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
Around electronics or electrical applicanaces, you often smell ozone. Ozone is created when oxygen molecules in the presence of a lot of energy, fuse together to form a 3 atom molecule instead of a 2 atom molecule (the form oxygen takes naturally). We can’t smell oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc. normally because we literally are breathing that in all the time. Our bodies are good at ignoring something we smell all the time. You notice how if you are in the presence of a noxious odor, after a little while it doesn’t seem as bad? Our bodies ignore that signal after a while. So gasses we smell all the time we don’t even smell any more. I think evolutionarily speaking, this is good so we notice when the smell changes or we smell something different, such as hydrogen sulfide, sulfur, etc. that can be dangerous to us.
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