Mummy Meat

People used to eat mummies.

Last week for the first time, I saw someone else writing about this, but in the spirit of the season, which is Halloween here in the US. Good time for a perennial favorite here at Limbic Signal:

A while back I discovered that people with lots of money and imagination were eating preserved human bodies to get high, about 200 years ago.

I thank Annick Le Guérer for this tidbit, she wrote about it in her book Scent, the Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell, written in 1988, and translated from French in 1994.

There was a time, we must remember, when mummies were a new thing, never before imagined by the Westerners excavating these immortalized bodies. It's hard to conjure the pretense of shock at something that has been around since long before you were born.

For a moment if you will, try to imagine what it would have been like to learn that deep within the awe-striking pyramidal limestone masses were 3,000-year old physically intact human bodies. This at a time before we had refrigerators! We couldn't even keep a bowl of potato salad from going bad in a couple days, and here's an entire human body with its skin still intact, and older than the entire city in which you live.*

That's magic to a person of the 19th century. Today, our tupperware will probably last longer than our species itself, nevermind the bodies we leave behind. We have plastic flowers for goodness sake. But if you can transport yourself back to a time where everything was ephemeral, you can begin to understand the fascination.

And the exoticism. The preserving substances used on mummies were much less known to Europeans hundreds of years ago. Today we can fly from London to Cairo in four hours. Then, it could have taken up to a month. Today we can have in our pantry any spice produced in any place in the world, within a few days. Things were different then. Egypt in itself was pretty exotic, and mummies, forgetaboutit.

So if you can now picture yourself at an all-nighter in a regal estate, well after midnight, deep into the spirits, when your host spreads on the table these tiny morsels of dry-aged royalty from another era, and who might as well be from another planet, and tells you to dig in – you will be intoxicated. The meat doesn’t make you intoxicated, of course; the idea is enough to placebo the heck out of your dopamine receptors.

I get into the details of how smells are so good at tricking us in this older post. But if you're interested in throwing your own mummy-party, these folks from the University of York have decoded the ancient recipe:

Mummy

-a plant oil –  possibly sesame oil;

-a "balsam-type" plant or root extract that may have come from bullrushes;

-a plant-based gum - a natural sugar that may have been extracted from acacia;

-crucially, a conifer tree resin, which was probably pine resin

-source

*Note that this isn't entirely true, for we have known for a long time about preserving things. Many of the same substances used to preserve mummies also preserve our food. Also note, however, that roughly speaking the practice of using spices to preserve food decreases as you move from the equator, with those places tending to use fermentation as a means of preservation instead, which is the opposite of using spices – one keeps microbial activity at bay, and the other uses it on purpose to regulate the rate of decay. Fermenting mummies would not have worked as well. But that’s pretty tangential, and a transparent excuse to say fermented mummies.

** Know that Europeans are not entirely unfamiliar with mummies; they’re called relics, and they’re not nearly as old.

***Finally, preserving the dead is not the most uncommon thing ever; Japan has a long history of it.

Post Script:

Embalming was just one aspect of preservation. Other steps included:

-Removal of the brain - possibly using a "whisking" process to cause the brain to liquefy

-Removal of the internal organs

-Putting the body into a natural salt to dry it out

-Coating the body in the embalming recipe , to kill bacteria and to seal it

-Wrapping the body in linen

Notes:

Ancient Egyptian mummification 'recipe' revealed

Aug 2018, BBC

Mummy-Eaters

Nov 2016, Limbic Signal

Like the Stanley What

Feb 2016, Network Address

I Got Your Back

Apr 2017, Network Address

Sokushinbutsu

Japanese Mummies

Exobiotic Nose Patrol

Smelling your lover's shirt could improve your sleep

Feb 2020, phys.org

"Romantic Partner" they call it.

155 people, sweaty t-shirts, you get the idea.

You don't even have to be there, just your shirt: "effect similar to taking oral melatonin supplements."

-University of British Columbia Department of Psychology

I'm going to chime in here and say this is something to do with security and familiarity. Knowing that another member of your tribe is with you while you sleep makes you less paranoid of the silent creepers waiting to attack you in the dead of night, be they lions, tigers or viruses. And your body knows who is a member of your tribe via both olfaction and your immune system (which are inter-related by their chemosensing inputs).

