Thankfully, there are people who have dedicated their lives to collecting.

Well, just about everything.

My work.

I really tried to reproduce smell scenarios for different purposes.

Beat ST Be the neighborhood in the city.

I've done thousands of smell all over the world.

Could be on behalf of a small molecule.

Find out something about history that we otherwise would know.

This is, Cecil told us.

She is many things an artist, a scientist, but more importantly, a smell expert.

She, however, prefers another title.

I'm commerce, a professional in between her, which means what exactly?

There's a whole world to smell and the whole world to educate how to smell so you cannot just limit yourself to one discipline, right?

The point is, she has dedicated her life to the sense of smell, what it means and how it can be used to better understand the world and each other.

Pretty early in my life, I started ask questions.

Why are we only understanding the world on behalf of how the world looked like?

What if we start to use the other senses more appropriate for the same purpose off.

I went starting to discover the same world I've been looking at for several years, using the nose for the purpose.

So how exactly did you go about recording and then reproducing these smells?

I will walk around, identify smells with my own nose.

I have small devices that enable me to collect the small molecules emitted from the source.

With the result, I go to my lab and then the data I get.

That is then the starting point off reproduction off the actual smell.

E have a lab consisting of up to 4000 chemical compound and with those ingredients is with those compounds.

Literally reproduce invisible reality that surround you full time all the time.

Name a city, a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a historical building or even an era in time.

And most likely, sizzle has reproduced that smell, along with thousands of other sense here in her lab, with the hopes of using the findings for a bigger purpose.

The purpose can be tolerance.

Education, navigation.

To memorize the list is endless is more interesting if you really start to understand the smells and see how you can use that information for a purpose.

Beyond the smell, it's off.

It can be beetles that come off a cactus.

It could be the dried urine of a cow.

Little insects that grow on an oak tree, a chunk of lead that soaked in vinegar.

It's truly amazing.

Wearing a Harvard University outside the Forbes pigment collection, pigment is a very small particle of colored material that is mixed in with a binding medium.

Pigment gives paint its color.

The force pigment collection is being brought together over several decades.

Way have around 2500 pigments.

We have a lot of very unusual and very rare colors, So this is, I think, one of them or unusually name pigments.

It's called Dragon's Blood.

Um, it doesn't come from dragons that comes from written palms, and it gives a very bright red pigment.

The unusual aspect of Mummy has to do with its source rather than the color itself, and that comes from Egyptian mummies.

And it's the resin that's applied to the outside of the bandages.

I think the rarest color that we have is actually a an entire ball of Indian yellow and this is a pigment that is made from the dried urine of cows that have fed only on mango leaves.

If you're looking at a work of art and you want to understand what is original on, what's the restoration, you will take a tiny sample of pigment and analyze it.

A lot of the pigments are actually toxic.

You don't wanna handle the pigments and then go out to lunch.

There's a green called emerald green that has an arsenic Santa to it.

We can use them for telling if something is real or not.

People will say this is by a certain artists and we can look at the materials that he used and decide if those materials were available during the artist's lifetime.

If not, then we have to look at who might have painted that picture.

I can't pick a personal favorite there.

It's like asking to pick a favorite child.

No, the other 2400 would feel left out.

We have sound speed rolling credit card.

Okay, Roll picture, thanks to Sony is National Museum of Natural History has over 144 million objects like this normal tusk.

My name is Kirk Johnson.

I'm in charge of all of them.

99% of the collections that behind the scenes And these are the people that work with them.

This is Carla Dove from the Division of Birds.

Here in the division of Birds, we have somewhere around 620,000 museum specimens thing that represents about 85% of the diversity of birds in the world.

You look at these specimens and you realize that this is where the science is really going to start.

We're using our collections to identify birds that collide with airplanes and help us improve aviation safety.

Dr.

Bob Robbins, curator of butterflies and moths.

I have been professionally employed as a lepidoptera work some butterflies for about 35 years.

This is the essence of my being is to know everything about butterflies.

