red wine from white wine
(22:19):
has been dyed red. Well, this guy, um right, Professor
Edmund Rowels invited volunteers over and had them smell cheese,
except sometimes he labeled the cheese cheddar and other times
he labeled it body odor, just to see what their
reaction would be. And then of course his team scanned
the volunteers brains, so you know, it wasn't like a
(22:41):
great dinner party, I guess, um uh. You know, so
they scan their brains to see what the what's going
on in their in their heads when they're smelling these things,
right a right, So when the cheddar cheese was labeled correctly,
when it's cheese that's labeled cheese, higher areas of the
brain that interpret smell were activated. Okay uh. Then they
would give him a whiff of just clean air labels
with jeddar cheese, and it activated the same areas but
(23:04):
to a lesser extent. So it's kind of like that,
you know, there's there's the suggestion is still doing a
lot of work, but but not as much as that
the real thing you know, would would do. Okay, And
the researchers also made sure to check how big a
sniff they were taking to see if that was playing
an effect that that didn't have any effect on on
the results. So anyway, the results of the result of
this experiment was they found that the pleasantness of the
(23:25):
odor um is being Mardu modulated in a part of
the brain called the and I make it this wrong,
the orbito frontal cortex, which is involved with emotions. All right,
So this is like a high level influence on on
on how you're smelling things. Uh. And for instance, this
is the same area the brain that sometimes damaged and
dementia cases or if someone's in a severe accident, and
(23:48):
that can alter your It alters your appetite in some cases.
Um it can apparently even make you more prone to obesity.
But like the appetite thing is key because of course
scent plays a key role and you know what we'd
like to eat, so um. So anyway, that's a really
interesting case um of just you know, just somebody telling
you how something smells. And this is this actually goes
(24:10):
and I don't know if you've found this with kids,
but I've often heard people talk about like when you're
feeding kids like new foods, like you never let them
say it smells bad or you know, you certainly never
refer to something as stinky. That makes sense you come
across that. Do you let your kids say food is stinky?
I don't know if they know the words stinky, yet
they wow, you were doing great. I think miss some
(24:33):
other words they shouldn't know, but stink he's not among them.
Yet another interesting case that I that I came across,
uh goes back to April fool stand in nineteen Yet
this is like a obviously an April Fool's joke on
BBC TV, and uh, they had a guy, did it
involve Foxes? No fox Um, But a professor from Lendon
(24:54):
University comes on and they go through this whole thing
where they're gonna unveil smell a visions, right, and they
they you know, they unveil some sort of hokey kind
of um you know, kind of like a look around
you esque explanation about how they're going to transfer the
scent molecules and like in like into like smaller like
digital molecules or something like transfer it through the screen,
So basically you'll be able to get close to your
(25:15):
TV and smell. Hilarious image of everybody getting close and
sniffing their TVs. Yeah, And apparently people fell from it
were like, you know, calling it like they put some
coffee or something up there, and people were like, they
were like, yeah, I can totally smell it. Uh. And
then in nineteen seventy seven Bristol University psychology lecture named
Michael O'Mahoney tried the same thing all right, and he
(25:38):
uh he told viewers that they were they were going
to smell hey and grass and no like cow crap
or anything, but just like a nice field, you know,
a pleasant kind of you know, um, you know, outdoor environment.
And people people again like people claim to have smelled it.
They like wrote in you know, some of these people
may have been lying or just wanting to you know,
(26:00):
you know, that's they kind of factored that into it.
But a lot of people said, hey, I can I
can totally smell. One person apparently even complained of hay fever,
just like that astronaut. Yeah, maybe who smell in the
Mondes may. Yeah. So anyway, so we've touched on stinky animals,
how space might smell, how they how things smell differently
(26:21):
depending on what kind of other sense data we're combining
with it. Um. I enjoyed this podcast. Yeah, I had
a lot of fund researching it. Yeah, it's kind of
a smart guess board, but I think it's it's kind
of like you you put all the elements together, it
really shows you how how vary the world of of
at least our own you know, sense perception really is. Yeah, definitely. Hey,
(26:42):
if you guys want to tell us about your your
favorite smells or your favorite bad smells, or what you
think Uru might smell like. Yeah, and I'm especially interested
to anybody out there who's like really really knows what
they're talking about with with the like the atmosphere of
other planets has additional ideas, even contrary ideas out with
some of these plow these places might smell like I'd
(27:02):
love to hear about. Yeah, send us an email at
Science Stuff at how stuff frix dot com, or you
can always uh hang out on Facebook. We're on Facebook
two with us stuff from the Science Lab or Twitter
as well with a lab stuff handle yeah, and give
us a cool science joke and gives your name and
where you're from, and we'll throw it up at the
front of the podcast. All right, cool. Thanks for listening.
