Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

I'm Ashley Hamer.

And I'm Natalia Reagan.

Today you learn about why your dog might be lying about its size and how physicists just achieved room

temperature superconductivity for the first time. But first, food science expert

Harold McGee is back to talk about the smells that existed before Earth did.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

Did smells exist before noses did?

It's kind of a tricky question.

Sort of like, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, doesn't make a sound.

But it's a question that today's guest researched for his latest book.

And it turns out that the answer is fascinating.

Harold McGee is a leading expert on the science of food and cooking who recently turned his

sights on smells with a new book, Nosedive, a Field Guide to the World Smells.

And I asked him to tell me what he learned about Smells

that existed before the Earth was born.

I began to wonder, you know, when smells are in different things on the planet, you know, and plants and animals and that kind of thing, I began to wonder what they were doing there, but then I began to wonder, well, if a person with a nose was around

from the very beginning of the universe, when would the universe begin to have smells?

And I figured that the answer would be, well, when planets form and living things begin to emit smells. But no, it turns out that radio astronomers have been able to detect about 200 different molecules in outer space,

by the way that they either emit or absorb radiation from the stars around them.

And it turns out that many of the molecules

that we're familiar with as smells here on Earth

...