smell

“On Earth we have lots of different smells, like washing machine laundry or fresh air. But in space there’s just one smell, and we get used to it quickly,” explains Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut, who spent eight days on the Soviet space station Mir in 1991.

But that spacewalk can introduce something novel to the space station - the metallic “space smell”.

“Radiation forms free radicals on the surface, and they react with oxygen inside the space station, creating a metallic smell,” she says.

What do you eat - and, importantly, what is the “space smell”?

One of the problems with devices designed to make people essentially invisible to sharks is that eyesight isn’t the only tool they use to detect prey: They also use their sense of smell and their ability to detect vibrations in the water.