What Does the Universe Smell Like?

 

The Pillars of Creation are clouds of cosmic dust and gas that are just a small area at the center of Messier 16, or the Eagle Nebula, where new stars are forming. This is 6,500 light-years away from us. Blue is oxygen and orange is sulfur, while hydrogen and nitrogen are green. NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

While there is still some debate about the shape of the universe—whether it’s round or saddle-shaped—we do know that it is probably beige—perhaps a bit pinkish.[1] We also know that outer space smells like fried steak, hot metal, or burnt electrical wiring. At least, that’s how it smells near the earth since it’s what astronauts report smelling after their space walks.[2] We’re not sure why, but it might be from oxidation of their space suits, or it might be from oxygen (O₁) in the upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere reacting with dioxygen (O₂) inside the spacecraft to make ozone (O₃), or it could be polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules that were expelled from a supernova. These smell like burned food or a barbecue grill.

Dying stars also make compounds that smell like solvents, mothballs, and burned plastics that spread throughout the universe[3], but in deep space, all of these scents are probably too faint for us to detect. Star and planet forming clouds have all sorts of areas with different chemicals and smells, from sweet to unpleasant. Some smell like oil, coal, or food. Interstellar clouds, if they’re strong enough to smell, would be faintly like urine and pickles or cleaning products.[4]

Interstellar space also has molecules that are part soot, sand, and grease. Australian and Turkish researchers found that our galaxy alone has about 11 billion trillion trillion tons of it (10 billion trillion trillion tonnes), which would probably coat any spacecraft traveling through it, making it feel sticky. This space grease is probably also toxic.[5]

The earth rises above the moon in this photograph taken from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University.

The moon smells more like spent gunpowder or wet fireplace ashes according to astronauts who could smell it on their suits after walking around on the moon.[6] Others say it’s like hot metal, but slightly sweet.

It’s thought Mars smells like sulfur and chalk, with a touch of sweetness.[7] Mercury probably doesn’t have a smell and Venus’s clouds of sulfuric acid would have the sour smell of rotting eggs. The upper atmosphere of Uranus would also smell like rotten eggs with some ammonia, if they weren’t frozen as ice crystals.[8]

So far, Jupiter is thought to be the worst smelling place in the universe. To start with, Jupiter’s highly volcanic moon, Io, ejects a lot of sulfur. Jupiter itself has layers of clouds, so entering its atmosphere would smell of ammonia. Then rotten eggs would be added. Then gasoline and then garlic.[9]

Jupiter’s moon, Titan, is a bit more hospitable. It has an atmosphere that four times denser than ours and the pressure there is a bit more like on earth, but it is extremely cold and you’d still need oxygen. But if you could breathe the air without freezing your lungs, the smell would be musky sweet, with a hint of bitter almond, gasoline, and rotten fish, along with perhaps the ammonia-smell of urine in some places.[10] It’s thought that dogs can separate smells like this, but we tend to just smell the blend. To us, pizza smells like pizza, not its ingredients, so we have to imagine what the blend would smell like.

This is an image of the center of the Milky Way, combining X-ray emissions (purple, orange, and green) and radio emissions (gray and blue). NASA.

On analyzing the components of one comet, European scientists found it smelled like rotten eggs, urine, almonds, burning matches, and pickles or cleaning products from its traces of hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen dioxide, and formaldehyde.[11] When a bit of an asteroid that was older than the solar system was ground up, it smelled like rotten peanut butter.[12] The center of our galaxy smells more like rum and tastes faintly of raspberries because of a vast cloud of ethyl formate, which helps give raspberries their flavor.[13]

Moving on to color, when astronomers averaged out all of the colors of light in the universe, it turned out that the universe is light beige, similar to the color of a latte. But since there’s a lot more area without light, it looks black to us since our eyes aren’t that sensitive.

What does space sound like? It doesn’t sound like anything, it’s completely silent. This is because there’s no air there. You can see fine, but you can’t hear because sound needs a medium to travel through, such as air or water.

When we look out into the universe, it took the light we see a long time to get to us, so we’re looking back in time. That means we can’t see what the distant universe looks like now, but it appears galaxies are evenly distributed throughout the universe, which means the distant parts probably now look like the parts that are close to us.

At the moment we’re not sure what the majority of the universe is made of. The current popular theories indicate there is something unknown out there, but whether it’s really there or whether there are flaws in the theories, we just don’t know yet. If we take into account everything astronomers know is out there in the universe, there is not enough matter to explain the gravitational force holding the galaxies together or to explain how they interact. For example, we can calculate from observations that the Milky Way galaxy should have a mass of around one hundred billion suns, but if we calculate the mass based on how rapidly gravity is pulling our galaxy toward our neighboring galaxy Andromeda we find the Milky Way’s mass is ten times greater.[14] The difference between these calculations leads us to believe there’s a lot more matter out there than we can see.

