Good morning and welcome to Kid News. I'm Kim. Today is Wednesday, November 13th, 2024.

And we begin with thousands of Australians lining up to smell something truly terrible.

It's the aptly nicknamed corpse flower. More formally known as a morphophilus titanium, a plant that

sometimes only blooms once in a decade, and when it does releases a stink

so bad it's been described as dead possum, rotting flesh, and a moldy bath mat.

The flower and its gag-inducing phenomenon only lasts a day or two.

So when the bud popped at the Geelong Botanic Gardens near Melbourne on Monday, crowds turned out in force.

By early this morning, the bloom had closed, which means the weight begins all over again.

The plant is native to Indonesia and is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Botanic gardens around the world, like the one in Australia, grow them

to help boost their population. One in Los Angeles, California, has named its stinky guest,

Darth Vapor. No sharp sense of smell needed to get a whiff of the corpse flower. Most people

can smell it from a half mile away. But search and rescue

requires an extra good sniffer, which is where Bo the Bloodhound comes in. The 18-month-old

North Carolina police pooch has just been named the nation's hero dog for 2024. Alongside

his handler, Bo has helped find lost kids and missing grandparents near their home base in the town of Gastonia.

Bo's scent-tracking superpower is the number of olfactory cells in his nose.

Bloodhounds have 230 million, while humans have only 5 million.

Those cells can help them pick up a smell more than 300 hours old and follow it for

hundreds of miles. And their long, distinct ears aren't just for show. They actually help funnel

scent particles to their nose. Bo will be celebrated at the 14th annual American Humane Hero

Dog Awards in Palm Beach, Florida on January 8th, alongside four other exceptional canines.

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