Your immune system knows who's deep inside your network because their microbes are deep inside your body crawling and growing and metabolizing all over your face, in your nostrils, under your fingernails, and throughout the entire length of your digestive system. Your immune system has one job, and that's to keep the xenobiotics at bay.

Yes, your immune system is hyper xenophobic. As you move through life, you pick up all kinds of microbes from your environment and especially from the people around you. All the while your immune system is working like crazy to detect, attack and remove all those microbiological trespassers.

If you spend enough time with certain people, then your immune system will need a way to identify those people and their biomes so that it doesn't waste time attacking things that aren't actually a threat. It's a probability game -- if you hang out with these people a lot, then they probably aren't a threat, and neither are their microbodies; you'd be better off saving your energy for another time, like when you're at the gym swimming in a sweaty soup of other people's effluence.

Point being, the more immunologically exposed you are to another person, the more your immune system will "know" who they are by the way they smell, and even while you sleep. And when your immune system is relaxed, so are you. (And yes, immunological exposure means exactly what it sounds like.)

Image source: Dartmouth College Electron Microscope Facility

Post Script

The “exposome” revealed - a barrage of bacteria, chemicals, microscopic animals and more

Stanford Medicine, Sep 2018

For two years straight, Michael Snyder, MD, professor and chair of genetics at Stanford, sported a peculiar accessory — a little gray box strapped to his bicep taking sips of air and recording his exposome cloud.

It turns out, at any given time, we are bombarded by a combination of microbes, fungi, chemicals, viruses, particulates and even tiny microscopic animals, a new paper in Cell reported. This whirling plume of particulates is called the human exposome.

The long-term goal, Snyder said, is to simplify the device into something that resembles an exposome-monitoring smart watch that can suck up and analyze the atmosphere on its own.

 

Full Cat Moon Revisited

It's that time of year again where the smell of feral cats marking their territory scents your local neighborhood. Only it's not actually the cats, it's the plants themselves. English boxwood to be specific. At the right time of year (which is now in New Jersey), these popular shrubs are announcing their presence via the sharp smell of a well-used litter box.

The offending molecule, called “cat ketone,” is also a main component in blackcurrant. Pour yourself a dram of blackcurrant desert wine, take a sip, and then smell the inside of the glass. And there you'll have it. Now take a walk around the block (anywhere from August to October), and pay attention. Once you tune in, you'll notice it every time you pass one of these bushes.

Sometimes we actually like bad smells. Rather, we learn to like them. Maybe it has something to do with our ability to control the biosphere so expertly. We have refined the practice of fermentation such that it has become an integral part of our diets. Bread, beer, cheese, kimchi, sauerkraut, chocolate; all these things are fermented. Fermentation is controlled rotting, and it's unnatural. (It's described way better in this book about fermentation that won the James Beard Award in 2013 for Reference and Scholarship.)

Uncontrolled rotting makes bad smells. Controlled rotting still makes bad smells, but less. And we learn how to ... re-evaluate those bad smells in light of their finer attributes. "Parmesan cheese" (isovaleric acid) comes up a lot in regards to this. If you put isovaleric acid in a hundred small bottles and give them to a hundred people, half will call it gross and the other half will love it. I call it quantum hedonics, but you can just call it an acquired taste.

image source - natgeo

Here’s  a picture of a boxwood shrub:

Taking this from an article by Smell-Linguist Asifa Majid:

The Chukchi and Yupik of the Beiring Straits eat fermented fish, reindeer blood, and walrus fat and have even been said to have a preference for partially decomposed food.* This is reflected in vocabulary too: for example, Chukchi veglyt’ul ‘old edible’ versus pegyt’ul ‘old, should not to be eaten’; ... .

*Yamin-Pasternak, S., Kliskey, A., Alessa, L., Pasternak, I., Schweitzer, P. (2014) The rotten renaissance in the Bering Strait: Loving, loathing, and washing the smell of foods with a (re)acquired taste. Current Anthropology 55: 619–646.

In the Soviet era, some indigenous people were no longer exposed to these foods and odors; thereafter when the Soviet Union collapsed, younger people who had to go back to the fermented foods (or starve) had difficulties ingesting these potent odors. This goes to illustrate the importance of early experienced environmental odors.*

*Beauchamp, G. K. (2014) Foul odors of rotted food: Lessons from olfactory physiology. Current Anthropology 55: 634–635.