This additional matter that we suspect is in the universe is referred to as Dark Matter. Some physicists think Dark Matter might be made up of invisible dark galaxies, planetary material, and brown dwarf stars—one of which might even be orbiting at the edge of our own solar system. Others think Dark Matter could be subatomic particles that have mass but don’t interact with anything, making them extremely difficult to detect.[15]

The Hubble orbiting telescope was supposed to clear all this up. Instead, it added an even bigger mystery by revealing that distant galaxies aren’t slowing down from the expansion of the universe as expected, they are actually speeding up. Something appears to be pushing them away. One explanation for this is something referred to as dark energy. No one is sure what dark matter or dark energy is, or if they even exist, but it looks like there’s an awful lot of it about. If the currently accepted theories are correct, then the universe is roughly made up of from 68.3% to 70% dark energy and 26.8% dark matter, while the remaining three to five percent is everything we know about—all the stars, nebula, black holes, interstellar dust; all the gases, atoms, and subatomic particles. Everything astronomers can see with our amazing new telescopes all the way to the furthest reaches of the visible universe—all those billions of galaxies—only account for about five percent of what we think is out there. The other 95 percent is unknown and has yet to be discovered. That’s pretty amazing.[16]

Still, there are other explanations, but so far they’re controversial and none of them have caught on. There are a lot of interesting ideas, but we just need more evidence, which is why experiments are so important.

 

Go to my index of posts to see more.

If you'd like to comment, please email me at John@AWondrousWorld.com.

---

[1] Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry, “The Cosmic Spectrum and the Color of the Universe”, Johns Hopkins University, https://web.archive.org/web/20160412230008/http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~kgb/cosspec/.

See also NASA, "Astronomy Picture of the Day", http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap020702.html.

[2] “Space ‘smells like fried steak’ ”, Telegraph (UK), October 16, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3210415/Space-smells-like-fried-steak.html.

[3] Katherine Latham, “From cat urine to gunpowder: Exploring the peculiar smells of outer space”, BBC Future, May 25, 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250522-what-does-outer-space-smell-like.

[4] “December 2021: What does space smell like?”, NASA Ames Laboratory Astrophysics and Astrochemistry, December 2021, https://www.nasa.gov/space-science-and-astrobiology-at-ames/interesting-fact-of-the-month-current/interesting-fact-of-the-month-2021/.

[5] Hannah Devlin, “Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal”, The Guardian, June 27, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/27/space-is-full-of-dirty-toxic-grease-scientists-reveal, citing B. Günay, T.W. Schmidt, M.G. Burton, M. Afşar, O. Krechkivska, K. Nauta, S.H. Kable, and A. Rawal, “Aliphatic hydrocarbon content of interstellar dust”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 479, no. 4, October 2018, pp. 4336–4344, https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/479/4/4336/5039660, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty1582.

Also Brandon Specktor, “The Milky Way Is Full of Toxic, Sticky Grease”, Live Science, June 28, 2018, https://www.livescience.com/62941-milky-way-space-grease.html.

[6] Tony Phillips, “The Mysterious Smell of Moondust”, NASA Science, January 30, 2006, https://phys.org/news/2006-02-mysterious-moondust.html.

And Jillian Scudder, “The Moon Smells Like Gunpowder”, Nautilus, February 8, 2023, https://nautil.us/the-moon-smells-like-gunpowder-261483/.

[7] Leonard David, “What Does Mars Smell Like?”, Space.com, June 9, 2016, www.space.com/33115-what-does-mars-smell-like.html.

[8] Lisa Grossman, “Uranus smells like rotten eggs”, Science News, April 23, 2018, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/uranus-smells-rotten-eggs.

And Nathaniel Scharping, “Uranus Smells Exactly How You Think It Does”, Discover Magazine, April 23, 2018, https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/uranus-smells-exactly-how-you-think-it-does.

[9] Katherine Latham, “From cat urine to gunpowder: Exploring the peculiar smells of outer space”, BBC Future, May 25, 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250522-what-does-outer-space-smell-like.

[10] Morgan L. Cable, “What does Titan smell like?”, Astronomy, September 3, 2020, https://www.astronomy.com/science/what-does-titan-smell-like/.

[11] Alastair Gunn, “What does a comet smell like?”, BBC Science Focus, November 9, 2021, https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/what-does-a-comet-smell-like/.

[12] Paul Rincon, “Oldest material on Earth discovered”, BBC News, Jan. 13, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51099609.

[13] Ian Sample, “Galaxy’s centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum, say astronomers”, The Guardian, April 21, 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/21/space-raspberries-amino-acids-astrobiology, citing research by Arnaud Belloche and Robin Garrod.

[14] NASA, “Building Blocks”, https://science.nasa.gov/universe/overview/building-blocks/.

And Mark Peplow, “Planck telescope peers into primordial Universe”, Nature, March 21, 2013, www.nature.com/news/planck-telescope-peers-into-primordial-universe-1.12658, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2013.12658.

