Wording is funky. To clarify:
The rain smell is due to a compound called geosmin. The bacteria that produces it is Streptomyces.
When I taught microbiology lab, I would grow a petri dish of Streptomyces during one particular class and have the students smell it
You mean… You can … Bottle up petrichore ??? How come is there no wide range of perfume/candle/lotion and whatnot?
Can I make it at home, if so, how would I go about it with everyday items? Can streptomyces cause health issues?
There absolutely are petrichor scented things
There’s like an indian family/company that’s been making some hiqh quality petrichor perfume for idk at least 100 years, probably several hundreds, if not a thousand or more idk.
I forget what it’s called you can probably look it up with perfume pertrichor india
edit it’s called “Mitti Attar”
They might’ve been making it for 10,000 years for all I know. I don’t know shit.
Yup. I have a shaving soap like that called “Summer Storm.”
https://maggardrazors.com/products/chiseled-face-summer-storm-artisan-shaving-soap-4oz
I have some of this. It smells pretty good
I’m nothing close to a chemist but I love watching chemistry videos.
Well the smell of rain is actually petrichor, it just has a combination of geosmin and ozone and other chemicals that make that smell.
Geosmin on its own is just a part of it.
Why would we need such a strong sensitivity to it?
Water is life.
Moisture is the essence of wetness and wetness is the essence of beauty
so hot right now
Shrek is life.
Shark is wife.
Shrimp is rife.
Shrimp-fried rice.
Victory is life
Life is life.
Na, naaa, nanana.
Maybe an evolutionary trait to locate water?
And thirsty herbivores to eat!
Unlikey
It’s worth remembering that evolution doesn’t select for the best as much as it selects against the worst.
The reason we have such sensitivity doesn’t have to be particularly game changing as long as it doesn’t make us less likely to reproduce.
You can plainly see our big niche adaptations being used everyday. We think good. We recognize patterns. We use tools. We walk a lot, efficiently and upright. We communicate with high precision. We have a surprisingly efficient digestive system.
We’re not busting out the ability to smell rain super often, which hints that it might be more in the “doesn’t hurt” category instead of being a big advantage.
My guess is that being able to smell disturbed soil is helpful for tracking, either where an animal has run or where something has been buried. Our ancestors were not above digging up a fresh-ish dead animal a canine had buried for later.
But it could just be that rain sense slightly more accurate than looking towards the horizon was as useful then as it is now: vaguely, I guess? It just doesn’t hurt anything.my theory is natural selection of humans/human ancestor species. The ones who didn’t find shelter in time before a rain were more likely to die.
I think it’s more than those who couldn’t find water died, within 3 days.
Average human male dick length is 2.7cm erect.
Based on my study with a sample size of 1
It’s also an off flavor that tasters train for in beer, from water inclusion. It’s not good for beer but I don’t mind the smell at all
Very beet-flavored to me
Funny you should call it beet-flavor. Geosmin is literally the reason why beets have that flavor :)
Yup! I know, I was an expert taster at a large brewery :)
It was fun! And a little bit ruined some beer for me.
I’m an enthusiastic amateur taster with a terrible palette and I bet it would ruin it for me, too.
Fitting username
At 45 i consider myself to have reached Pro-am status.
“Earthy” if you will.
Wayoooo
You train to taste beer?
Absolutely, if you’re serious about sensory science!
At the large craft brewery I worked in we trained on like… ~40 attributes? Weekly usually, with taste panel and impromptu trainings most every day.
You can study to become a beer judge, even just for fun: https://dev.bjcp.org/education-training/exam-preparation/beer-judge-training-study-program/
One of the parts of that is to get a kit that helps you recognize “off” flavors: https://www.bjcp.org/education-training/education-resources/sensory-kits/
I lost my smell to COVID in that first year, before the vaccine. Recently and for the first time since, I smelled petrichor and I could have cried.
I thought it was ozone.
It is also that.
Petrichor is the smell of rain and is a term like Channelle #5 where it’s a combination of ozone and geosmin and other compounds.
Ozone is the smell of an electrical fire
Or poliester fleece or blanket when you hear little sparks.
Some will remember playing with a CRT TV screen 👀I remember the feeling and the sound, but not scent.
Smells kinda dry and vaguely fishy/metallic. It’s very distinct, you know it when you smell it.
Should be noted however that it’s not very healthy to breathe it in and large and/or repeated exposures can cause respiratory damage. Some static electricity is probably fine but I don’t want to encourage someone to go out there and learn what it smells like first hand
Also lightning
Diff smell.
I call this ‘outside’ smell and you can smell it on a clear day.
There’s also fat volatiles in our skin that metals and sunlight degrade, so that outside smell could be the smell of you in the sun.
There’s a saying, someone smells like sun.
I find I smell it more often this time of year. I guess the heavier and colder air?
Hmm. Seems strangely on point that Ichor is the blood of the (greek) gods. (Petro- means stone, as in Petro-Oleum.)
Fee-fi-fo-fod
I smell the blood of a god
I love the smell of redistributed ood in the morning.
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“better then”
I’d like to see a shark write that more good.
I fricking love petrichor! Give me that god blood from stone sky daddy!
Not funny, but interesting!
Wish we could be sensitive to H2S, would have saved a lot of lives.
EDIT: On second thought, no, fuck around pumping fossil fuels and find out.
Make every fart a million times worse.
Smell of rain!? What…?
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