Glass Petal Smoke

Interview with scientist Jonas Olofsson, author of  The Forgotten Sense There are many things one can say about The Forgotten Sense: The New...

The orange flavor of Tic Tac Orange Mints unfolds like the experience of eating an orange out of hand. Flavor chemists want you to think of ...

Untitled Image by Joe Brainard (1942-1994) “If I’m as normal as I think I am, we’re all a bunch of weirdos.”—Joe Brainard, artist, poet and ...

The crumb structure in Semolina Spice Cake resembles tiny interlaced flowers. Zoom into the image and see if you can find a few cakey f...

Sniffing out the truth regarding smell loss requires critical thinking. When we skim the surface of a news story we risk i...

Opening a container of asafoetida ( Ferula asafoetida ) will clear out a room. The ground gum oleores...

The proverbial Proustian moment isn’t limited to the nostalgic reveries of a madeleine loving protagonist. Flashes of ...

Edith Frank was my high school chemistry teacher at The Bronx High School of Science . A taskmaster in the classroom with a...

I have a confession to make; I'm related to William "Captain" Kidd by marriage. This fact has been a source of amusement ...

There are regular readers of Glass Petal Smoke and those who discover the blog by algothrimic happenstance. The most interesting email...

As a "nose," I am often asked how one develops a vocabulary of the senses. There isn’t a simple answer to this question as descri...