There's a whole world out there that unless you look very closely, you don't see and it's an interesting world.

It's a fascinating world, and it is full of practical value for human beings.

This is Ellen strong curator of molluscs.

What I love about this collection is its breath.

We estimate that we may have many as 20 million specimens.

We are preserving a record of past life on this planet of present life on this planet and preserving that for the future.

I take that responsibility very seriously and providing access and caring for the specimens for posterity.

Dr.

Jeff Post, cured of the National gem and Mineral Collection minerals in this collection go from something that formed maybe in the last few tens of years to others that form more than three billion years ago.

Way No.

Right now they're more than 5000 minerals that make up the Earth.

And in our collection, we probably have more than half of those each one little piece of the puzzle.

And you try to put all these things together and hopefully eventually understand the big picture of how the Earth works.

And Floyd Shockley, collection manager for Entomology.

We have just a little over 35 million specimens in the collection.

A third of all insect life on Earth is represented by at least one specimen art collection.

When you look at a collection the size of ours, you're starting to get to a point where you can ask really big questions.

The questions related to global climate change habitat destruction, and you can Onley answer those big questions.

If you have a lot of specimens collected over a long period of time, a lot of different species toe understand the earth and living things on the earth.

You need to collect those things and preserve them and study them.

And that helps you when you need food when you have a disease.

All that stuff arcs back the fact that we have samples of the whole planet here, and that's how we understand the planet.

The Harvard Brain Bank is one of the largest brain banks in the country.

At the moment.

We house person Italy, 5000 brain specimens.

My name is having a Beretta.

I am the scientific director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, which we affectionately called Harvard Brain Bank.

Our mission is to collect brain specimens, stored them, characterize them and then redistribute them out to investigators across the world.

The do research on the human brain and in particular on large number of neurological and psychiatric brain disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Parkinson, Huntington and many others.

The brain bank never sleeps.

We have two sets of people that are on call 24 7.

We have a very limited time window from when the person passes away to the time we need to be done with this all processing.

So this is gonna be your first brain late at night way have to do it in less than 24 hours.

Our career.

We'll bring it to McLean Hospital, tow the brain bank.

So just put it out here.

So we're gonna take ourselves.

It will be a dissection is ready to dissect the brain that involves separating the two hemispheres.

One of the two hemispheres is put in a solution that preserves it.

The other hemisphere will be dissected in thick sections and those will be frozen.

We're not even close to understand a lot of what we take for granted.

Our thoughts, our instance, our feelings, our emotions.

They have a lot of questions we still don't know.

A lot of our brain functions still will probably be studied for a long time to come.

A brain donation is, in a very complete way, a gift of knowledge, and it cannot be done without the help of families and people willing to donate their brain in Spring green, Wisconsin.

There is a house on a rock, but it is so much more than that.

Inside it is home to many bizarre and incredible collections.

There's a room of self playing instruments, a nen finicky room, a giant squid attacking a whale and some nightmare inducing dolls.

It seems like a really strange museum, and that's because, no, um, it appears to be museum because it is housing antiques.

It's housing all kinds of memorabilia and things from a different era.

It's more of a place to just enjoy.

So what is House on the Rock?

The house on the Rock, to me is a magical complex.

It's an all around century explosion.

It was made by Alex Jordan, who was an architect.

Not at all, not at all.

He is not a trained man.

He's just a man of great vision.

Maybe not an architect, but an evident hoarder.

Alex Jordan, with the help of his friends, built the house on the rock in the forties and opened it to the public in the sixties.

His collections of antiques and junk, new items and old riel and quite obviously fake have no central theme or apparent reason for being there.

And maybe that's part of its charm.

There are some pretty incredible things, including a huge unreadable carousel, 269 different animals.

Not one of them is a horse.

Really?

Yes, the horses adorn the walls.

Of course they dio, you know every time you turn the corner here, it's a different thing and it's a different wow, and you don't know what to expect.

One man's trash is another man's roadside tourist attraction, E.