Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about why researchers have broken down the smell of old books.

New research that shows why your brain has a kind of spider sense, and a theory

that human life originally came from outer space.

Let's just have some curiosity.

There's nothing like that musty smell of an old book, And today I've got some exciting news.

Researchers have broken down the smell of old books. And the authors of this new extensive study

also have an argument for the importance of documenting and preserving

smells. I love the smell of an old book. Yeah and we've talked about this before on

the full-length curiosity podcast when we interviewed experts from the Newberry

library. Right, I will put a link to that in today's show note. podcast when we interviewed experts from the Newberry Library.

Right, I will put a link to that in today's show notes.

But back to today's study.

As reported by how stuff works, researchers at University College London

noticed that people visiting at least one local library

would make a lot of comments about the way the place smelled. Some said it felt like

they could smell history. Ours can in fact make us feel emotions, especially when they're related to memories.

So the researchers argue that, hey, smells are part of our cultural heritage.

That gives them historical value, and that means they should be identified,

analyzed, and archived. To figure out how to do this, researchers started by asking

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