Odor Camouflage

random perusals of the internet reveal:

Stench can also be used by the military as a decoy. For example, during America’s Civil War the union army used the odor of burning wood and the sound of banging in wooden barrels on the banks of the Tennessee River to convince the Confederate army that boat building was going on. So the Confederate army turned its attention to that area of the river, and the Union army crossed at another.

-source

in other news:

Iran has developed a “Deceit Perfume” that masks the odor of gunpowder with weather-related scents.

The Smells of Expansion and Contraction

wrinkled tesseracts

In the contemporary parlance of computer security, this is called a "zero day exploit": Olfaction is the back door to our un-thinking mind, and big business knows this.

Smells can represent spatiality to us, and unconsciously direct our decision-making. This can be used to the advantage of 'retail sales' by using clever olfactory design of sales spaces to "trick" our emotionally-reined limbic system.

Using a scent reminiscent of enclosed spaces, like the smell of firewood, and a scent evoking open spaces, like the seashore, scientists found benefit in augmenting retail spaces with their complementary smells.

American Journal of Business via phys.org

It is interesting to think that space itself can be distinguished by its smell, but on second thought, of course it can. Half of smell is place. That is to say, the hippocampus, or "place" part of the brain, plays a critical role in smell/memory.

Closed spaces and open spaces both affect us psychologically, and the co-located smells of those places would do so as well.

White Smell Machine

[compulsory image]

Another piece of news sitting in my to-post box for way too long:

Brothers Lav Varshney with the University of Illinois, and Kush Varshney, with IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center have taken the idea of White Smell further by creating a mathematical model that could be used to create a working 'olfactory white machine' which by using an olfactory ananlog to White Noise could render a smell unsmellable.

Their white smell machine could be used to improve indoor air quality, or by the food industry to cancel bad smells.