How Scientists Accidentally Created The World's Worst Smell | Random Thursday

this video is supported by brilliant we've all gotten used to hearing about covet over the last couple of years and all the weird things that it can do to the body all the weird effects that it has but one of the weirdest has to be that it can actually take away your sense of smell remember when it was still new and we were still learning things about it all the time how weird it was and remember panicking anytime you smelled something and it wasn't quite as strong as you thought it should be like we only have five senses and for some reason two years later for reasons we still don't understand this disease turns one of them off like imagine if it temporarily made you blind or deaf or you you couldn't feel anything that you touched i guess there are other diseases that do that actually but the point is everybody who had that experience talks about how weird it was to lose their sense of smell how it ruins the ability to eat food because everything just kind of tastes like elmer's glue i guess don't know what you got until it's gone but there are some instances where not having a sense of smell would probably be a good thing for instance if you were to run across a chemical called thioacetone which is considered by many to be the absolute worst smell in the world [Music] what's the worst thing you ever smelled really think about it put it in the comments i bet just thinking about it brings you back to a vivid memory of some kind probably not a good one maybe even one that traumatized you in some way and now you're spiraling into a dark abyss of pain that you thought you had escaped a door you had permanently closed and now you're trapped inside of it screaming inexorably into the uncaring void sorry i just made you do that but that's the power of smell it's wired directly into our emotional centers it's our most primal sense that we have and we still don't really understand it i know that sounds like clickbait but it's true there's no single agreed-upon theory about how smell works what we do know is that a smell happens when an odor molecule binds with a receptor within the nasal cavity that smell is then interpreted by the glomerulus which gets a bunch of information from other receptors in the nose called olfactory receptor neurons and then combines all that info together into what we call smell and that's about as deep as our understanding goes we we know that there are certain molecules that fit into certain receptors in our noses but we don't fully understand the mechanisms behind it there are a few theories there's the docking theory of olfaction which proposes a very one-to-one match it's kind of like a lock and key situation where a molecule key fits into a receptor lock each receptor is either on or off and the number of different receptors tells the brain how to interpret it the ototype theory is similar to the docking theory except that molecules can fit several different types of receptors and vice versa it's more a matter of processing the signal through the noise and then there's a vibration theory of olfaction this says that the molecules fit into receptors but the receptors are actually interpreting the vibrations of the molecules at an atomic level this one is actually pretty controversial it also posits that the quantum tunneling is involved in some way which is pretty nuts and it's very heavily debated i just think it's funny that that smells science has drama involved in it but because we don't know exactly how it works that means we can't really measure stink or i should say we can measure the concentration of a smell but we can't measure whether or not a smell is good or bad that's sort of a subjective thing you know one person's dripping gasoline is another person's bouquet of roses noses are weird so there's no objective scale of smell like say spice has scoville units you know you can actually measure the amount of capsaicin that's in in food and objectively come up with a number to quantify how spicy that is what we can gather is people's reactions to a stink and how universally loved or hated it is and then we can determine how easily it can be detected when it's dispersed into air and then from that of course we can create a weapon out of it because humans got a human yes the u.s department of defense did study smell for a while in order to create some kind of non-lethal stink bomb to use against the enemy stink bomb who knows what that does oh one person who consulted on the stink bomb project is a cognitive psychologist named pamela dalton she said that the dod had actually created a large inventory of different smells to choose from and gave her access to their stink inventory she zeroed in on one that the government had created that its purpose was to simulate large military latrines that they would then test cleaning products on from this base of stink dalton created what she called the stench soup and she described the smell of this soup as quote satan sitting on a throne of onions she said she she couldn't imagine a worse smell well she might not be able to imagine it but it turns out there is a worse smell far worse in 1889 german scientists were working with a chemical called trithioacetone which is a fairly harmless chemical it's actually used as a flavoring in some candies today but as they were messing around with this chemical they they cracked the molecule turning trithioacetone into just thioacetone and while good things may come in threes it turns out one is the loneliest number because this compound smells in a profound way like almost supernatural okay so let me take a second and explain to you exactly what i wanted to do with this video like i heard about thioacetone and my youtuber clickbait brain went off and i was like i'm