That all being said, it's not a bad thing that your blackcurrant apertif smells like civet; it's enriching your experience, and that's a good thing, right? Or would you rather not know?

“cat ketone”

4-thio-4-methylpentan-2-one

And here's a similar molecule that you can get as part of the AROXA Beer Taint Kit:

“buchu mercaptan”

p-mentha-8-thiol-3-one

Catty, like blackcurrant juice or tom cat urine, tomato plant

Notice below how this substance is described on the Good Scents Company directory for blackcurrant. They are used by the flavor and fragrance industry, so they are less likely to use the words "cat piss." "Catty" will suffice!

black currant bud absolute

powerful

impactful

green

incense

spicy

woody

herbal

berry

fruity

blackcurrant

blackberry

jammy

currant bud

catty

narcissus

boxtree

sulfur

sulfered family

unusual fruity aroma

Notes

The Art of Fermentation: An in-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

by Sandor Ellix Katz

Winner of the 2013 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship, and a New York Times bestseller, The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut...

-goodreads link

Post Script

Civet is a kind of animal musk taken from a kind of cat/mongoose. It’s used in perfumes because humans like the way it smells. Maybe it reminds us of the “quantum hedonic” natural body odors that we wash off every day. Civetone is the name given to the molecule that most represents the Civet smell.

Post Post Script

National Geographic attracting jaguars using Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men 1986.

The Origin of Artificial Olfaction

Researchers unveil a pruning algorithm to make artificial intelligence applications run

Apr 2020, phys.org

MIT researchers have a new and better way to compress models.

It's so simple that they unveiled it in a tweet last month: Train the model, prune its weakest connections, retrain the model at its fast, early training rate, and repeat, until the model is as tiny as you want.

In other words, in order to make a more efficient artificial brain, you grow it from scratch, like a person. 

This is a welcome development for artificial olfaction enthusiasts, because we won't see fully-functioning synthetic olfactory systems until we can first get a "lifetime" worth of autobiographical data for that system. 

That feeling you get when "the smell of grandma's attic" hits you, it will not work if you didn't have a grandma. The data used by an olfactory system, artificial or otherwise, will come not only from infinite odorous molecules and their physiochemical properties, but also from the limbic system. And not just a limbic system, it has to be one that is preloaded with physiological datapoints as they relate to different combinations of odorous molecules. That requires a lifetime of matching bodily experiences, social experiences, and ultimately autobiographical moments to odors. 

To decode olfaction is not so much a phylogenetic (species) problem as an ontogenetic (individual) problem. There is so much variety in the way we perceive smells, that to use a phylogenetic approach would exclude the majority of what makes smell such a powerful experience. It needs meaning; it is by nature subjective, not objective. In other words, it needs a subject, and in ways that other senses can do without (see object recognition, for example).

Image source: Hiroto Ikeuchi cyberpunk

Notes

Comparing Rewinding and Fine-tuning in Neural Network Pruning, arXiv:2003.02389 [cs.LG] arxiv.org/abs/2003.02389

Post Script

Artificial brains may need sleep too

June 2020, phys.org

"We study spiking neural networks, which are systems that learn much as living brains do," said Los Alamos National Laboratory computer scientist Yijing Watkins. "We were fascinated by the prospect of training a neuromorphic processor in a manner analogous to how humans and other biological systems learn from their environment during childhood development."

Watkins and her research team found that the network simulations became unstable after continuous periods of unsupervised learning. When they exposed the networks to states that are analogous to the waves that living brains experience during sleep, stability was restored. "It was as though we were giving the neural networks the equivalent of a good night's rest," said Watkins.

Threat Detection, the Exposome and Olfactory Awareness

Global pandemics are real good for motivating exposure scientists to identify threats in the environment. Add to that the threat detection capabilities of chemosensation (smelling), and you've got some ingredients for a burgeoning field of study that overlaps with olfaction-inspired technologies.

 

Olfaction is for threat detection perhaps above all things, so it is fitting that we see this application become more common. One common use already being implemented by the company Aclima is the distributed air-quality sensor network for pollutants:

 

Early warning sensor sniffs out cities' harmful gas

May 2020, phys.org

 

The IGZO thin-film transistor acts as both an electronic component of the device and also as the NO2-sensing layer. The strongly electron-accepting NO2 molecule is drawn to the electrons on the transistor's surface. The more NO2 molecules that adhere to the IGZO, the more electrons are depleted from its surface, altering its electronic output and triggering an NO2 detection alert.