 

A Wondrous World GPS

This is a list of the posts on A Wondrous World by topic. Click on a topic and it will take you to the list of posts under that topic and their descriptions. Some topics have more posts than others, but I am still adding to them.

 

Main Topics:

What is Real? 

Along the Shore

Animals 

Humans 

Universe 

Sumo

 

What is Real?

Our perceptions of the real world aren’t accurate and reality is different from what we think it is. Section 1 of this series examines how our senses work, how our brain creates what we perceive, how our thought processes can be distorted, and our thinking errors and biases. Section 2 looks at Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum physics. Section 3 explores the universe and time.

Section 1 Part 1:

Down the Rabbit Hole (Our senses are distorted)

Down the Rabbit Hole: Our brains are locked away inside of our skulls. The only way we have of knowing anything is through our senses. We rely on our senses to give us an accurate view of the world.

Misperceiving Reality: Our senses receive way more data than our brains can handle, so it has to take short cuts, weeding out what might not be useful and summarizing the rest, altering it in the process. This is why magicians and optical illusions can fool us.

Our Perceptions are Distorted: Optical illusions can also show us how our brains distort and enhance our perceptions, even altering our perceptions of our own bodies. Our brains can even trick us into feeling that we have a third hand.

Creating Our Perceptions: Each of our eyes see in just two dimensions, so our brains have to create our depth perception. It does the same with our hearing. In addition, colors, the way we see them, don’t really exist at all. It’s the same with sound. Colors and sounds are created in our brains, and there are many other electromagnetic waves that we can’t detect at all.

Constructing Our World: The information our senses receive is divided up and sent to different parts of our brains for processing. Then it is passed on to higher levels for more processing. Then it’s pieced together and our expectations are added in. Finally it enters our awareness.

Perception is Not Continuous: Our vision seems continuous, but it actually flickers, just as still images are used to create movies. Much of the time we are actually blind, but our brains hide this from us. Athletes have to adjust for this. Different animals have differing flicker rates, with most seeing a lot faster than us. All of this processing takes time, while the world has moved on, so to hide the delay, our brains give us predictions and then modify them after the fact without our being aware of it. We can’t see things in real time.

Getting Creative with Reality: Our brains invent some of what we see to fill in missing data from blind spots and our peripheral vision. The more data that’s missing, the more our brains have to fill in, eventually reaching the point where it’s creating hallucinations, as can be seen in some ailments and the Bloody Mary illusions. Most of our perceptions run on autopilot without us being aware of it.

 

Section 1 Part 2:

Standing at the Doors of Perception (Variations in our senses)

The Doors of Perception: What exactly is light? And how much can’t we see? How much of the world is imperceptible to us, but can be perceived by other animals? The answers are in this post.

The Sixth Sense and Beyond: We have more than five senses. Scientists list up to 33 of them. And we have sensors in some very unusual places. Here we compare our senses to those of other animals.

In a World of Our Own: Our senses vary between individuals so that each one of us ends up experiencing the world in different ways. There is considerable variation between how people see, smell, taste, hear, and feel. We explore these differences and how our own senses can change depending on the time of day and where we are, which is why airline food often tastes bad. Even your expectations can severely alter how something tastes. Then there are the flavor hallucinogens.

What do You See?: In 2015 a photograph of a dress suddenly made people realize that others see the world differently when people couldn’t agree on what colors the dress was. In addition, there are factors that can change how we see something. And there are a few women who can see thousands more shades of color than the rest of us can. To them, we’re all color blind.

Where’s My Pacifier?: Our perceptions have to be learned and this takes experience. So what is it like to be a baby? The answer is startling. For some people the senses blend together with some very surprising results.

 

Section 1 Part 3:

We’re All Mad Here (Thinking errors)

We’re All Mad Here: We are all confident in our beliefs and are convinced we are right, yet no one seems to agree and many people have some really far out and beliefs that are obviously wrong. We are constantly bombarded by people and ads trying to convince us of something. We are also influenced by subconscious biases.

Crash Test Dummies: People are poor judges of their own abilities and the ones with the most confidence are usually the worst. Self-deception comes in many forms.

A Carnival House of Mirrors: Here we look at delusions and the fallibility of intuitions, and what scientists do to get things right.

Thinking Errors: Students are not taught how to think or analyze an argument. This enables thinking errors to flourish, making people susceptible to political lies, propaganda, and opinions presented as if they’re facts, with harmful consequences.

Mind Craft: We all have distorted and false memories because of the way our memories work. They can be distorted when they are made or altered later on. This post explains how all this happens, how false memories can be created, and why eyewitness testimony is particularly bad.

Bright Summer Days: People’s beliefs are often heavily influenced by nostalgia—unrealistic memories and impressions of the past. Here we find out how this happens and why it can be harmful.

