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
There absolutely are petrichor scented things
Yup. I have a shaving soap like that called “Summer Storm.”
https://maggardrazors.com/products/chiseled-face-summer-storm-artisan-shaving-soap-4oz
I’ve never smelled the stuff but apparently the smell of rain is something people try to bottle.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/smell-of-rain-kannauj-perfume-mitti-attar-india
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.
Not funny, but interesting!
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.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?
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
Some of those rains went unblessed because someone missed them.
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.
Their spelling was moulded by the US
Run! He’s a mossman!
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.
Life is life.
Na, naaa, nanana.
Maybe an evolutionary trait to locate water?
And thirsty herbivores to eat!
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.
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.
Fitting username
“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 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
I love the smell of redistributed ood in the morning.
I fricking love petrichor! Give me that god blood from stone sky daddy!
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.