 

After a detection event, the sensor is reset by reviving the IGZO layer with the light from an integrated blue LED. Similar to a solar cell, the light generates negatively charged electrons and positively charged holes in the IGZO, which neutralizes the adsorbed NO2 and releases it from the surface. "This is the first study to achieve sensing and revival of a semiconducting metal oxide-based thin-film transistor sensor at room temperature," says Surya.

 

*Nitrous oxides (NO2) are a by-product of burning fuel, just like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and sulfur oxides, and all of these are harmful to human health.

 

And here's another related report:

Aerosol-printed graphene unveiled as low cost, faster food toxin sensor

June 2020, phys.org

 

Researchers in the USA have developed a graphene-based electrochemical sensor capable of detecting histamines (allergens) and toxins in food much faster than standard laboratory tests.

 

The team created high-resolution interdigitated electrodes (IDEs) on flexible substrates, which they converted into histamine sensors by covalently linking monoclonal antibodies to oxygen moieties created on the graphene surface by a CO2 thermal annealing process.

 

As an additive manufacturing method that only deposits material where it is needed and therefore minimizes waste, aerosol-jet-printed sensors are low-cost, straightforward to make, and portable. This could potentially enable their use in places where continuous on-site monitoring of food samples is needed to determine and maintain the quality of products, as well as other applications.

 

-Aerosol-jet-printed graphene electrochemical histamine sensors for food safety monitoring, 2-D Materials, DOI: 10.1088/2053-1583/ab8919

 

And still further sensorific developments:

Paper-based device provides low-power, long-term method for analyzing sweat

June 2020, phys.org

 

Using a process known as capillary action, akin to water transport in plants, the device uses evaporation to wick fluid that mimics the features of human sweat to a sensor for up to 10 days or longer.

 

"We expected that the flow of the model sweat will be suppressed by the deposition of a salt layer inside the drying pad," Velev said. "By following the flow of model sweat, we found, quite surprisingly, that such a simple paper construct can achieve continuous sweat pumping and disposal for very long periods."

 

"The biological markers or drug metabolites that seep in the patient's sweat over a long period will be captured on the paper pad and preserved in a time-stamped manner to be analyzed later, similar to tree rings preserving the record of tree development," Dickey said.

 

-Principles of long-term fluids handling in paper-based wearables with capillary-evaporative transport, Biomicrofluidics (2020). aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0010417

 

Post Script:

The exposome - When our environment drives health and disease

May 2020, phys.org

 

From this press article: The exposome is the sum of all the environmental drivers of health and diseases: a combination of external factors such as chemicals contained in the air, water or food, and of internal components produced by our organism in response to various stress factors.

 

Notes:

Aclima delivers hyperlocal air pollution and climate emissions intelligence at unprecedented block-by-block resolution.

 

 

 

Headline Bingo

Once in a while, I end up with a whole bunch of headlines and not much inspiration. Here’s to clearing out the queue – 

Oldest material on Earth discovered

Jan 2020, BBC News

 

Dust grains within a space rock that crashed on Earth are found to be really old -- older than the Earth itself in fact. But I only came here to post this:

 

In order to analyze the rock, it has to be prepared... "Once all the pieces are segregated, it's a kind of paste, and it has a pungent characteristic – it smells like rotten peanut butter."

 

Asking yourself what rotten peanut butter smells like? Go find a tree-of-heaven, snap off a leaf, and smell it. It has to be a slightly older tree, not one just shooting out of the ground, or it will smell too mild and too much like not-rotten peanut butter.

 

 

Watch that smell! Scents can regulate fat storage

Apr 2020, phys.org

 

Honestly I can't even follow this, but it is a story that features the indispensable C. Elegans.

