When David Deamer, now a research professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was grinding up a marble-sized bit of the Murchison meteorite to study, he found that a “strange, penetrating odor rose from the mortar … simultaneously smoky, dusty, and sour,” he writes in his book First Life, Discovering the Connections Between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began. He thought it “reminiscent of a cigar butt or the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag.”

— Read more in Some Space Rocks Are Notorious for Being Stinky at Atlas Obscura. Hat tip to Liza!