going to get my hands on some of this i'm going to go down to the park and i'm going to smear a little bit on a tree and then like go hide somewhere and catch people's reactions as they walk by i mean i'm not really into prank videos that's not really what i do here but smell is a very hard thing to get across visually so i wanted somebody to react to it either somebody other you know strangers at the park or myself but i was going to have a title that was like i got my hands on the smelly substance in the world and i was going to put my wow face on there with a red circle randomly i mean i was ready to sell out big time but then i read some of the stories about thioacetone and uh yeah that's not gonna happen because yeah when those german scientists first created thioacetone they accidentally spilled a little bit of it and apparently one little quirk of thioacetone is that it dissipates and moves through the air so fast that the people standing right next to it don't smell it immediately and by the time they picked up on the smell of it in their lab people were already vomiting and passing out in the streets of freeburg a newspaper at the time described it as quote an offensive smell which spread rapidly over a great area of the town causing fainting vomiting and a panic evacuation they literally tipped over their beaker and people were evacuating their homes and businesses up to a half a mile away within seconds that is some fast stank thioacetone popped up again in england in 1967. british researchers victor burnoff and kenneth latham were experimenting with thioketones trying to create some new synthesized new polymers and whatnot uh when something terrible happened they left a bottle of residue open for a moment just a few seconds and just that caused a building 200 yards away filled with people to be overwhelmed with odor and nausea followed the official report from the researchers at the station said quote we recently found ourselves with an odor problem beyond our worst expectations during early experiments a stopper jumped from a bottle of residues and although replaced at once resulted in an immediate complaint of nausea and sickness from colleagues working in a building 200 yards away literally opened a bottle for a few seconds and people were sick in a different building 200 yards away two football fields away like just around that same time professor mayer at the dresden university of technology was also playing around with thio ketones and had heard about thioacetone wanted to experience it for himself immediately regretted it he said quote the smell of this unstable red oil is indeed almost indescribable he calls it red i've heard it described as brown and orange as well oh and another thing about thioacetones it lingers as if that pungent smell wasn't bad enough apparently it gets kind of sticky and clings to clothes and hair and stuff there was a story of some chemists that had been exposed to thioacetone and even though they cleaned themselves off and followed all the protocols and whatnot apparently later that day they went to a restaurant and it smelled so bad that so many people complained to the manager about it that the manager of the restaurant came out and started spraying them with deodorant but all these stories are from a long time ago it's actually hard to find any recent research that's been done on thioacetone i think because they found out what they needed to find out about it like it doesn't seem to have any other uses whatsoever it just smells really really really bad the end it's literally like a wmd of smell it's just it's just not worth messing with because it turns out smelly spills happen all the time one of these spills happened in the city of rohan in normandy france there's a chemical plant there run by lubrizol in 2013 they had a large chemical spill that chemical was heated by the air and caused the smell of rotten eggs that apparently traveled for hundreds of miles they could smell it as far away as london people in rowan reported feeling nauseous and getting migraines from it the chemical that was spilled not thioacetone it was actually his baby brother mercaptan which is what they put in natural gas to you know be able to detect leaks the gas is odorless but they add the smell so you know when there's a leak yeah the use of mercaptan and gas lines goes back to you guessed it the victorians i mentioned in one of my many victorian videos that when in the early days of using natural gas in homes a lot of people died because they had gas leaks in their homes and it overtook them well they started adding more captain to it so that people could actually smell the gas the human nose can detect 1.6 parts per billion of mercaptans so you can imagine how strong that smell was when pure mercaptan got spilled and started blowing all over europe and the reason is the sulfur in the molecule the human nose is so good at picking up sulfur it's thought that even one molecule of it can be detected fun fact the human nose is also really good at picking out the smell of vanilla that the scientific term is vanillin uh the the threshold for that is so low it's actually i got to look at it it's 2.0 times 10 to the negative 7 milligrams per meter cubed yeah apparently if you took an oil tanker full of vanillin and tipped it over it would make the entire planet smell like vanilla the entire planet which would kind of turn the whole planet into disneyland they they do that at disneyland they pipe vanilla smell into main street but back to thioacetone why why is this stuff so bad especially when you consider that it's derived from something that's so harmless they put it in candy chemistry is weird thioacetone is derived from the thiol group in other words sulfur thiols are basically sulfur analogs of alcohol the thigh being sulfur