Fuel, rotten meat & other ugly smells: what causes it?

[Daub Marley]

Sam also makes some very good points lostatsea. The terpenes in cannabis are what gives each strain their unique medicinal properties. It's imperative that science pushes forward to better understand these effects so that future use is more beneficial, practical, and widely accepted.
P.S what are biowaves?

 

[G.O. Joe]

No one who knows anything is doing headspace volatile analysis and publishing a list like:
xxx = fuel
yyy = rks
zzz = that thing in that one clone
It isn't done. Anyone in the perfume business knows individual components have a complex role in the odor of the whole. The people doing headspace analysis are using many plants from seed, instead of whatever clones you're interested in. I don't like the off smells at all and don't understand why someone would want to smell like a skunk from 30 feet away because they have a couple grams of RKS in a baggie in their pocket. It's the hip thing though and it's all new and evolving.

Strong penetrating odors resulting from selection and cloning may have higher volatility than monoterpenes and be barely present in the essential oils and perhaps even the headspace, or be something with a stronger odor per ppm than terpenes. These rare odors aren't going to really be showing up in analyses of anything else. The headspace volatiles are different than the essential oil though, in all cases. Only Hood in 1973 recorded the volatiles with less than five carbons - one of them was isobutyraldehyde, which would be expected to disappear with drying through either volatility or chemical reactivity, for which reason it's not something you want on your skin. Hendriks did say in 1978 that methyl salicylate was found in plants from birdseed.

 

[Ninja Mechanics]

Very nice post GO Joe!

Williams Wonder... the rotten meat legend... can't get enough of that aroma... its so off putting yet, so addicting to my senses... I wouldn't mind knowing a lot more about its terpene profile!

 

[Only Ornamental]

...Borane...

Are you trying to kill us all? ROFLMAO!
Seriously, organoboranes don't (or as good as) exist in nature and the synthesised ones are usually highly toxic.

P.S what are biowaves?

Although being a scientific I have also a soft spot for things not explainable by science (commonly known as esoteric)... I think I'm an agnostic . I respect alternative visions but I think that neo-esoteric and pseudo-science should be prohibited. There's absolutely no point in trying to explain science with esoteric and esoteric with science; it doesn't work. There are no DNA waves and no information in photons but there could be other 'waves' or 'energies' (in a non-physical sense) like 'biowaves' (or auras or the 'waves' a dowser senses etc.) . Maybe one day we find what it is or prove that it actually isn't (I suppose science will never be able to explain everything), until then shall we not mix up natural science and mysticism/hermeticism. They were and always will be two different things forming a whole known as truth, reality, universe...

 

[mofeta]

I always thought that valuable information could be gained using GCO (gas chromotography olfactometry). I made a thread about it a couple years ago, but nobody was interested. Here is a link to it.

Gas Chromatography-Olfactometry-- Anyone tried this?

I am going to try this out this fall. If it is interesting, I'll report back.

 

[Only Ornamental]

I always thought that valuable information could be gained using GCO (gas chromotography olfactometry). I made a thread about it a couple years ago, but nobody was interested. Here is a link to it.

Gas Chromatography-Olfactometry-- Anyone tried this?

I am going to try this out this fall. If it is interesting, I'll report back.

We had a GC-sniff in our lab... nobody used it...
But it's a valid tool in the perfume industries. The thing it that you're not (or not principally) interested in the structure but the scent. Chivaudan recreated several scents from what they learned by GC-sniff; the product may or may not contain the same chemical constituents as the original. No one cares because it's not about copying the chemistry but copying scent via replacing the 'scented peaks' with smells you know and have stored in your library.

Good luck with your work and keep us posted!!

 

[Ninja Mechanics]

Well said Only Ornamental.

 

[mofeta]

The thing is that you're not (or not principally) interested in the structure but the scent.

Yeah what I am interested is both scent and structure.

Scentwise, I would like to take whatever variety it is that I want to investigate, in this context lets say it's called Carrion Kush.

Say CK had a penetrating odor of week-old badger carcass laying in the Arizona sun, belching out foul amines. You could load it up in the GCO, and see if that stench was a single component or not.

With regards to structure, you could also look at a normal chromatogram from a sample that was as close as possible to the one you are sniffing, while you are sniffing it. I always wished I could say "that peak smells like this". Maybe sometimes something that looked like the same compound on two different chromatograms would smell different. I would also expect to say occasionally, "I smell a faint smell that is not reflected in this chromatogram, I marvel at the awesome power of my nose! I wonder what the compound I'm smelling is?"

 

[Daub Marley]

Are you trying to kill us all? ROFLMAO!
Seriously, organoboranes don't (or as good as) exist in nature and the synthesised ones are usually highly toxic.

