On a mild April night some years ago, I walked past a college dorm in New Haven and smelled something I couldn’t place. It reminded me vaguely of swimming pools. Was it chlorine? I sniffed again, more deeply than before. Suddenly I knew exactly what it was and hurried away, internally berating an unseen teenage boy. A few evenings later, in the same spot, I smelled it again. Filled with a sense of moral outrage I looked around, I looked up, and identified the culprit: A tree.

More precisely, a Callery Pear, or Pyrus calleryana, a deciduous tree that’s common throughout North America. It blossoms in early spring and produces [...]

• Tom Ford: "vanilla bean"

• Michelle Obama: "cherries"

• Cher: "a mermaid"

• Kevin Bacon: "a little mix of baby powder and Listerine"

• Rihanna: "coconut and vanilla"

• Gideon Yago: "that clean smell that really young children have, as if they've never been dirty"

Today's Odor: Hot mothballs in a manure fire. Gentle kisses of body odor stained carpet.

— Gowanus Canal (@Gowanus_Daily) November 20, 2012

"It is the nasal equivalent of white noise, researchers report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Just as white noise is a mixture of many different sound frequencies and white light is a mixture of many different wavelengths, olfactory white is a mixture of many different smelly compounds." —Hoping that the Gowanus Canal's "Today's Odor" is the newly discovered "olfactory white" soon.

Space smells like meat and metal.

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