Myths and Legends: Mistaken beliefs can lead people into mazes of false ideas, including strange religions and conspiracy theories. This post looks at how some common beliefs are wrong and how people often end up believing what they want to believe.

Jesus on Toast: Our brains are attuned to recognizing faces. So much so that we end up seeing faces everywhere, when they aren’t actually there. Here are some interesting illusions that have fooled people, and why we see them. How seeing patterns that don’t exist makes people susceptible to false conspiracy theories. We also look at how to make pigeons superstitious and how this affects gamblers. And check out the photograph of Big Foot on mars.

Roll of the Dice: People are poor at understanding randomness and probabilities, which causes problems in assessing risks. As a result, assessments of some dangers are blown way out of proportion, while very serious dangers are glossed over. This affects our evaluation of the risks of air travel, terrorism, smoking, sharks, and vaccinations. This leads us to the gambler’s fallacy.

Life’s a Variable-Sum Game: There are essentially two basic types of interactions people have, whether in negotiations, business competition, or in topics like immigration. Most people wrongly see these as being win-or-lose situations, but most of the time that’s not the case, and often both sides can win, and in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right...but Three Lefts Do: Here we compare two methods of thinking—scientific and adversarial, like is found in the court system. It also has to do with whether everything is in black and white, or whether there are shades of gray. This affects our government, since most of our leaders were trained to be adversarial.

So What’s Real?: With all of the issues discussed so far, how can we tell what is real? Scientists are divided. Some lean towards realism and others antirealism. There are several types of each of these. There is also social reality, which stems from our culture. Then there are the social constructionists. Somewhere in the middle is instrumentalism. We take a quick look at all of these.

 

Section 2 Part 1:

Extremely Far Down the Rabbit Hole (Einstein’s relativity)

Extremely Far Down the Rabbit Hole: Physics is extremely strange, but this is because the experimental evidence is extremely strange. It is completely contrary how we perceive and think of the world. Yet all of this makes it very fascinating.

Stepping Way Outside the Box: The basis of Einstein’s special theory of relativity and its unusual implications are presented, which, among other things, places a speed limit on light and makes sizes and time relative. It can also means events can happen in a different order depending on your perspective.

The Fastest Thing in Universe: Since the speed of light is constant, this raises some interesting questions. What if you’re traveling close to the speed of light and turn on a light, what happens? Why can’t we go faster than light speed? How can galaxies move apart faster than the speed of light?

More to come...

 

Along the Shore

This series looks at life along the coast, along with ocean and the creatures living it, highlighting what these organisms are actually like, how they behave, interact with each other, and how they live their lives. Surprisingly, they are much more advanced and intelligent than you would think. 

Along the Shore: An introduction to living on the coast and what makes it so amazing, fascinating, and magical.

Safe Harbors: Harbors are places where the people of the sea and their ships gather. It’s their gateway to their homes, yet many greatly prefer the freedom of the open ocean.

A Lonely Light in Darkness: Lighthouses both beckon ships and warn them away. They also experience a wide range of weather, but have to keep working in order to save people’s lives. We also look at what it was like to live in Cape Cod’s lighthouse. To them, it's their gateway to the world.

Shipwrecks and Wreckers: Working on the ocean is a dangerous profession and shipwrecks are one of the reasons. Looking at their history, we find tales of criminals who tried causing shipwrecks so they could loot the wreckage.

Dangerous Seas: The sea has many unknown dangers, including gigantic rogue waves and bubbling gasses. Many ships without crews are found, with few clues as to what happened.

Ghost Ships: Stories of phantom ships like the Flying Dutchman abound, along with tales of mermaids luring sailors to their doom.

Thousands of Rubber Ducks: Because of a shipping accident, thousands of rubber ducks are drifting around the world on its various currents and gyres, along with other interesting flotsam and jetsam.

The Great Oregon Whale Explosion: What do you do with a smelly whale that washes ashore? Oregon officials decided to blow it up. That was a mistake, but this humorous story resulted in people celebrating Exploding Whale Day.

Sophisticated Societies: Dolphins are one of the most intelligent animals in the ocean and they have very advanced societies. They are much more similar to us that you would expect. They have cultures, family dynamics, individual personalities, and they each have their own names.

Sponges on the Move: Sponges are simple creatures that can’t move. At least that’s what most people think. They actually do move and some even migrate. Also, see a video of a sponge sneezing.

Worm with Many Butts: A worm that lives in sponges has a body that branches out to follow the sponges’ passageways. It eventually splits off so many times that it’s all over the place. Strangely, it only has one head, but perhaps more than a thousand butts. But that’s not the weirdest thing...

Those Teenage Years All Over Again: Caterpillars transform into butterflies, but some sea creatures go through many transformations. Some can revert to earlier stages, making them potentially immortal.

Going to War: Sea anemones get along with their clones, but not with any others. When two groups meet, they go to war, fighting daily battles along the no-man’s-land between them. And it can get brutal.