(27:29):
For more on this and thousands of other topics because
at how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
com home page.
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Works dot com. Alright, Alison Neutron, A neutron walks into
the bar, all right, and he asked the bartender for
a drink. Bartender says for you, no charge. Hey, I'm
(00:25):
Alison that the science how stuff Works dot com and
I'm Robert Lamb, science writer How stuff Works dot com.
And that joke came to us courtesy of listener Christian, Yeah,
he submitted on our Facebook page. Yeah, thanks Christian. I
like that one. That was a Some people might say
that joke was a stinker um, but but I mean
that's that's the great thing about cheesy jokes that they
(00:46):
kind of stink. And we're gonna be talking about a
number of things that stink, uh in today's podcast. Yes,
because we're talking about science and it's varied smells and
that's the name of the podcast. Smells like science. Yeah,
And don't run away because we're not This is not
going to be just a discussion of like how the
nose works or something. We're gonna we're gonna come at
it from a number of different angles. In fact, our
first angle we're gonna hit is outer space and how
(01:07):
doesn't smell. Well, Um, it's interesting. There's actually far more
data on this than I possibly imagined. Um. I don't
know if you've ever watched Futurama. I have, I've seen
episodes yet. Okay, well, there's a there's an episode, I
think a couple of different episodes where Professor Farnsworthy, ancient
um often naked mad scientists, pulls out this thing called
a smelloscope and it looks like a telescope except it
(01:30):
has these two nostril plugs. Just drapes his nose over
it and the plugs go up into the nostril, and
then he can smell distant regions of the cosmos. And
of course this is fantastic and ridiculous, but there's, like
I said, there's a lot of information out there. For instance,
space itself, according to some people who've smelt it has
(01:50):
an odor, all right, And this is not just people,
you know theorizing. This is coming from International Space Station
Science officer Don petite Um. And Don did not spell
smell the void directly. It's important to mention because he,
you know, might be dead. Uh No, he was merely
(02:10):
opening the airlock. So a couple of his crew members
could come back in from a spacewalk, and he started.
Every time we do this, he would notice this peculiar smell,
you know. And at first he's like, it's just something
weird with the ventilation system, and he's probably thinking it
is it me, you know, do I smell kind of funny?
But no, he kept noticing that it was. It was
cleaning to the space suits in the gear, especially the fabrics,
(02:33):
and uh, I actould just read the quote and this
is this. He kept a little blog of his time
up there. He says, quote. It's hard to describe the smell.
It is definitely not the oldfactory equivalent to describing the
the sensations of some new food as tastes like chicken.
The best description I can come up with is metallic,
a rather pleasant, sweet, metallic metallic sensation. It reminded me
(02:56):
of my college summers where I labored for many hours
with an arc welding porch, repairing heavy equipment for a
small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant, sweet swelling
smelling welding fumes, that is the smell of space. So
aside from him seemed to have kind of a weird
thing about welding. Um. It also like it reminds me
(03:17):
of my cat actually because because like I pick up
the cat and like smell the cat, you know, I
mean not in like a sick way, you know, but
just kind of the cats there and you know, you
bury your nose in the fur. I totally get it. Well,
maybe not buried, but you know, it's like, you know,
she's there, you smell, and I always think, like, she
doesn't really smell like anything, maybe batteries. You know. It's
funny you say that because we recently went to the
(03:37):
Atlanta Zoo and we go a lot, you know, we
have kids, and I've always noticed a peculiar smell at
the gorilla exhibit, and to me, maybe it does have
a little bit of a metallic odor to it, but
it is a distinctly animal smell and it but it
does have a metallic kind of but not a monkey
house odor. No, no, no, no, not monkey house. It's
(03:58):
just it's just a funky kind of metallic. But back
to space. Back to space. Okay, well, all right, so
that's outer space itself. So from there, let's head to
the moon. And here you have a number of the
different astronauts who went to the moon, came back, and
they had some some comments about especially how moon dust smells. Now, again,
they were not going out onto the surface of the
(04:18):
moon and sniffing moon dust, but but it's everywhere and
it gets all over you. And so they're coming back
into the in from their walk and it's you know,
it's all over their stuff, over the equipment, et cetera.
