Night-time view of Tokyo Station from fifth floor urinals in the Shin-Marunouchi Building ©Avery Gilbert
Making a Splash
I have been to Japan many times, and I love it—the people, the culture, the aesthetics, the whole scene. Some ordinary things in Japan strike an American as kooky, and some of the weird stuff there goes to a different level. I think everyone can agree that a crime spree in Sapporo’s Higashi Ward is out of the ordinary. Someone is stealing the grates from urinals—fifteen of them so far. Let’s go to the tape:
I know it’s not an smell story as such, but it has an undeniable para-olfactory aura. What does the thief want with urinal grates? Is he making wind chimes? Tiny hibachis for elves? Is he nailing them to trees as trail markers?
Raising a Stink
My standing web searches for smell dredge up a lot of unsavory news stories. Back in the day, these became material for the wildly popular I Smell Dead People feature on my old Blogger blog. It delved into the fascinating, if somewhat grim, backstories of people who live with the decomposing bodies of family members and/or murder victims.
This story from Nigeria would have been posted on ISDP with a flashing siren:
I Took illicit Drugs Before Making Love With My Girlfriend’s Corpse For Six Days - Suspect Confesses
Neighbors called the cops after smelling a “foul odor” coming from the apartment of Ifeanyi Njoku. Inside it they found the body of Precious Okeke.
Njoku allegedly killed his girlfriend as part of a money ritual. Reports indicate that a local spiritual practitioner instructed Njoku to engage in sexual intercourse with Okeke’s lifeless body.
I have questions.
What on earth is a “money ritual”? Is the “spiritual practitioner” a freelancer or a duly certified shaman from a recognized cult? Mr. Njoku allegedly offered police a bribe of ~$13,000 to make the charges go away. Does that mean the money ritual was partially successful? Inquiring minds want to know.
Tripping Balls in Tunisia
The OR2M3 human odorant receptor is narrowly tuned to detect 3-mercapto-2-methylpentan-1-ol, a key molecule in onion odor. Activation of OR2M3 is potentiated by the presence of copper, due to a copper-binding motif in the receptor. So far, so good.
Now a team of quantum and statistical physicists in Tunisia have modeled this stinky onion molecule and its specialized receptor. But to what end?
The work appears to have been carried out in the lab of Abdelmottaleb Ben Lamine, a physics professor at the University of Monastir. He has published a lot on absorption chemistry, which is fine, but it is odd to conceive of the activation of odor receptors as a process of adsorption. That’s like setting out to model the interaction of your house key and door lock as an absorptive process. I mean, you could do it, but what’s the point?
Maybe I’m missing something. I don’t know anything about the “advanced models developed by a grand canonical formalism of statistical physics” that Ben Lamine’s team uses. In fact, I don’t even know how to parse this sentence of theirs:
For thermodynamic characterization of the olfactory process, the adsorption entropy indicated the disorder of the adsorption systems of 3-mercapto-2-methylbutan-1-ol and 3-mercapto-2-methylpentan-1-ol on the human olfactory receptor OR2M3.
FWIW, Prof. Ben Lamine has previously applied “the grand canonical ensemble in statistical physics” to receptors for sweet taste, to ibuprofen being absorbed by activated carbon, and to lead and cadmium being absorbed by bentonite clay.
[Rod Serling narrator voice]: “Meet Abdelmottaleb Ben Lamine, a physics professor so obsessed with a theory of absorption that he applies it to everything. Until one day, his theory absorbs him entirely into . . . the Twilight Zone.”
Houda Smati, Yosra Ben Torkia, Ismahene Ben Khemis, Fatma Aouaini, Abdelmottaleb Ben Lamine. (2023) Modeling by statistical physics and interpretation of the olfactory process of the two enantiomers 3-mercapto-2-methylbutan-1-ol and 3-mercapto-2-methylpentan-1-ol on the OR2M3 human olfactory receptor. International Journal of Biological Macromolecules. Published online May 31, 2023.