Shark Attack: People kill a tremendous amount of sharks, partly because of the movie Jaws, but that was fiction, misrepresenting these animals. Here we look behind the myth and hear about some interesting face-to-face encounters with sharks.

The Smartest Bivalve in the World: While clams tend to be rather sedentary, scallops are active in comparison and are often on the move. They are also quite smart. And they can look at you with their bright blue eyes.

Slime Fish: There’s a fish that has an interesting form of defense—slime. And it can produce massive quantities of it—more than enough to ruin a predator’s day.

Clever Fish: Fish are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, and they do have very good memories. Each fish also has its own personality and some can recognize themselves in mirrors and photographs.

Snails that Harpoon Fish: Some cone snails are extremely venomous and they fire their deadly harpoons at predators and prey. They can kill people within hours if they’re not treated.

Psychedelic Slugs: Nudibranchs are among the most brightly colored animals in the sea, with a stunning variety of shapes. They also have the unusual ability to absorb another creature’s weapons and use them themselves. And some of these slugs are solar powered.

Megalodon: A look at the world’s largest shark, thought to equal twenty-five great white sharks. With teeth the size of a man’s outstretched hand, it was an impressive predator.

Attack of the Bobbit Worm: The horrifying bobbit worm is like something out of a nightmare, armed with pincers so fast they can cut a fish in half. Fish, on the other hand, have a peculiar way of dealing with it.

What’s Happening to My Head: While teens go through some transformations, those are nothing compared to what flatfish have to deal with when their skulls start rearranging themselves, moving their faces from one side to the other.

The Joy of Living: Can fish experience the joy of living? Do they feel emotions? Evidence seems to indicate that they can. It looks like they can also suffer from depression.

More to come...

 

Animals

So far this section focuses on how animals perceive the world.

What’s It Like to Be a Cat?What’s It Like to Be a Cat?: This post explores how cats see and experience the world. And it looks at why cats and dogs are color blind and why we can see colors.

What’s It Like to Be a Rat?: Rats have a very different view of the world. Here we try understand what their lives are like by exploring their senses and how they communicate with each other.

Sense of Smell in Dogs and Cats: Cats and dogs have noses that are much more sensitive than ours—amazingly more. Dogs can locate 2,700-year-old graves, while one cat could detect when patients were about to die. And some people can smell and identify when someone has a certain disease. We also look at what animals can’t taste and how catnip affects cats.

Spidey Senses: Spiders have their own unusual set of senses. They can hear you talking. I also explain how they use their eight eyes. They can also do some very interesting things with their webs.

Sense and Sensibilities: Every organism needs to sense its environment. We start by looking at how bacteria and single-celled organisms do it, and also how they communicate amongst themselves. Our own cells have similar abilities. There is also a single-celled organism that has an eye like ours. We also look at some unusual senses in various animals, including how sponges are able to sneeze.

They Have No Eyes But Sight: You don’t need eyes to be able to see. Many creatures without eyes are able to do it. Here we look at how they do it and what they’re able to see having no eyes. Then there are creatures that have eyes, such as scallops and jellyfish, that you wouldn’t think would have any. Also, some animals that lack ears can still hear.

How Far Can a Dung Beetle See?: This is a trick question and here we explore why. The answer applies to our vision as well. This leads to a look at the many different types of eyes and how they evolved. Also, there’s why an eagle’s eye can see so much farther than ours and what sports figures do to improve their eyesight. Finally we look at some very unusual sense organs.

Tastes like Chicken: Ever wonder what dinosaurs tasted like? Or how about the chicken and egg problem? Find out the answers here, along with how taxonomy works, and more about chickens.

More to come...

 

Humans

A new section that’s all about us.

You are Older than Dirt: The materials we are made of have been around for a very long time. Some of it is billions of years old. This post takes a closer look at this and how the bits of you were created, along with how you and your components change during your lifetime. We also look at where your elements were during all that time.

More to come... 

 

Universe

A new section on the universe.

What Does the Universe Smell Like?: Our universe is a smelly place. Here is what outer space, interstellar space, the moon, and the planets smell, taste, and sound like, as well as what color the universe is and what it’s made from. It’s a sensory trip around the cosmos.

More to come...

 

Sumo

Some notes about sumo and why it’s the world’s ultimate sport.

The Warrior Spirit and the Magic of Sumo: Sumo is an amazing sport and one that’s completely misunderstood in America and much of the world. This post provides an overview of the sport, along with my initial impressions of it and why I came to realize that it is the ultimate sport.

Sumo is Not Wrestling: Sumo isn’t wrestling, it’s a martial art. The so-called wrestlers are actually the last of the samurai and they follow completely different traditions from wrestling and other grappling sports, with the differences between them being quite stark, as it originated within the Shinto religion before becoming a form of military combat training, yet sumo operates under a strict set of rules that mirror those of Japanese society. Also while a rikishi’s size is a factor, there are many other factors that determine bouts. There are no weight categories and often the small guys win. We also look at how they dress.