So they end up sniffing it. They end up you know,
it's getting in their mouths and their nose, etcetera. And
so you had a number of different like a number
from Paulo seventeen astronauts that we're within the stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(04:40):
that commented on it. One in particular, Yeah, Gene Cernan
said that it smells like like spent gunpowder, and a
number of the other astronauts backed him up on this, right, So, uh,
paula seventeen astronaut Jack Schmidt and held some of it,
and he said it gave him a few hours of
hay fewer. Yeah, And when they asked him it was interesting.
Their as was like, did any the other astronauts have this?
(05:02):
And he said, well, they didn't say, they didn't own
up to it. So it's sort of like this, like
maybe that they had it too, but they didn't want
to say anything. Tough guy. Yeah, I'll astronauts are tough guys,
tough women in case maybe, well, yeah a lot of
them were. Like the thing about the gunpowder is that
these were guys who knew their way around some guns.
This was not just a theoretical what gunpower. You know,
these were gun toting Americans, you know of of the
(05:25):
of the late sixties, early seventies. Well, the smell makes
sense in a way when you think about what moon
dust is made of, right, because almost half is silicon
dioxide glass created by meteorites hitting the moon. So these impacts,
which have been going on for billions of years, fuse
top soil into glass and they shatter into tiny pieces.
And it's also moon dust is also rich and iron,
calcium and magnesium. It's bound up in the minerals such
(05:48):
as olivine and pyroxy and so it's actually nothing like gunpara. Yeah,
it's but the impact thing makes sense to me. Yeah,
I mean it sounds plausible, Like you look like I didn't.
I don't doubt it for a second. When they're like
hunt smells like gunpowder, up there all right, you know,
gray and dusty. But they said also some of it
comes from gases evaporating off the moon dust, and these
(06:10):
are gases that get there via the solar wind. So yeah,
the Moon is constantly exposed to hot wind, this hot
solar wind of hydrogen, helium and other ions blowing away
from the Sun. So so a lot of that gets
caught up in the dust as well. So we don't
really have a firm answer of why these guys found
it to smell this way, but you know, we we can.
There's some commentary on the various elements at play there. Well,
(06:34):
if I never get to the Moon at least have
a fuller sensory picture. Yeah, it makes it a little,
I don't know, stinkier. I don't know. The space thing
was really surprising because you just think of space itself
as being just kind of sterile, you know, right, totally
I do. So let's talk about some many other planets
out there and what their particular odors are. Yeah, well, Mercury,
of course, closest to the Sun and doesn't really have
(06:56):
much of an atmosphere at least not anymore very thin.
Most of it was US long ago and what remains
is mostly sodium, which doesn't really have a smell, So
don't expect to find mercury just by using your smaller scope.
What would you expect mercury to smell, like, just off
the top of your head. Well, being a fiery world,
you kind of expect to get this like a sulfury
(07:17):
hell smell, which is we're going to see you actually
do get a very sulfury sulfury hell smell off of
some of these other planets. I'm thinking mercury maybe like peppers,
you know, spicy food sort of smell like a curry,
like a nice planet planetary curry kind of odor. Yeah,
like super tied chili hot. You know, that's what I
would think that mercury might smell. Like. Moving onto venus um,
(07:40):
this is supposed to be a sharp, pungent smell, and
then onlike on rotten eggs. Do the clouds of sulfuric
acid which you were just talking about and mars that
similar In a similar note, they say, you know, there's
sulfur acids, magnesium, iron, put that all together in a
carbon dioxide rich environment, and it's going to probably reek
like rotten eggs. Hidding, Yeah, bad smelling solar system. We
(08:03):
have it. Yeah, it's it kind of sucks for the
first Mars colonists to get there, right, but they do.
They're just going to get used to it. So Jupiter,
it kind of depends on the layer what you're sniffing
on Jupiter, So the lighter zones would smell like ammonia,
then ammonia and rotten eggs, and then you pass through
hydrogen sulfa, then bitter almonds, which is gonna be your
hydrogen cyanide, and then and that's really cool because it's
(08:24):
like a lot of these planets have some more odors,
but this is like this rich bitter almondy poison center.
