#badsmell

I rlly enjoyed the lightning and my cig

Read more: Why does my car heater have a bad smell?

Why do some things smell good and some things smell bad? The reason things smell good or bad is a combination of learned experiences and evolution. We smell in the same way that we taste. Everything around us is made of molecules and some of these molecules are released. If they happen to be released in the vicinity of us and find their way into our noses, they can attach to smell receptors that we have there. We have approximately 400 to 1,000 of these scent receptors and they can each react to a multitude of different molecules. When they are triggered by a molecule, it creates an electric signal that travels to the olfactory center of the brain and the brain works out what signals came from what scent receptors and puts together a scent profile from that. It is the same way our taste or sight work. With taste, we have taste buds that have receptors that get triggered by different molecules in the food. These signals go to the brain and the brain analyzes how much of which taste came and puts together a total taste. It is the same with sight. We have cones in our eyes that detect red, green, or blue light. They send signals to the brain and the brain works out how much of each color it has seen to make an overall color and an overall picture. Some things we taste are good and some things we taste are bad. Some things we smell are good and some things are bad. Why is that? There are two main reasons. The first is a learned response and this is why people in different cultures find different scents appealing. If you have never eaten a durian fruit and were exposed to one, you would not be able to eat it because of the smell. However, if you have grown up eating them and know that they taste amazing, you would associate the same smell with something that tastes good and the smell would be pleasant to you. This is down to memory and learned association. We learn from an early age to connect the smells of things to the experience that comes with them. For example, most people think a cookie smells better than a salad because we have learned that a cookie has an instant hit of sugar and fats that our body wants. Scent and memory have a very strong connection which you can see when you suddenly get a nose of a smell that reminds you of something that happened in your childhood. If you had a bad experience every time you ate a cookie, perhaps if you were strongly allergic to chocolate, you would probably grow up to dislike the smell of cookies. There are also, interestingly, some scents that we cannot detect. Oxygen is one of them. We have the ability to detect trillions of different smells, but we cannot smell oxygen. The second reason is evolutionary. We have fairly strong stomachs and fairly strong stomach acid, but there are still bacteria and certain toxins that can make us very sick, or are potentially fatal. A lot of these bacteria release sulfur and oxygen (sulphate), which we have evolved to think smells particularly bad. These bacteria release this compound when they are decomposing things, such as old food, meat, bodies, and anything that is rotting. These bacteria are also present in excrement, making it smell bad. We have evolved to dislike these smells because if there is a smell we don’t like, we will avoid the source of the smell. That will stop us from eating rotten food, staying near dead bodies, or staying near excrement. Avoid those things will keep us safe from the bacteria and their lethal toxins. There was probably a point where we didn’t think those things smelled bad, but a mutation meant that one organism started to dislike the smells and stayed away. That organism had less chance of getting sick and more chance of passing on its genes, so disliking the smell spread. Interestingly, the majority of animals avoid smells that come from rotting meat and dead bodies. However, there are some animals, such as hyenas and vultures, that live on decayed meat and have stomach acid that is strong enough to destroy even the hardiest of toxins. They haven’t evolved to dislike the smell of rotting meat because if they did, they wouldn’t be able to eat anything. On the contrary, they have evolved to seek out the smell. And this is what I learned today. Photo by Matthias Zomer: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pink-pig-66627/ Sources https://umbc.edu/stories/what-makes-something-smell-good-or-bad https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5j2q1r/eli5_why_do_bad_smells_smell_bad_and_good_smells/ https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/30838-study-reveals-smell-receptors-work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_receptor https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14904 https://www.quora.com/Does-human-smell-only-involve-about-400-unique-receptors Read the full article

What’s Really Happening? #161 07/05/20 Yes, I have another show for you this Sunday noon to 3 in studio 2b. What a crazy world this is well I'll try and mellow things out a bit before Kanye runs for President.

Advice for Remy, Day 32. Sometimes you'll have to do unpleasant things for the ones you love. I don’t mean like assassinating their enemies, or anything like that. Today’s example is much worse. Since you started eating we’ve cooked you some lovely dishes, but your favourite seems to be something incredible unpalatable to your mum and I. Your little sweet potato fish pie has established its fishy self at the top of the Remy food tree, filled as it is with sweet potato, leek, sweet corn, egg yolks and, of course, plenty of stinking white fish, poached in whole milk with a couple of bay leaves for that subtle baby-pleasing flavour. Now for some people this would be lovely - a real treat. However, as our house currently smells like a dirty dockyard at 5am, I’m firmly not in that camp. Having had a little bit of a delicate stomach of late, the act of extracting little bits of cooked fish from a pan of simmering milk was almost too much to take. And that smell really sticks. To everything. EVERYTHING. Stirring the bowl - hands smell of fish. Moving the pan - hands smell of fish. Chopping veg, washing up, watching TV - fish, fish, bloody fish. I’ve washed my hands more times in the last two hours than a paranoid serial killer. And I can still smell it. And I’ll soon have to dispose of that milky fishy soup, which will probably be more than my gag reflex can take. But, you love it. For some ungodly reason, you gobble down that monstrous fishy mush like a champion, grinning widely so little flakes of haddock can be seen peeping from your lips. And that makes it alright, as we can see just how much you love it. Just don’t ever ask me to eat any. That would end badly for all concerned.