A Brief Note on Sumo Techniques: One fascinating thing about sumo is the huge variety of techniques that they use and how these interact in both offense and defense. The bouts are rapid and short, so there are a lot of things a rikishi has to be aware of and at lightning speed, while trying to do several things at once.

Gentle Warriors: Sumo is an aggressive and dangerous sport, but it’s not about fighting. It’s highly controlled by strict rules. It’s a sport with dignity, modesty, and humility, putting it on a higher plain than any other sport. It is a mirror of Japanese society.

No Celebrating Allowed: Because of sumo’s emphasis on dignity, modesty, and humility, celebrating after a win is considered rude and unseemly, and is therefore not allowed. This is the opposite of most Western sports. This post explains why.

Sumo with Babies: You wouldn’t think sumo and babies go together, but during the Sumo of Tears Festival, they do. Here babies demonstrate their health and fitness through their ability to cry.

More to come... 

 

If you'd like to comment, please email me at John@AWondrousWorld.com.

 

Tastes like Chicken?

Jlhopgood, CC BY-ND 2.0 (adjusted).

Birds evolved from dinosaurs 165 million to 150 million years ago. Of all the birds in the world, the one that shares the most DNA with the ancestor of all birds is…the chicken! This means that the closest living relative of the dinosaurs is the chicken.

But that doesn’t mean Tyrannosaurus rexes tasted like chicken, which is unfortunate since the Kentucky-fried drumstick would have been larger than you are. Taste is determined by other factors, such as what the animal ate and how much fat is in the meat. Those using their muscles slowly for extended periods (like cows and most larger animals) have red meat, while those who used them twitchily for short periods (like cheetahs, chickens and most smaller animals) would have white meat. Contrary to popular opinion, pigs and humans have red meat. But more to the point, predators, and scavengers tend to taste gamey. T. Rex was both, so would have had very strong-tasting red meat. But some smaller vegetarian dinos may have tasted like chicken.

The chicken or the egg?

Also, if anyone asks you which came first, the chicken or the egg, say “the egg”. Eggs have been around for about 600 million years, while chickens have only existed for about 10,000 years. All female vertebrates have eggs. The earliest external eggs with shells evolved in diapsids, an ancestor of reptiles, roughly 350 million years ago. Our synapsid ancestor split off not long before this from the shared ancestor of mammals, reptiles, and birds. All of the subsequent dinosaurs laid eggs, so the egg came before them as well.

Fossilized dinosaur eggs. Gary Todd.

 

Hard-shell eggs are important because it allows reptiles and birds to live completely on land, while the older amphibians are still tied to water for laying their eggs. It’s the same for the few fish that are able to live out of the water, like mudskippers.

Looking at the question from the point of view of an individual chicken, then again that chicken’s egg came first. If you look at it metaphorically, this conundrum is intended to point out the futility of trying to determine the cause of self-perpetuating cycles. It can be puzzling at first, but ultimately fails because the cause can be determined.

If you change the question to, “which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?” then it becomes a bit tricky because you can’t have a chicken egg unless you have a chicken. The problem then becomes was there a first chicken? Animals are constantly evolving, going through intermediate stages before they gain the set of features that taxonomists use to determine whether an animal is a new species.

It’s all a bit messy because taxonomy tries to force animals into artificial categories. Before the chicken, there was a bird classified as something else, and as it evolved into a chicken there would have proto-chickens, or those who were partially ancestor and partially chicken. There isn’t a clean break between the two. You don’t have a situation where the parent is not a chicken, but the offspring are.

But for the sake of argument, let’s just say there was one particular feature that suddenly evolved that made one individual a chicken. Then its egg would have come from a non-chicken, but it’s the egg that the chicken embryo developed in, so which would it be? Either the non-chicken laid a chicken egg or the chicken developed in a non-chicken egg. The answer depends on the features of that particular egg, so we’ll never know. It would have had to have been caused by a single DNA mutation, but evolution usually works gradually over the course of many mutations, so there probably a first chicken.

To explain this in another way, there are salamanders in California that live around most of a lake. They live on the north and south sides and are one continuous community that connects along one side of the lake. Those in the north look different from those in the south and the two won’t breed with each other, but the community breeds all the way along the lake.[1]

Are they two species or one? Or are they in the process of becoming two species? Because of the connection along the side, they’re still considered to be one species, but if that connection is broken, the middle salamanders will become one or the other and there will be two. It’s isolation that usually causes a species to gradually separate into two, but the key is “gradually”. It doesn’t usually happen overnight.

Taxonomy is a very useful tool, but it has its flaws and you can’t fit nature into pigeonholes. The flaws become much more apparent when you look back in time, since lineages of animals blend into one another, which is why looking for “missing links” doesn’t make sense. All animals are links on the way to becoming something else—unless they go extinct. What that something else is will depend on how taxonomists decide to pigeonhole animals in the future.