You know, it's kind of like it's like what a
bond bond or something, an enormous bon bon. But then
it's also got its moon. Io was kind of interesting
because it's highly volcanic, and guess what ye smells like
rotten eggs due to all the sulfur and the volcanic
(08:46):
eruptions satur and we're not so sure what it smells like.
But the moon titan Um, so it's haze covered over
nitrogen based atmosphere and a silled surface and a pungent
odor reminiscent of a petroleum processing facility that's not very pleasant. Um.
And oh, and then of course there's there's uranus yea,
(09:09):
and the hydrogen and helium portions of the uranian atmosphere
are essentially scentless. And then there's that two percent methane content,
which I have to stress something here because we're also
gonna discuss another planet has some some methane content to it.
There's this idea that methane is stinky out there purely
(09:29):
because of the methane component in various gases that um,
you know, come out of cows and humans, etcetera. Right,
farts essentially, but it's important to note that that farts
also contain a number of other elements. All Right, these
tiny amounts of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, methane, hydrogen, sulfide, um, ammonia,
(09:55):
this is all mixing together and and this is this
is all a recipe for for bad odor. Methane on
its own is is not going to stink. Okay, So
so again you're in this nothing really smell going on there.
Same with Neptune, very similar environment. Yeah, but you know what,
that doesn't surprise me because I think of Neptune and
you're in a very similarly I feel like brothers in
(10:18):
the Solar System. Yeah, I don't think of them as
having very different traits, you know what I mean? And
I know that's not true, brothers that hang out on
the outskirts of the Solar System. And then for all
of you guys who bemoaned the lack of Pluto amongst
our Solar System, we do have some infra on Pluto,
and that's a since it's such a thin atmosphere composed
mostly of methane, so you mainly got nothing going on there. Interestingly, though,
(10:41):
to be untrained, Iron knows, people would think, oh, but
Pluto's got methane. Um, you know, atmosphere, it's gonna suck.
You know, it's going to really stink. But it doesn't totally. Which, incidentally,
if I can run through this real quick, I did
run across, you know, all those different websites where people
ask quite random people have questions and random people answer them.
(11:02):
Somebody had asked the question like, what do the planet
smell like? And somebody had had replied and I and
these are completely not true, but they said the mercury
smells like refried beans. Venus smells like gasoline or smells
like unwashed socks, Mars smells like martians, Jupiter smells like
muddy dogs, Saturn smells like burnt paper. You're You're in
the smells like dead trees. Nepteine smells like a turtle,
(11:23):
and Pluto smells like quaw squab? What squab? Again? I
think it's like pigeon meat, like some sort of all right, right,
I think you're right, which, so anyway, I just found
that amusing. Yeah, so let's head back to the Earth
for a second and check out some of our planets
most pungent residents. Oh yeah, that's right, some animals and
plants certainly do put out an odor. Yeah, here on Earth.
(11:45):
And this section gave me a chance to revisit one
of my favorite articles on the site, and that is
why does the Stink Plants Think? And it was written
by a freelancer, Jonathan Attebury. So in the article, att
Abury takes us back to eighteen seventy eight and he
imagines checking through the Launching rainforest alongside botanists Duardo Becari
his Italian. Yeah, and so, as the Italian is exploring
(12:08):
the forest, he gets a whiff of rotten meat. Next
thing he knows, the wind shifts and a stench floods
his nostrils. The smell is very, very bad, symphony of
spoiled eggs, road kill, and dirty laundry. So imagine that
Beccari looks towards the source of the odor and behold
the stinct plant A. K. Tighten arum. And this is
(12:31):
a This is a great U time to do a
quick Google search to see the image, or go ahead
and go to that article and look at the picture,
because it just looks bizarre. It's just enormous and it
kind of looks like a fountain and kind of looks
like something from the set of like Classic Star Trek. Yeah, well,
it's this massive plant sporting a massive pillar and it's
it is kind of phallic. Thus the scientific name a
(12:53):
morphox Phallus titanum or titanum. So the stinct plant is
an inflorescence, and what does that mean. It's a it's
a group of flowers clustered around a central column known
as the spadix, and it's surrounded by this leafy structure
called the space spath. And why does the corpse flower
smell so terrible. Take a guess, I mean to attract
(13:14):
in of course. And it's such a large plant that
it can take a year or more for the plant
to store enough energy to bloom. So even then the
plant can only sustain its bloom for a couple of
days though. So it's it's you know, it's has this
really terrible smell, but it's it's fleeting. And because these
plants are located so far apart from one another and
they bloom, you know, on such an infrequent basis, they
(13:36):
want as much insect attention as possible, so they get
a whole bunch of like bees and beetles. They're crawling
all over and spreading the pollen around, right, yeah. Yeah.
