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

Thioacetone is a chemical whose smell is so bad, it's almost impossible to believe. Weirdly, it was created from a chemical that you can find in candy. But it opens up questions about how smell works and why we react to smells the way we do.

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[DrPWNS-fzyh]

Best smell ever - I worked at a Kraft factory as security and they had a water purification room for crystal light drinks, that room smelled incredible, like a clean rainy day but in a purely indescribable way. It smelled so good 😊

[alexkorocencev]

Mark Rober should use this in the Glitter Bomb Trap 5.0

[drsuperhero]

Worst smell I ever experienced was an elderly lady in surgery whose infarcted bowel was so foul every single person dry heaved. We were all professionals so nobody actually vomited. That was 30 years ago and I still think about that smell and the withered geriatric partially alive human this smell came from and it made me sad, nauseated and terrified at the same time .

[My_Op]

My worst smell (yet) was when cleaning a marginal hoarder house in Charleroi: the city ordered them to leave after their smallest child got the gangrene after being bitten by rats. In their cellar, there was a freezer full of meat that had liquefied after being there without electricity for at least half a year. That combined to the 20 cm of poo on the floor because the pipe of their toilet was broken and had leaked there filling the cellar slowly but surely. Opening that freezer in that cellar...

[jaredsmith]

I used to work with mercaptan at a hazardous waste lab.
The smell gave me literal nightmares.
A smell. That gives you wake up shouting nightmares. I wore my optional respirator after that.

[scenenuf]

My primary school was in the middle of hundreds of sugar cane fields.
When they would prepare the lands they'd use blood and bone manure.
It is one of the worst smells I've ever experienced. Literally the smell of corpse's and poop, all day for weeks in class. You could never escape it.

[kathlenecharbonneau]

My mom passed away in 2015. Somehow, every time she took a shower, the whole house would smell of soap and shampoo but it never did when anyone else would shower and use the same products. And it didn't matter what products my mother used, it always smelled the same to me. I can still remember exactly what it smelled like. Thanks for the Memories, Joe! 💞

[boeingseven]

The smell of old wooden houses is one of the best smells ever imo. The combination of the flooring, paneling, trim, etc, aged to perfection. Also some cedar helps. When i step into an old house or building with that smell, i don't want to leave.

[holdenvpet]

The worst smell I probably ever experienced was when I had to get my tonsils removed.... and they used a laser. So for a solid 1-2 days I was both smelling and tasting burnt and decayed flesh constantly, which wasn't fun.

[kristianwilliams]

Before the pandemic, I was a frequent volunteer in my local nature museum's specimen prep lab, where I worked on turning mostly small songbirds into study skins to be added to the museum's research collections. It was incredibly cool work, but it was in the prep lab that I encountered the worst smell I've experienced to date - a bird that neither I, nor my supervisor, nor the other volunteers in the lab that day knew was actually in an advanced stage of decomposition until we thawed it and opened the ziploc it was in. Pure, intense, eye-watering rot wafted out into the lab that day. It was so bad that I could taste it, and all of us were racing to get data from the specimen - measurements, weight, information about where and when it died - as fast as we could so that it could go into the trash, and then out to the dumpster behind the museum. The only thing we could do in the face of such a horrible, unexpected stink was laugh. Just thinking about the smell made me gag for weeks afterward.

[Ballacha]

when i was about 12 or 13 my family moved to a new place. the underground storage room wasn't very clean. lots of stuff were left there by the previous owner. amongst the rubbish was a 2 litre milk carton just standing there by itself with a hole on top. i went to have a look. imagine "i can smell it with my eyes" isn't a joke. imagine having flashbacks every time you see a milk carton. imagine an interrogation tool 10 times more effective than waterboarding. so let me describe the content i saw before my body involuntarily recoiled all the way upstairs. there's gooey brown liquid that probably was once milk, 1/4 full. there's a mouse floating on top half decomposed. there are maggots in the liquid and on top of the mouse, all dead and decompsing too. what i think happened is the mouse bit into the carton, fell in and drowned. then maggots started eating the corpse but probably died of lack of oxygen sometime later (the only opening is at the very top of the carton. gas from decomposing are all heavier than air, like CO2, H2S etc). anyhow. the family therapist at the time suggested sharing is the best way to deal with trauma. so here i am. hope you lot enjoyed my story of smell.

[faustus]

There is a smell i like to think of as "sun" smell. It's when the sun comes out and heats up your living room, there is a smell that does not come from heat (like radiator) - but from the sun rays warming the room directly. Another smell i like is campfire. Fresh wood, burning wood ... smells nice.

[wavecast]

One thing I've noticed with smells is their seemingly instantaneous ability to recall memories of mine from decades ago. People talk about how music can take them back to a time and place but with smells I find that effect to be a lot stronger. I'll open a new brand of washing detergent and immediately recognise it as the smell of my friend's house which I haven't visited in 15+ years or something like that

[threeballedtomcat]

Decompositional slurry is pretty bad, when a human has decomposed over a 2-3 week period. That is how a lot of bodies are discovered. The smell is really horrible and very strong.
Then there was a chemical made from sulphur called "Apple Blossom". It was applied to the radiator heaters in the high school I attended ( 1969 or so ) and the school was evacuated due to the sickening smell.

[MylesField]

There is a perfume - don't know the name, never learned it - that whenever I smell it, I immediately think of a good childhood friend's mother who passed away when we were still kids. Audrey was almost like a second mom to me at the time. I smell this perfume on strangers from time to time and I'm transported back to her house. A great way for me to remember a tremedous woman.

[panellmann]

As an urban explorer I regularly come into some really foul smelling places, mostly from molds, rotting tissue or homeless people's shitrooms. However the worst smell I remember was the inside of a smoke purifier of an abandoned powerplant. I have no idea what chemicals they were using in there, but it was just this really artificial, slightly metallic, volatile substance smell combined with a bit of sulphuric odor. I actually got a bit disoriented by it and my head started to hurt, fortunately I kept myself on the narrow catwalk which lead me to this purifier's hatch.
The second worst smell I remember was in an abandoned yeast factory where they dumped hundreds of liters of unfinished product into some outdoor trench. The smell itself was not so terrible, it was really just an amplified yeast smell, but it catched onto everything, including my own skin and cavities. So even weeks after the visit the smell ocassionaly just went back into my nose from somewhere deep inside my body...

[TheMusicalFruit]

I used to work in a lab and one time someone tipped over a 25 mL (less than an ounce) bottle a 2-mercaptoethanol. The entire building was evacuated until the spill was cleaned up because the HVAC system spread the stench to nearly every room. I wonder if that HVAC system was routed properly, because it probably wasn't a good thing that lab air was being mixed with office air.

[emlix]

I was a winemaker for 15 years: mercaptans can form in wine that isn't properly managed, and the stench is utterly foul, similar to rotting garlic. I hate to think how bad it would be at higher concentrations.

[fatninja]

I think the worst thing I have ever smelled was when I was a kid me and my friends made these stink bombs where we put milk, egg, vegetables, fruits, and just a bunch of stuff that would spoil into Gatorade bottles then we left them out in the back of our yard for 2 years in the sun and everything, we both puked when we opened them up… the things we do as kids 😂

[erikheidecker]

Due to chronic sinus infections which started when I was an infant, I have permanently lost my sense of smell. I have no memory of what smell even is. So I have been very interested in speaking with covid sufferers who suddenly have no smell and how they react to food. I salt almost everything I eat because it's one of the few things I can taste.