Getting back to chickens and dinosaurs: While chickens are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives, the few available fossils suggest the earliest birds looked more like a loon, but honked like geese.[2]

And one last thing, there are now 22 billion chickens on the planet, so they outnumber us three to one. On the other hand, people are working hard to eat as many of them as we can.

 

Go to my index of posts to see more. 

If you'd like to comment, please email me at John@AWondrousWorld.com.

---

[1] Robert A. Wallace, Jack L. King, and Gerald P. Sanders, Biology: The Science of Life, Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1981, pp. 388-90.

[2] Jeff Hecht, “Goose-like birds survived the dino wipeout”, New Scientist, no. 3149, October 28, 2017, p. 9, and a longer version as “Geese-like birds seem to have survived the dinosaur extinction”, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151059-geese-like-birds-seem-to-have-survived-the-dinosaur-extinction/, citing Federico L. Agnolín, Federico Brissón Egli, Sankar Chatterjee, Jordi Alexis Garcia Marsà, and Fernando E. Novas, “Vegaviidae, a new clade of southern diving birds that survived the K/T boundary”, The Science of Nature, vol. 104, p. 87, October 7, 2017, https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00114-017-1508-y.

 

You are Older than Dirt

We are stardust

We are golden

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

 —Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock”, which was popularized by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

 

We are actually much older than you think, since every bit of you was made long before you were born. Almost two-thirds of your weight is water and essentially none of it was created during your lifetime. Up to half of the earth’s surface water is older than our sun. Additional water formed in the crust and atmosphere of the early earth, meaning much of the water in you is likely to be two to five billion years old.

That’s at a molecular level. At an atomic level, many of your atoms were created in long-dead stars that could have been up to a thousand times the mass of the sun. While it’s thought the three lightest elements—hydrogen, helium, and about one fifth of today’s lithium, all of which make up 98% of the ordinary matter in the universe—were made in the first three minutes after the Big Bang, elements with 3 through 26 protons—much of the additional lithium through iron—were made inside stars, with the exception of beryllium and boron (elements 4 and 5), which, on Earth, are made in our atmosphere.

Most of these atoms are roughly five to eight billion years old, although some might even date back to around 13.2 billion years—just 550 million years after the Big Bang. These ancient stars exploded as supernovas, scattering dust that drifted for millennia through interstellar space becoming parts of new stars that also ended up going supernova—perhaps repeating this process several times.

Some of it even left our galaxy for long periods in currents known as the circumgalactic medium, travelling out up to four times the width of our galaxy away from the Milky Way, before being pulled back in. Astronomer Jessica Werk, with the University of Washington, who had studied this, noted, “The same carbon in our bodies most likely spent a significant amount of time outside of the galaxy!”[1] This applies to other elements as well, suggesting that most of what we’re made of was once intergalactic. That’s stuff from the Milky Way that left and came back. Researchers estimate that half the stuff in us came from another galaxy, possibly from before our galaxy even existed.[2]

As we eat and breathe, new material enters our body, while some leaves. We’re constantly exchanging bits of us with the universe in a process of renewal. Obviously most of us wasn’t part of us when we were born and a large part of us only became part of us recently, but all of us are made from non-us elements.

When you look at a photograph of yourself when you were young, you know it’s you, but much of what you were made of then has been replaced. You have a sense of continuity, but you’re not the same as you were. You also think and act differently, and many of your interests and preferences have changed as well. If the you of then stood next to the you of now and you talked about your likes and dislikes, people would probably have trouble realizing the two of you are the same person. There are even some minor changes to your DNA.

Supernovas leave behind dead stars called neutron stars. Neutron stars are so compact and dense, that the protons and neutrons form what’s called nuclear pasta, which is a hundred trillion times denser than anything on earth and more than 10 billion times stronger than steel.

It’s now believed that many of the 90-plus heavier elements, which include nickel, copper, zinc, silver, tin, iodine, platinum, gold, mercury, lead, uranium, and plutonium, were formed when two neutron stars crashed together generating temperatures up to 1.4 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (800 billion C), shooting out these higher elements. Some might even come from smashups of a neutron star with a black hole. While you may think these smash-ups are rare, they’re actually thought to be quite common. Scientists estimate that there are actually about 100 million black holes and about a billion neutron stars in our galaxy alone.

(Top) This artist’s impression compares the size of a 12-mile-wide (19 km) neutron star with that of Manhattan. Neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe that we can directly observe. It takes matter equal to half-a-million Earths, compressed down to a sphere a few miles wide to form a neutron star. It’s so dense that on Earth one teaspoonful would weight a billion tons. A neutron star can spin faster than 700 times a second and, compared to the Earth, its magnetic field is a trillion times stronger. Astrophysicists think neutron stars consist of various oddities—such as a neutron superfluid—with a crust of ions and electrons.[3] (Bottom) Formed in a supernova a million years ago, this 17-mile-wide (28 km) neutron star named RX J18563.5-3754 is only about 200 light years away from us and travelling at 4,000 miles (6,500 km) per second. It will reach its closest point to Earth, 170 light years away, about 300,000 years from now. (Top credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Bottom: NASA and F.M. Walter of State University of New York at Stony Brook.)

