Scientists were stunned on May 30 when a rock that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove over cracked open to reveal something never seen before on the Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals. Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur and forms as water evaporates. But where past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals -- in other words, a mix of sulfur and other materials -- the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made of elemental (pure) sulfur. It isn't clear what relationship, if any, the elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area.
While people associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs (the result of hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It forms in only a narrow range of conditions that scientists haven't associated with the history of this location. And Curiosity found a lot of it -- an entire field of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed. "Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert," said Curiosity's project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It shouldn't be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting."
It’s too late and I’m too many beers in to look this up, but I’d bet my next beer on the word pair ‘white people’ being considerably more prevalent than ‘while people’, especially around here. So you’re not necessarily in need of coffee, your brain is just doing its job—matching patterns and saving you fractions of a calorie to not have to actually pay attention to the letters.
As a white person currently drinking beer I agree with this.
But the real question is do you, as a white person, associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs?
I don't. I associate sulphur with natural gas or untasty drinking water.