During a live Radiolab show about a garlicky smell reported in an ER, Kielty explains why sulfur alarms people more than almost any other smell. He adds that natural gas has no odor and sulfur compounds are pumped into it so that leaks can be detected.
She said, specifically Italian garlic.
Okay, love. I'm into it.
…incredibly attuned to it. Our nose can pick up some sulfur compounds at as little as 0.5 parts per billion in the air. And if that doesn't mean anything to you, which it might not, if you were to imagine like 8 billion people of Earth all squished together, that'd be the equivalent of being able to pick out four individuals. Inside that massive humanity. Like, that's how sensitive we are. And we've evolved to be that sensitive because sulfur is death. It is rot. It is decay. When you die, when bacteria start eating your flesh, your organs, they start pumping out sulfur. And that idea has woven itself into culture. Fire and brimstone. Brimstone is just an archaic way of saying sulfur. Like, this is what we call hell. And in fact, you know, like when you smell it, we've been evolved to smell it so that it's like a little alarm for us. It's like, something's happening.…
Yeah, I was writing a book about my grandfather, James B.
Conan, and he was a brilliant chemist, president of Harvard, and one of the famous warrior scientists of World War II. He was topped by President Roosevelt to head the Manhattan Project, and he was Oppenheimer's boss. You know, he was personally oversaw the development of the bomb. Anyway, I…
okay, so let's start there. Bari. Where exactly are we? When are we?