And it's also interesting that scientists size that the overall
appearance and smell helped the plant masquerade as a giant
hunk of decaying meat. It does, it does look it
doesn't look kind of fleshy. Again, you really need to
(13:59):
check out the article because it's it's hard to imagine.
It's it's it's like this giant pillar. Um, you know,
as long as your arm if you're to hold your
arm in the air right now. But even longer. I
think it can be maybe a couple of feet. Yeah,
the stink plant is by no means the only mellower's plant.
In fact, a whole group of them are called carryon flowers,
(14:20):
which is kind of an interesting name for a flower.
I mean that you don't necessarily go together when you
think about flower carryon carrying flowers. Yeah, we have a
we have a great botanical garden here in town um
and some lovely smelling flowers. I almost kind of want
them to put on like a carrion flower exhibit, you know,
just just you know, just so I can run through
real quick at least and sniff these and really the
full experience. Yeah, I have no doubt that would be
(14:41):
a big hit with the ladies of the garden club set.
So not only do these carrying flowers smell like we're
just saying, but they also tend to look the part right. So,
for instance, the Stipilia asterious flower is coated with fine hairs,
and that's handy because it makes the flower resemble moldy meat.
And then we have the rough roughly see you are
no oldie, And that's the world's largest flower. And that's
(15:03):
another fleshy carrion flower located in Sumatra. Sumatra is just
ripe with this stuff, like literally right with this stuff.
So what about animals? I assume you know, naturally, not
every animal's gonna smell as nice and metallic as our
cats and gorillas, right right, right right? Um. So I
had fun researching this part of the podcast, and I
(15:24):
came up with a couple of candidates for the most
pungent animal on Earth, and one of the candidates I've
never heard of before. And this is called the zarilla.
See now that just makes that just sounds made up,
it kind of does. I mean, it's like I'm picturing
like maybe a gorilla with zebra stripes. Is that what
it does? Yeah? Well no, Robert, it's a striped pole cat, okay.
(15:44):
And it's a it's a skunk like animal, and it's
a member of the weasel family. Okay. I see. I
was wondering when when we were going into this, and like,
is the skunk going to be the stinkiest animal, because
that's the one that instantly comes to mind. It does,
it definitely does. But we're going with the skunk like
in this case, and I'm I'm weighing in on the zailla.
You want to know why you want to we want
to know why this convinced me that that Zarella's might
take the prize. Is that because they can ward off
(16:08):
lions with their stink, they can ward off lions, the
King of the Jungle, Yeah, the grassy plaint whatever, but
but still, yeah, warding off the lion. These guys are ferocious.
You think they wouldn't shy away from a slightly stinky meal. Well,
I read one editorial about the Zorella that said it's
anal glance can be smelled from a half mile away. Yeah, okay,
(16:34):
I have another. Are you ready? Are you ready for
the next nomination? You know what, I'm finding something to
be true in this podcasting series we've been doing. I
think I have a stronger stomach than you do. Maybe
so that mean they're yeah, I mean, if you listen,
I mean with the worm and the woman's foot and listener, man,
that was worms and a woman's foot. That was kind
(16:54):
of gross. That was pretty cool and it was cool,
but it was you know, it's a pretty grim image. Right.
So my next nomination, getting back to pungent animals, is
is a beetle? The bombardier beetle. I've seen clips of
these guys. Yeah. Yeah, So these beetles, when physically assaulted, um,
they squirt out this hot quininoid spray from their abdomens,
(17:16):
and the African bombardiered beetle can aim its spray and
pretty much any direction. So I was reading about this
in the journal Proceedings in the National Academies of Science,
and UM, the reason why this beetle has evolved such
an olfactory defense is if you can remember that can't
instantly take to the air, so it has to right, right,
I mean, it can eventually take to the air, but
(17:37):
not instantly, and you know, an instant can be you know,
life or death, as we all know. And so I
like this. I really like this beetle. And according to
authors of the paper and the proceedings will just call
that for short, it can discharge upwards of twenty times
before depleting its glands. And this is this is kind
of cool. The discharges are accompanied by audible audible detonations,
(17:59):
so it's like it's setting off these little smell bombs
and they do deter predators. Yeah, I've seen some. I
think this is one of the ones that some scientists
were interested in in the you know, in the field
of bio mimicry, like looking how how nature is evolved
to carry out certain processes that we might want to
carry out. And you know, they're very interested in like, um,
(18:22):
like like being able to take this squirting mechanism and
apply it to some sort of gizmo or another. You know,
it's just one of the amazing little evolutionary traits it's
come around. That's cool. Yeah, So those are two of
my nominations for most punching Animal. Of course, if you
guys have ones that you'd like to send us, please
do feel free to email them on over a post
m on Facebook. But let's talk about when it doesn't
(18:44):
smell so bad. Well, you know, and this is of
course subjective because smell is subjective. Um, like a koala.