An alternate idea is that some of the heavier elements came from collapsars. Collapsars are massive rapidly spinning stars that collapse before going supernova. Although rare, these might produce even more heavy elements than a neutron star collusion.[4]

There’s also evidence that up to 10% came from massive ejections of material from magnetars. Magnetars are neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields that are about a thousand times stronger than a normal neutron star. Their flairs could widely distribute these elements, without a collusion. Some magnetars are also pulsars.[5]

A minute amount, relatively speaking, of this dust from supernovas and neutron star collusions coalesced to form our solar system and, eventually, you. As author and astrophysicist Carl Sagan used to say, we are all made of star-stuff.

Moving from the origin of our atoms to the distribution of molecules, there’s an interesting exercise that professors present to their chemistry and physics students. On March 15th back in 44 b.c., Julius Caesar was stabbed to death at the Forum by sixty Roman senators. How likely is it that you have ever breathed in one of the molecules from Caesar’s final breath?

Assuming his dying exhalation was the average volume of a deep breath, which is a liter of air, then we can estimate that it consisted of something like 25 sextillion gas molecules. Making some assumptions about the lifetimes of molecules and how gases mix, we can calculate that on average, one of Caesar’s molecules is in every breath we have ever taken and every breath we will ever take.

There’s also a good chance that some of the water molecules in you right now once passed through a number of dinosaurs...along with many other interesting creatures—before getting into you. In fact, the same applies to all of the elements in your body. They too were once parts of dinosaurs, trilobites, trees, bot fly maggots, fungi, and rocks. The varied elements that came together to make us will eventually be dispersed back into the environment once again where they will become part of something else. In this way, everything on earth is related. Everything is made from the same stuff that’s continually recycled.

While the water in you is ancient, it only recently got into you. It comes from what you eat and drink. Most of it comes from tap water. Even if you don’t drink much water, it comes from the tap water used to make your soda or beer or reconstituted fruit juices. Within minutes of drinking it, water becomes part of your bloodstream, which is also mostly made of tap water (or well water or rain water or mountain-stream water, if that’s what you drink, but remember, filtered water is just tap water unless it comes directly from a well, stream, or rain and into a bottle). Your blood has some cells, salts and organic molecules in it, but it’s mostly water. If you think blood is thicker than water...well, not by much. From your blood, the water is distributed throughout your body, becoming a major part of all your organs.

Water passes through us like a stream. It’s unlikely that any of the molecules of water that are in you now will still be in you in two years’ time.

If all of this isn’t strange enough for you, your head is older than your feet are because of time dilation—a well-proven aspect of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

So on the day you turned 10 years old, next to none of you was actually 10. Most of you was much, much older, while some formations of those elements were much younger.

 

Go to my index of posts to see more. 

If you'd like to comment, please email me at John@AWondrousWorld.com.

---

[1] James Urton, University of Washington press release, “The carbon in our bodies probably left the galaxy and came back on cosmic ‘conveyer belt’ ”, UW News, January 3, 2025, https://www.washington.edu/news/2025/01/03/galaxy-carbon-conveyer-belt/, citing Samantha L. Garza, Jessica K. Werk, Trystyn A. M. Berg, Yakov Faerman, Benjamin D. Oppenheimer, Rongmon Bordoloi, and Sara L. Ellison, “The CIViL* Survey: The Discovery of a C iv Dichotomy in the Circumgalactic Medium of L* Galaxies”, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2024; 978 (1): L12, https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ad9c69.

[2] Ziya Tong, The Reality Bubble, Toronto: Prentice Hall Press, 2019.

[3] Francis Reddy, “NASA’s Swift Reveals New Phenomenon in a Neutron Star”, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, May 29, 2013, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/new-phenom.html.

[4] Caleb A. Scharf, “Moon Blobs, Collapsars, and Long Planets”, Scientific American, May 10, 2019, https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/moon-blobs-collapsars-and-long-planets/.

[5] Tatyana Woodall, Ohio State University press release, “Stellar collapse and explosions distribute gold throughout the universe”, ScienceDaily, May 7, 2025, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/05/250507130338.htm, citing Anirudh Patel, Brian D. Metzger, Jakub Cehula, Eric Burns, Jared A. Goldberg, and Todd A. Thompson, “Direct Evidence for r-process Nucleosynthesis in Delayed MeV Emission from the SGR 1806–20 Magnetar Giant Flare”, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025; 984 (1): L29, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc9b0,
https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/adc9b0.