Showing posts with label soil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soil. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Feb 8 2023 - Smells like Spring

 

It smells like Spring.  We're only at the beginning of February, so this is a fleeting experience.  When we smell soil, what we smell is bacteria.  And more specifically, Geosmin.

Scientific America tells me this:  Two of the chemicals responsible for that earthy perfume are geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol (2-MIB). Geosmin is made by many organisms — including, unsurprisingly, beets — but particularly by bacteria in the genus Streptomyces.  

Author Jennifer Frazer says: "One of the most exciting and unexpected discoveries I made in college occurred the day I opened a Petri dish of soil bacteria. There was no soil in the plate — just opaque patches of bacteria called colonies — but it smelled just like a cave. I had discovered that dirt doesn’t actually smell like dirt. It smells like bacteria."

"Perfumiers have found geosmin an irresistible component of some of their concoctions, either as a purified commercially available product (as a 1% solution) or, as in the case of a more traditional potion, Mitti Attar, by distilling sun-baked earth with sandalwood (it is said to resemble the smell of the first monsoon rain on parched soil).

For example, in the perfume The Smell of Weather Turning by the cosmetics company Lush, “geosmin is supported by oak wood, hay, beeswax, nettle, English peppermint, mint and Roman chamomile”. 

What would you think if this perfume was on the retail shelf?  I would say that is true retail therapy.
 

I found some palm bark close-ups and gave this one a spring makeover.
 
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Sunday, November 7, 2021

Nov 7 2021 - The Earth vs earth or aka The earth's earth

 

It is odd that we use earth as soil and as our place of existence - the planet we live on. It seems strange that we didn't "reserve" the name of our planet.  We did that with the other planets.

My thinking is reversed.  We should look at how things evolved. The name Earth comes from English/German which means the ground.  The Old English words 'eor(th)e and 'earth' or in German 'erde'.

One site says: "Earth has different names in different languages. It’s called ‘terra’ in Portuguese, ‘dünya’ in Turkish and ‘aarde’ in Dutch, just to name a few with their own etymology. However, the common thread in all languages is that they were all derived from the same meaning in their origins, which is ‘ ground’ or ‘soil’."


Sciencefocus says:  The Greeks and Romans named most of the planets in the Solar System after particular gods, and we have kept those names in English. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, all unknown in classical times, were named by the modern astronomers who discovered them, but still after Greek and Roman gods.

So Earth is the one exception. Its name, according to the official gazetteer of planetary discovery, comes from the Indo-European base ‘er’, which produced the Germanic noun ‘ertho’, the modern German ‘erde’, Dutch ‘aarde’, Danish and Swedish ‘jord’, and English ‘earth’.

Livescience says: One interesting fact about its name: Earth is the only planet that wasn't named after a Greek or Roman god or goddess. 

And we don't know who first used the world for the planet.  A mystery.


More Chrysanthemums today.

 

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