Really they're so adorable and yet they stink. Well, a
lot of people have talked about koala smelling like cough drops,
and do they in fact smell like coughdrops. I've never
heard this particular, like they're addicted to cough drops or
(19:05):
oh no, I guess it's their their diet, right, right.
So if you remember, kuala is the furry Australian marsupial
that sleeps all day and it's a cradled up in
the tree branches, and it wakes up maybe you know,
for a few hours, much as a couple of eucalyptus leaves,
and it conks out again. Yeah, probably all that time
digesting food. It's probably not that easy to digest. It
(19:26):
reminds me of the panda in that their digestis they
have such a specialized diet, right, you know, the qualitists
eats these eucalyptic eucalyptus leaves and then you know, maybe
eats a couple of other random things, but mainly eucalyptus,
you know, in the panda with the bamboo, right. Yeah,
they're all specialists, right, and but their digestive systems have
such a hard time accommodating that specialized diet. So it
(19:47):
just doesn't really make sense to me. Yeah, well that's
why you don't see any any specialist um species like
building cities and ruling the planet, you know, I mean,
we're we're more generalists. We can eat just about anything,
you know. Okay, so you're saying that pandas can't rule
the planet because they exactly. Yeah. And and also it's
like you go, you look around a city, what's running everywhere? Raccoons? Rats, uh, foxes?
(20:10):
You know, I don't know if fox is canna. I
don't think foxes are running everywhere anyway. Oh yes they are.
London foxes are everywhere in London. Seriously, like you don't
see him as much because then I'm not making this.
It sounds like something I would make up. But but no,
there are a lot of foxes, uh in especially in
the London area. Well, So, getting back to coals and
(20:30):
cough drops for a sex off thea the British foxes. Um,
so do thesemart supiles actually smell a cough drops? All right?
So do you se these leaves from the eucalyptus street?
And remember that eucalyptus is are grown for their gums,
their resins, their oils in their woods. And then you
can lift to soil acts as an expectorant. So it
loosens the flegm and the respiratory passages and that's that's
(20:53):
great for those cold. It can be an antiseptic and
it can also function as a dearnorant. But according to
freelancer Julia Layton and the Australian Quala Foundation. Mostly it's
the young ones that smell like eucalyptus. As they get older,
the small fades, and a mature koala will smell muskie
or like urine and uh, not so much like a
(21:15):
drug store cough drop, more like an old person's m
I guess, I guess so, So when cuddling up to
a koala, go for the young ones, grab the babies. Well,
I I did look around a little bit, um to
see whether kuala breath smelled like eucalyptus or perhaps a quala.
A kuala passing gas smelled like what a day of
research you've had? It was pretty fun. So what do
(21:38):
you have? Oh? Um, well, this is pretty interesting. Um.
So I was looking at some we're gonna we're gonna
leave the animal kingdom. Well, most of the animal can
get back into the human world of scent. And I
was reading a couple of studies that had to do
with the way suggestion plays into our our sense of smell. Uh.
