Why is it you can smell sulphur but you can’t smell nitrogen or oxygen?
And why does the air around some hot appliances have a distinctive odour. I can smell that my clothes iron is hot.
In: Chemistry
It would be more correct to say that some gases fall outside of the human ability to detect. I’ve read somewhere that dogs the ability of a dog to detect odors is anywhere between 10,000-100,000 times greater than ours.
It is wildly held that bears have the keenest sense of smell with polar bears reported can detect the scent of a seal through three feet of ice.
Hot appliances cause changes in their surrounding environment which can cause elements that have no detectable scent by humans at room temperature to become detectable at higher temperatures.
Think about a frozen pizza, at room temperature it does not smell strongly, but when heated in an oven, the scent is detectable throughout the house. Popcorn is also another good example.
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