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
Why would we need such a strong sensitivity to it?
Water is life.
Victory is life
Shrek is life.
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.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!
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.
You’d think more African animals (especially predators) would have that ability, then
Average human male dick length is 2.7cm erect.
Based on my study with a sample size of 1
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 love the smell of redistributed ood in the morning.
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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
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Smell of rain!? What…?
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.
