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’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.
There absolutely are petrichor scented things
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?
We evolved in the Savannah.
Rain means the watering holes are filling up, which is obviously good cause we need water, but it also attracts prey animals.You think rain is your ally?
You merely adopted the damp. We Brits were born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see dry sand until I was already a man…
Heh. Molded.
Run! He’s a mossman!
Was that area a desert 250,000 years ago?
The whole continent of Africa (as every other continent) went through several major climate changes, small and big. Pretty sure there were at least five major turnovers from wet to dry climate and back since then, and numerous before.
Fun fact, there are some theories that the Sahara desert was actually caused by over foraging from early goat herding.
So to a degree our ancestors may have already caused some climate change.
Your ape’s first anthropogenic climate disaster.
The North African region was a lush verdant region 11,000 years ago, which is not so long ago considering humans already spread far and wide around that time.
I’m still missing something here. For it to be useful, I’d imagine that it would need to inform decisions, and do so where existing senses would fail.
At least in my environment, if I can smell rain, I could also just as easily use my eyes to see the cumulonimbus clouds and say “rain, due east”.
In the savanna are there scenarios where the only awareness of rain would be smelling it? Can you derive directionality at 5 parts per trillion? Does it matter?
you can smell it coming before you see it imo. that gives you time to get to shelter and to move to where the water/food is
You’d think more African animals (especially predators) would have that ability, then
This, of course, was summarized most eloquently at the zenith of human evoloution: the 1982 hit single by Toto clearly stating, “I bless the rains down in Africa.”
Oh wow all this time I thought they missed the rains of Africa
“I guess the rain is down in Africa” for me.
Water is life.
Shrek is life.
Shark is wife.
Shrimp is rife.
Life is life.
Na, naaa, nanana.
Victory is life
Maybe an evolutionary trait to locate water?
And thirsty herbivores to eat!
Unlikey
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.
At 45 i consider myself to have reached Pro-am status.
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 👀Also lightning
I love the smell of redistributed ood in the morning.
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 fricking love petrichor! Give me that god blood from stone sky daddy!
“better then”
I’d like to see a shark write that more good.
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.
Smell of rain!? What…?