Lol I know I know! I wasn't suggesting a borane substitution just making a point about the similarities in vibrational frequency, but I guess I'm kind of beating a dead horse at this point.

I respect alternative visions but I think that neo-esoteric and pseudo-science should be prohibited. There's absolutely no point in trying to explain science with esoteric and esoteric with science; it doesn't work.

Yeah that's what I expected it was. I like to keep an open mind as well, but that is something that should not be proposed as a valid scientific phenomenon lostatsea, in sea or whatever. You neg repped me because I went against your hippie values in the George Soros thread and then you post this? Your not helping anything just making yourself look more like a loony hippie.

 

[Only Ornamental]

Dam, mofeta, did you really need to cite a typo?

But I'm all your opinion, though I'm more wondering how the different compounds might taste...
A GCO is nothing more than a GC, you could simply branch a FID or an MS to it and run the sample a second time. Although, the runs are often longer with 'olfactory novices' so that your nose can follow. A problem with GC is that many compounds degrade and don't give a precise structure without a reference.

 

[wordtree]

what of:
flavonoids and flavanoids (ketones and non-ketones)-- these polyphenols are unexplored.

butyrates (esteric)

trace amounts of indoles modifying the detection of the terpenophilic mixture

effect of bacterial action upon essential oils, salts and plant fibers (this is not an inert planet)

 

[wordtree]

also in-situ aldehyde oxidation factors in aroma as well.

 

[Only Ornamental]

Flavonoids don't smell and burn to ashes when smoked...
Butyrate esters and related esters have already been mentioned earlier ...
Indoles? LDS is a psychoactive drug, not a perfume !
Bacteria in the essential oil, hope not! On an annual healthy plant also not likely but they might contribute during the curing process.

 

[wordtree]

non-glucoside flavonoids are actually aromatic.

 

[wordtree]

indoles are also aromatic compounds that exist in nature. jasmine and cloves come to mind (most white flowers contain these for pollination purposes)

 

[wordtree]

I mean to say with bacterial action such as occurs during growing and curing (all air contains aerobic bacteria, thus I said earlier it's important to recall we don't live on an inert planet)

 

[mofeta]

Indoles? LDS is a psychoactive drug, not a perfume !

No, LDS is a religion. (ha!)

Seriously, though, anyone who has handled some of the interesting mind-manifesting molecules (Indoles, monoamines etc.) out there can attest to their distinctive odors and tastes. I think he was referring to the indoles commonly thought of as odor compounds. Skatole anyone?

I have always felt that there is a strong resonant interaction between olfaction, mood and cognition. Isn't smell the most basic, primitive sense? If you had to say what type of sensual experience the amoeba has, wouldn't smell be the best fit? The actual smeller in the nose is basically a projection of the limbic system into your face, so it is no wonder that it is so powerful.

I don't think that it is just coincidence that smelly things like terpenes can modulate receptors that are intrinsic mood and cognition. Someone mentioned how cadaverine and putrescine etc could be found in coffee, and that that they contributed to the delicious aroma of said. I have always thought that these compounds were also responsible for some of the psychoactivity of coffee too. A coffee buzz is different from tea is different from technical caffeine. Decaf coffee gives me a buzz that I have always attributed to these tasty but grossly named amines. Some migrainuers reactions to coffee might speak to a action at 5HT receptors getting their monoamines mixed up, not the caffeine.

I have seen that many mundane spices that people eat every day in small quantities can have surprisingly powerful psychoactive properties if you eat a few grams of them. To the point of being able to call them drugs, imo. It is usually the smelly stuff in them that are the principles. There is an obscure spice from eastern Europe that has traditionally been considered to be a drug. When I tried it, I felt a dissassociative feeling and thought "Ooo, look out! Feels like an NMDA antagonist!" A few years later I'm perusing an odd corner of the interwebs and found a nugget that identified the active as a metabatropic glutamate antagonist.

 

[Only Ornamental]

non-glucoside flavonoids are actually aromatic.

indoles are also aromatic compounds that exist in nature. jasmine and cloves come to mind (most white flowers contain these for pollination purposes)

The aromatic you're speaking of refers to chemistry (think of benzene, a six membered unsaturated ring); the term 'aromatic' used as synonym for scent, aroma, smell etc. has nothing to do with that.

 

[mofeta]

cloves

The odor compounds here make for a powerful anesthetic, psychoactive in its own right, and are the precursors to very powerful drugs, illustrating my previous point.

 

[mofeta]

Dam, mofeta, did you really need to cite a typo?

What typo? I don't see any typo.