The unique smell of rain comes from plant oils, bacteria, and ozone.
100 Mind-Blowing Smell Facts
Small as they may be, ladybugs have a unique smell that humans are incredibly sensitive to.
The Poodle is one of the cleanest breeds of dogs, making them a great choice for people with pet allergies. They don’t moult much at all, and they rarely smell, either.
Comets smell like rotten eggs. A comet smells like rotten eggs, urine, burning matches, and… almonds. Traces of hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, sulphur dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide were all found in the makeup of the comet 67P/Churyumove-Gerasimenko. Promotional postcards were even commissioned in 2016 carrying the pungent scent of a comet.
You can smell ants. Many species of ants release strong-smelling chemicals when they’re angry, threatened or being squished. Trap-jaw ants release a chocolatey smell when annoyed, while citronella ants earn their name from the lemony odour they give off.
‘New car smell’ is a mix of over 200 chemicals. These include the sickly-sweet, toxic hydrocarbons benzene and toluene.
Smells can pass through the liquid. Please don’t try smelling underwater (your nose will not appreciate it), but the smell does protrude through the liquid.
Snakes smell with their tongue.
Comets smell like rotten eggs.
Dogs sniff good smells with their left nostril. Dogs normally start sniffing with their right nostril, then keep it there if the smell could signals danger, but they’ll shift to the left side for something pleasant, like food or a mating partner.
Michael Fassbender had makeup artists put alcohol on his moustache for a role. For 12 Years A Slave, Michael Fassbender had his makeup artist apply his moustache with alcohol. His reason? He wanted to better portray an alcoholic and wanted other actors to react naturally to the smell.
Ben & Jerry’s learned how to make ice cream from a $5 course at Penn State. The titular Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were childhood friends. Although Greenfield finished college, he was unable to pursue med school. Cohen, on the other hand, dropped out of school. In 1977, Cohen and Greenfield completed a course on ice cream making from Pennsylvania State University’s Creamery. One of the fun facts no one knows about this famous product: Have you ever wondered why Ben & Jerry’s is so chunky? Ben Cohen has a condition where he can’t smell or taste anything. Instead, he relied on food textures texture to provide variety in his diet. This led to the company’s trademark chunks in their ice cream.
Our sense of smell and taste decreases by 20%-50% during flights. Because of the lack of humidity and pressure in high altitudes, our sense of taste and smell weakens.
Smelling green apples helps with weight loss. Research stated that the smell can help curb your hunger. The neutral sweet scent that comes from green apples and bananas is enough to temporarily forget about hunger.
The smell of freshly cut grass is noted to be the grass screaming in distress. This smell is a chemical that grass uses to call other critters to come and rescue them. The chemical compounds that the plant releases can also be used to poison an enemy and alert surrounding plants.
Rain has a smell. The smell comes from a slightly pungent scent that comes from the ozone. Specifically, the one that comes from fertilizers and natural sources that are carried in a storm’s draft from a higher altitude. This is why some people can smell rain right before it starts to pour.
The human body is the cause of metallic smells found in coins and other metals. Upon contact with some metals, 1 Octen 3 One is formed as the result of the decomposition of oil present on the skin. This is what causes the metallic smell from metal.
The smell of freshly cut grass is a distress signal. The refreshing fragrance of fresh-cut grass is the plant’s release of enzymes as a result of stress—almost like the way we break a sweat when stressed. When grass is cut, the plant signals to the environment that it is being eaten or damaged.
Bearcat urine smells like buttered popcorn. The smell of buttered popcorn is mouthwatering and even nostalgic to some – so much so that there’s even a jellybean flavour and candle scents for it. However, make sure you’re not getting duped – because that’s exactly what the Southeast Asian bearcat’s pee smells like. Bearcat urine contains the same compound found in buttered popcorn (2-AP). The Southeast Asian bearcat covers its feet and tail in its buttered popcorn-scented urine for other bearcats to smell.
The Play-Doh scent is patented. In 2017, Hasbro filed a trademark for Play-Doh’s distinct smell of “sweet, slightly Musky vanilla fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, mixed with the smell of salted, wheat-based dough.” Soon after, the trademark was approved.
An ant’s sense of smell is stronger than a dog’s.
A skunk’s smell can be detected by a human a mile away.
Dogs can smell 100,000 times better than humans.
What do Comets smell like? Well, rotten eggs. That’ll happen because of the ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide and more.
Dogs’ sense of smell is about 100,000 times stronger than humans, but they have just one-sixth our number of taste buds.
A dog’s sense of smell is 1000 times greater than a human!
You cannot smell while you sleep.
The Milky Way smells of rum, raspberries and booze. In 2009, astronomers exploring a giant cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way made a surprise discovery – the cloud was packed full of a chemical known as ethyl formate, which has a couple of intriguing properties: it is responsible for giving raspberries their flavour, and has the smell of rum. Another nearby region is also notable as it’s full of ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the type we use to make alcoholic beverages. It contains enough alcohol to supply every person on the planet with 300,000 pints of beer per day for the next billion years! If bottled at the source, the proof for this beer would be very low, with an alcohol content of less than 1%, but as the cloud also contains plenty of other nasty chemicals, among them carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, it would still leave you with quite a headache the next morning.
Dogs have wet noses because they secrete a thin layer of mucus, which helps dogs smell!
In warmer months, reindeer feast on grasses, mushrooms and plants. In the winter they feast mainly on moss and lichen. Reindeer have a strong sense of smell, which helps them sniff out food underneath layers of snow.
Sloths see better at night than in the day and they have very poor hearing. They rely on their sense of smell to locate food and other sloths.
According to many astronauts, space does indeed have a smell. Many Spacewalkers describe space as smelling like “seared steak” or “hot metal.”
Everyone has a unique smell except for identical twins, theirs are the same.
PlayStation 1 had Scratch and Sniff discs. In 1999, Gran Turismo 2, the 2-disc edition of the game, the blue disc featured the smell of fuel and burning rubber. When FIFA 2001 was released in 2000, they used Scratch and Sniff technology on their discs, so it smelled like football stadium turf.
Smell test. A 17th-century King of Arakan chose wives by making women stand in the sun and then doing a blind sniff test on all their sweaty clothes. The ones he didn’t like he sent to lesser nobles.