In the article: “The odours defied the expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable.”
"The odours defied the expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable ... and genuinely denied responsibility since they were working in closed systems. To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile, and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds."
In other words, the smell intensity increases with dilution, _not_ decreases. We must protect this data from the homeopaths.
There's a saying! "Skunks don't have the WORST smell, just the MOST smell"
It's not the worst smell in the world. I would say it's not even remotely as unpleasant as summertime "dumpster soup", sewage, or whatever. But man, skunk smell is just so intense and overwhelming.
I did my coding bootcamp in downtown Chicago, near the Merch Mart, and (at least back in 2013) there was a chocolate factory not too far away. I remember walking to class and being almost overpowered by the smell. For awhile it turned me off of chocolate entirely, and I normally have a pretty strong sweet tooth.
I remember feeling so sorry for the people who had to work there, day after day.
Soup factories are notorious for smells. A single pot of cooking food generally smells good, but layer up a dozen different soup flavors and in total it smells like rot.
As a kid one of the tours we did was a chocolate factory. When the person leading the tour told us the employee told us workers were allowed to take as much chocolate as they wanted we were super jealous.
At the end of the tour, there was a buffet of chocolate snacks nobody wanted to touch (though we were allowed to and did bring bags of products home), the person told us that after a day of working at the factory, most workers have no taste for chocolate snacks whatsoever, and those which do will generally fuck up, binge, get an indigestion, and at best be a lot more reasonable (at worse stop eating chocolate if it was bad enough). Without the allure of the forbidden fruit (sneaking snacks out), chocolate is definitely overpowering enough that it's a turn-off.