and all being alcohol it's not that humans evolve to avoid sulfur compounds because sulfur is usually emitted by rotten things rotten things also carry disease and and death stink saving lives after a couple hundred thousand years of evolutionary pressures we are now completely grossed out by the smell of dumpsters and a warm summer breeze i'm looking to use south dallas but ultimately that's what our sense of smell is supposed to do what all of our senses are supposed to do just keep us alive bioacetone just really shows how powerful chemistry can be and possibly dangerous i mean can you imagine if a tanker full of thioacetone spilled over would it have the same effect as vanilla would it coat the entire world in a stench of rotten crap but luckily that's very unlikely to happen again there's not really a lot of use for thioacetone so there's not a whole lot of it being made like it's so bad that you can't even weaponize it which is why the dod was looking at other compounds and not really a thioacetone because like if you're trying to smoke somebody out of a building or or disperse a crowd you would wind up making all of your own people pass out so even though my original plan for this video got thwarted i don't know maybe it's better for some things to remain a mystery maybe maybe thioacetone being on a shelf in a big building with the ark of the covenant at somewhere maybe maybe maybe that's the best plan researching into this episode made me um appreciate my nose as weird as that sounds i found myself taking time to really smell the environment around me you know we kind of get used to smells that we're around all the time we call it nose blind or smell blindness but you know just just being more aware of it and thinking about it as i breathe just kind of enhance the experience of life and smell is also powerfully tied to our emotions and our memories like i was talking about before you know we're very connected to a certain smell you might smell something that smells like your grandmother's house or the cookies that your mom used to bake and it would just take you right back there apparently one of the lowest concentrations of smell that humans can detect is the smell of rain that's a scent called geosmin and apparently 400 parts per trillion can be picked up by our nose shows you just how well refined our little booger factory is so it's not all horrible you know i asked you at the beginning of the video to think of the worst smell that you've ever smelled maybe we could eat things on an upbeat what's the best thing you've ever smelled what's your favorite smell what's a smell that just takes you back mentally and emotionally to a place that you once cherished and maybe as you go about your day you know take a moment from time to time to just sort of focus on the smell and in the the environment around you not only is it something that can kind of enhance the experience of living it's something that kind of grounds you and keeps you in the moment which is always a good thing what's also a good thing is getting a little bit smarter with today's sponsor brilliant like i said before chemistry is weird one little reaction can turn a candy flavoring into the world's worst stink bomb and you can find out why this happens in brilliant's chemical reaction course through 15 interactive lessons covering 180 exercises this course will teach you everything from acids and bases to moles and avogadro's number reaction energetic stoichiometry and more and if all that stuff sounds way over your head don't worry it won't be because brilliant uses visual and interactive lessons to teach you by solving problems which is something we all know how to do on a certain level it kind of hacks this innate problem-solving ability that we all have and uses it to teach us fundamental concepts that you can then build upon until the next thing you know you're doing advanced math and science that you always thought was out of your reach it's a great gift for kids who are struggling to learn in the traditional school setting or if you're an adult and you just always wish you had a better handle on it well here's your chance it's never too late so if you've been on the fence about brilliant you can actually try out the first couple of lessons on every single one of their courses and if you enjoy that and you think it's worth checking out um you can go to brilliant.org slice answers with joe and get 20 off your subscription that gives you access to all of their lessons now this only applies for the first 200 people that sign up so don't wait again it's brilliant.org answers with joe link's down in the description big thanks to brilliant for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon and the channel members who are forming an awesome community and giving me great feedback and just being incredible people got a few names to murder real quick these are new members we've got elizabeth wagner christina carr sean g dharma hetherington love the spam spam sawyer mirage tiger shower derby jill renee cameron miller leo quince j kjf and bobby l nelson thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get early access to videos also get a little a little avatar a little thing by your name to stand out in the comments uh you can just hit the little join button down below please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here um google thinks you might like this one too so you might check that one out or any of the others that have my little face on them down the side and if you enjoy them i do invite you to subscribe i'll come back with videos every monday and sometimes thursday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 454,153

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: B5Wxryx2hWw

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021