(21:59):
For instance, there is a two thousand five study from
Oxford University. Okay, and this one, this one sound reminds
me a lot of in our wine episode, we talked
about the neuroscientists who had everybody come over a wine
testing and started having all these crazy little experiments to
see if people could tell like good wine from bad wine,
or or you know, white red wine from white wine
(22:19):
has been dyed red. Well, this guy, um right, Professor
Edmund Rowels invited volunteers over and had them smell cheese,
except sometimes he labeled the cheese cheddar and other times
he labeled it body odor, just to see what their
reaction would be. And then of course his team scanned
the volunteers brains, so you know, it wasn't like a
(22:41):
great dinner party, I guess, um uh. You know, so
they scan their brains to see what the what's going
on in their in their heads when they're smelling these things,
right a right, So when the cheddar cheese was labeled correctly,
when it's cheese that's labeled cheese, higher areas of the
brain that interpret smell were activated. Okay uh. Then they
would give him a whiff of just clean air labels
with jeddar cheese, and it activated the same areas but
(23:04):
to a lesser extent. So it's kind of like that,
you know, there's there's the suggestion is still doing a
lot of work, but but not as much as that
the real thing you know, would would do. Okay, And
the researchers also made sure to check how big a
sniff they were taking to see if that was playing
an effect that that didn't have any effect on on
the results. So anyway, the results of the result of
this experiment was they found that the pleasantness of the
(23:25):
odor um is being Mardu modulated in a part of
the brain called the and I make it this wrong,
the orbito frontal cortex, which is involved with emotions. All right,
So this is like a high level influence on on
on how you're smelling things. Uh. And for instance, this
is the same area the brain that sometimes damaged and
dementia cases or if someone's in a severe accident, and
(23:48):
that can alter your It alters your appetite in some cases.
Um it can apparently even make you more prone to obesity.
But like the appetite thing is key because of course
scent plays a key role and you know what we'd
like to eat, so um. So anyway, that's a really
interesting case um of just you know, just somebody telling
you how something smells. And this is this actually goes
(24:10):
and I don't know if you've found this with kids,
but I've often heard people talk about like when you're
feeding kids like new foods, like you never let them
say it smells bad or you know, you certainly never
refer to something as stinky. That makes sense you come
across that. Do you let your kids say food is stinky?
I don't know if they know the words stinky, yet
they wow, you were doing great. I think miss some
(24:33):
other words they shouldn't know, but stink he's not among them.
Yet another interesting case that I that I came across,
uh goes back to April fool stand in nineteen Yet
this is like a obviously an April Fool's joke on
BBC TV, and uh, they had a guy, did it
involve Foxes? No fox Um, But a professor from Lendon
(24:54):
University comes on and they go through this whole thing
where they're gonna unveil smell a visions, right, and they
they you know, they unveil some sort of hokey kind
of um you know, kind of like a look around
you esque explanation about how they're going to transfer the
scent molecules and like in like into like smaller like
digital molecules or something like transfer it through the screen,
So basically you'll be able to get close to your
(25:15):
TV and smell. Hilarious image of everybody getting close and
sniffing their TVs. Yeah, And apparently people fell from it
were like, you know, calling it like they put some
coffee or something up there, and people were like, they
were like, yeah, I can totally smell it. Uh. And
then in nineteen seventy seven Bristol University psychology lecture named
Michael O'Mahoney tried the same thing all right, and he
(25:38):
uh he told viewers that they were they were going
to smell hey and grass and no like cow crap
or anything, but just like a nice field, you know,
a pleasant kind of you know, um, you know, outdoor environment.
And people people again like people claim to have smelled it.
They like wrote in you know, some of these people
may have been lying or just wanting to you know,
(26:00):
you know, that's they kind of factored that into it.
But a lot of people said, hey, I can I
can totally smell. One person apparently even complained of hay fever,
just like that astronaut. Yeah, maybe who smell in the
Mondes may. Yeah. So anyway, so we've touched on stinky animals,
how space might smell, how they how things smell differently
(26:21):
depending on what kind of other sense data we're combining
with it. Um. I enjoyed this podcast. Yeah, I had
a lot of fund researching it. Yeah, it's kind of
a smart guess board, but I think it's it's kind
of like you you put all the elements together, it
really shows you how how vary the world of of
at least our own you know, sense perception really is. Yeah, definitely. Hey,
(26:42):
if you guys want to tell us about your your
favorite smells or your favorite bad smells, or what you
think Uru might smell like. Yeah, and I'm especially interested
to anybody out there who's like really really knows what
they're talking about with with the like the atmosphere of
other planets has additional ideas, even contrary ideas out with
some of these plow these places might smell like I'd
(27:02):
love to hear about. Yeah, send us an email at
Science Stuff at how stuff frix dot com, or you
can always uh hang out on Facebook. We're on Facebook
two with us stuff from the Science Lab or Twitter
as well with a lab stuff handle yeah, and give
us a cool science joke and gives your name and
where you're from, and we'll throw it up at the
front of the podcast. All right, cool. Thanks for listening.
(27:29):
For more on this and thousands of other topics because
at how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
com home page.
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