The metallic fallout of the first atom bomb. The aroma of clover and oranges. The first aid kit of a medieval plague doctor. What do all of these things have in common? Simple: you may choose to smell all of them at the United Kingdom's University of Sunderland's first World Impossible Smells Exhibition.

The exhibition is a combined effort of perfumers, chemists, botanists and a NASA scientist. Robert Blackman, mastermind of the event, has made sure that a lot of strange and exotic scents will be on hand to show us how the nose knows.

Thanks to James Wong and fellow botanists, visitors can catch a whiff of extinct flowers.  Wong and co. identified extinct flowers that were closely related to flower species that still exist. By combining historical reports of how the extinct flowers smelled with those of the living ones, the botanists then arrived at an educated guess as to what the extinct species smelled like.

The Impossible Smells Exhibition is underway at the Reg Vardy Gallery, University of Sunderland and will run until June 6, 2008. If you're in the mood for sniffing, why not check it out?