 

Ayse Sena Mutlu et al, Olfactory specificity regulates lipid metabolism through neuroendocrine signaling in Caenorhabditis elegans, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15296-8

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15296-8

 

 

New sleep method strengthens brain's ability to retain memories

Mar 2020, phys.org

 

"By triggering consolidation processes in only one side of the brain during sleep, we were able to compare the activity between the hemispheres and isolate the specific activity that corresponds to memory reactivation," -Prof. Yuval Nir of TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience

 

While exposed to the scent of a rose, research participants were asked to remember the location of words presented on either the left or right side of a computer screen. Participants were then tested on their memory of the word locations, then proceeded to nap at the lab. As the participants were napping, the scent of roses was administered again, but this time to only one nostril.

 

With this "one-sided" odor delivery, the researchers were able to reactivate and boost specific memories that were stored in a specific brain hemisphere.

 

"Our findings emphasize that the memory consolidation process can be amplified by external cues such as scents," she concludes. "By using the special organization of the olfactory pathways, memories can be manipulated in a local manner on one side of the brain. Our finding demonstrates that memory consolidation likely involves a nocturnal 'dialogue' between the hippocampus and specific regions in the cerebral cortex." -Ella Bar, Ph.D. student at TAU and the Weizmann Institute of Science

 

Local Targeted Memory Reactivation in Human Sleep, Current Biology (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.091

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.091

 

 

Study shows major gender differences in the human social brain

Mar 2020, phys.org

 

I bring this one up because it’s a general fact that women “smell better” than men, meaning they have a better sense of smell. Personally I think it’s because women tend to be better at communication and language, and smell has such a poor affinity for language. If women can use language better, then it will seem like they’re better at identifying and detecting smells, when really they’re just better at talking about something that most people never talk about in the first place.

 

The Data:

·      U.K. Biobank database, background data and MRI scans of the brains of 10,129 male and female participants.

·      36 parts of the brain involved in processing social cues and behavior.

·      Lifestyle factors such as how many people were in a household, whether a person was married, how much they enjoyed their relationships and degree of social support.

 

The Results:

·      Neuroanatomical associations in the amygdala that were predominant in socially stimulated women, but barely present in most of the males.

·      Differences in volume of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex of men who lived alone versus those who were socially stimulated—variations not generally seen in the brains of the women under study.

 

Hannah Kiesow et al. 10,000 social brains: Sex differentiation in human brain anatomy, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz1170

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz1170

 

 

Smelling a rat - How rodents sniff out fake beggars

Mar 2020, phys.org

 

·      Lead author is Karin Schneeberger of the University of Potsdam in Germany.

·      They took rats that were either hungry from fasting overnight, or well-fed, and placed them in a room separate from the "focal" rat whose generosity they wanted to test.

·      Air from the rooms of the hungry or well-fed rats was pumped into the chamber of the focal rat.

·      They found that the focal rats were much quicker to provide help -- by pulling a food tray within reaching distance of another rat -- when the air was pumped from a hungry rat's room.

·      The authors then analyzed the air around the rats and found seven different organic compounds that differed significantly in their abundance between hungry and satiated rats.

·      These might result from recently ingested food sources, the metabolic processes involved in digestion, or possibly even a pheromone that indicates hunger.

·      Taken together, these signals form a "smell of hunger" for rats that serves as a reliable cue of need, said Schneeberger.

 

Schneeberger K, Röder G, Taborsky M (2020) The smell of hunger: Norway rats provision social partners based on odour cues of need. PLoS Biol 18(3): e3000628. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000628

 

 

Sweat sensor detects stress levels; May find use in space exploration

Mar 2020, phys.og

 

It detects cortisol in sweat. Another similar device measures uric acid in the blood.

 

Rebeca M. Torrente-Rodríguez et al, Investigation of Cortisol Dynamics in Human Sweat Using a Graphene-Based Wireless mHealth System, Matter (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2020.01.021

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2020.01.021

 

 

Scientists discover a new class of taste receptors

Apr 2020, phys.org

 

Our bodies, all bodies will be perpetually a source of wonder. Here we see how receptors meant for detecting light are used also to detect very small amounts of a bitter-tasting chemical: Much like rhodopsins turned on by very dim light, the chemically-activated opsins then initiated a molecular cascade that amplified the small signals. This enabled the flies to detect concentrations of the compound that would otherwise be insufficient to trigger a response in their sensory neurons.

 

Could you imagine if every pore on your body was an eyeball? Because it kind of already is.

 

Nicole Y. Leung et al, Functions of Opsins in Drosophila Taste, Current Biology (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.068

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.068