Sniffing Out 6 Stories About Smell

[Music] smell we know when it's good and we know when it's bad but there's a woman in scotland i'm a joy moon who can smell the unsmellable my nose went on fire joy milne is the only known person who can smell parkinson's disease i have an extremely sensitive sense of smell i can smell it mainly on the forehead and the back of the neck to joy it has a greasy musky odor it is just a heavy smell to me she first noticed it on her late husband les milne 12 years before he was diagnosed i just thought he was tired and he wasn't shouting enough it wasn't very welcome of course me saying to him well you're smelling it wasn't until she attended a conference with other parkinson's patients that she realized the smell was something more when i walked into the room i thought gosh these other people smell the same as liz does at the end of the meeting i stood up and said why were they not investigating the smell of parkinson's no one was investigating because no one else could smell it researchers set up a controlled experiment to test joy's nose she was asked to distinguish a set of t-shirts worn by those with and without the disease she insisted one of the subjects in the control group had the musky scent the man rang about eight months later and said i've got parkinson's so i had pre-diagnosed somebody by the time most people are diagnosed 80 to 90 percent of the damage is done so joy's mission is to help scientists improve early detection methods if they can find these people earlier it would stop this anguish some people say it smells like decaying garbage or rotten meat or smelly feet but nope it's stinky tofu stinky tofu has been fermented and gives off an intense smell while mostly found as a street food throughout china here in taipei one woman has given the stink a home what it means [Music] [Music] [Music] t [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] but for most of taiwan it's moral of the story don't judge a dish by its stink this is yuni a two-year-old binturong [Music] with a face like a cat a body like a bear and a tail like a monkey these reclusive creatures are unlike any other binturongs are native to the tropical rainforests of southeast asia and spend most of their time high in the treetops they are excellent climbers their long prehensile tails act as another limb as they move through the trees even when asleep their tails are anchored securely around a branch the binturong's flexibility doesn't end there their ankles can rotate 180 degrees to maintain their grip even when climbing down a tree head first perhaps the most curious trait of the binturong is its smell buttered popcorn while pleasing to a human knows the binturong scent is a way to mark its territory and to warn rivals to move along the binturong faces many threats the worst being habitat destruction over the past two decades their population has fallen precipitously this is the binturong [Music] in the french riviera lies a medieval town that's held one industry at its very heart for the last 300 years this is grass this is the world's capital of perfume this is the city of saints [Music] some of the big names that come from here like chanel chanel number five dior of course and louis vuitton it's something that's understood here it's a community it's a language it's something that people share [Music] for example [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign my name is jessica buchanan and i am an independent perfumer i came to grass for perfumery school so what i do is in very simple context mixing together raw materials for various different uses whether it's a perfume that one would wear to for example a candle [Music] i think to create a good perfume i like to allow six months to a year this is a very creative process when i sit in front of the perfumer's organ and create it's like sitting in front of a piano and composing music yeah i think there's something in the air here [Music] in my work i really try to reproduce smell scenarios for different purposes be it a street be the neighborhood in the city i've done thousands of smell all over the world could we on behalf of a small molecule find out something about history that we otherwise wouldn't know this is cecil tolis she has many things an artist a scientist but more importantly a smell expert she however prefers another title i call myself a professional in-betweener which means what exactly there's a whole world to smell and a whole word to educate how to smell so you cannot just limit yourself to one discipline right the point is she has dedicated her life to the sense of smell what it means and how it can be used to better understand the world and each other pretty early in my life i started to ask questions why are we only understanding the world on behalf of how the world look like what if we start to use the other senses more appropriate for the same purpose off i went starting to discover the same world i've been looking at for several years using the nose for the purpose so how exactly did she go about recording and then reproducing these smells i will walk around identify smells with my own nose i have small devices that enable me to collect the smell molecules emitting from the source with the result i go to my lab and then the data i get that is then the starting point of reproduction of the actual smell i have a lab consisting of up to 4 000 chemical compounds and with those ingredients with those compounds i literally reproduce invisible reality that surround you full time all the time name a city a neighborhood within a neighborhood a historical building or even an era in time and most likely sizzle has reproduced that smell along with thousands of other scents here in her lab with the hopes of using the findings for a bigger purpose the purpose can be tolerance education navigation to memorize the list is endless it's more interesting if you really start to understand the smells and see how you can use that information for a purpose beyond the smell itself [Music] most people think this fruit smells terrible it's been described using words like rotting onions or raw sewage not this guy though [Music] it's a very good smell to me [Music] my name is chang tekseng they call me durancing i'm a farmer until now nearly 30 years selling durian that's why they call me durensing if you're not that familiar with durian it has a spiky rind and the inside is a yellow soft colored creamy fruit it's native to southeast asia and because of its odor is actually banned from many public places durian is forbidden in airport in hotel some places they put a sign age that no durian allow the smell you can't hide my record is about 100 feet i can smell durant [Music] besides having a distinctive smell durian also has a distinctive taste it's like a peanut caramel they have five flavor a sweet flavor alcohol flavor bitter flavor flour flavor and nam taste daughter of five flavor numb taste literally means your mouth will go numb wow i can feel the numbness freshly dropped during the flavor is so good even the bees come to the durant this may well be my new favorite fruit people in general are divided on this fruit those who love it love it the durian is so tasty it's really good it's much better than it smells if you really like durant there can be like some people may look like crazy like breakfast lunch dinner three meals are all durant they can eat five seven fruits per day and there are others who just can't get past the smell that smell like or what they chase for durian sang it is the perfect fruit either you like it or you hate it some people they don't give chance to taste [Music] but you've got to try once in your lifetime [Music] little trees they're a rear-view mirror staple protecting noses from offensive odors all over the world but where do they come from [Music] over 60 years ago a scientist by the name of julius simone had a chance encounter with a milkman that changed the course of the air freshener game forever it was in watertown new york a milkman was making the rounds when he stopped to speak to julius a german jewish chemist who fled the nazis and studied alpine tree aromas in the forest of canada said milkman began venting to julius about the stench that spoiled milk left in his car and thus the quest began to destroy bad car odors julius drew inspiration from the tree aromas he studied by infusing their oils onto paper in 1954 he filed a patent for tree-shaped paper infused with odor-destroying air perfume julius then started producing the air fresheners out of an empty auto shop and sending samples to local gas stations the little trees were a big hit and julius successfully created the first automotive air freshener though the look remains the same the scents are forever changing now the little tree company has over 60 cents and has sold over a billion little trees worldwide

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 66,191

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, smell, nose, stinky, sniffing, New releases, Great Big Reels, Weird & Fun Knowledge, Biography & Profile

Id: GeCSxaNbuqk

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019