this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Wait, is that true? Is someone able to smell ants?
There are lots of weird genetic traits. Sneezing triggered by sunlight is another funny one.
Veritasium video on that one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e69XZJ9DEj0
I got the "cilantro tastes like soap" gene personally. Would much rather have gotten the, "Always remember where I left my car keys" gene, or maybe the, "Come up with witty retorts on the spot instead of two hours later in the shower" one.
At least you don't have my "sky-high cholesterol no matter what you eat" gene.
Also artificial sweeteners have an unpleasant chemical aftertaste that lingers for a long time. Apparently that's generic too...
TIL about the artificial sweetener thing, this explains a lot. I have never been able to understand people enjoying diet soda.
Dude, same, and this is the first time I've heard of it. I thought the Diet Dr. Pepper commercials were just being cheeky when trying to compare it to dessert.
have you tried ants?
My grandfather had low cholesterol no matter what. It was always perfect. This man ate more bacon and had more buttermilk and cornbread than anyone I've ever met in my life.
I have to watch mine pretty closely. Well, I should, but I'll just die horribly and early I guess. The alcohol will get me first anyway.
Hah, my grandfather had heart problems and very high cholesterol so we gave him such a hard time for eating unhealthy food. But now I have been a vegetarian for almost twenty years (I try to avoid eggs and dairy too) and my cholesterol is just as high as his was, unless I take medications. So we should have just let him eat whatever he wanted to...
I love cilantro, but I got the celery tastes bitter and spicy gene. So many people tell me it's tasteless but it has a strong, terrible taste to me.
Bitter and spicy kinda sounds like an allergy my dude
Celery tastes like that too me as well, but no allergy. I can eat it with no negative effects, other than the fact that I've had to taste celery.
Celery man. Everyone tells me it has no taste, but to me it tastes like an entire lawn's worth of grass clippings compressed into a stick. Extremely pungent.
Same with cucumbers. They taste awfully strong and bitter to me.
Look up the "TAS2R bitter taste receptor gene family". It's a fun little group of genes that control how well bitterness is detected.
I am a moderate bitter taster. So I do not like celery (mildly unpleasant flavor) and prefer cucumbers that contain the recessive bi gene that stops the production of cucubitacin in the plant. The ones that contain the bt gene, the skin gets too bitter for me. This gene mostly stops the cucubitacin production in the fruit but not the plant.
Yeah I really don't like celery. Cucumbers are pretty good if they're peeled, but yeah they have a very strong taste to me, and the peel is very bitter
Just to signal boost the other guy that sounds a lot like a food allergy friend
Cilantro tasted like soap to me until my wife described it as lemony, and it suddenly tasted different and now I like cilantro. Senses are weird
Cognitive Modulation of Olfactory Processing: Neuron
If I eat cilantro by itself and focus on the idea of it tasting like soap, I can kinds taste it. It still tastes good to me, just with a hint of soapiness. It's not enough to ruin it for me, and I have to be looking for it.
I have that! Sneezed twice today because of bright sunlight. It can sometimes also be triggered voluntarily by looking at a bright light. You can't trigger it multiple times in a row though. I suspect this is because sinuses need to recover from the shock of the sneeze.
I can sneeze several times in a row if a light is bright enough. I've even triggered it just thinking of the sun, a few times.
Yep same here! It's nice when you feel a sneeze coming on and then it stops, you can kinda force it to happen!
Wait that's a genetic quirk? I do that shit all the time with "the sneeze that won't sneeze"
Still can't believe that some people are unable to smell rain coming in the summer!
I honestly love that smell. It's relaxing.
wait, not everyone gets that?
I have a slightly different version of this. I get sneezing fits when too full. It's genetic and happens to most people on one side of my family. Thanksgiving is always fun.
I have sunlight-sneezing, my thoughts are spoken word, I can read in dreams, the dress is gold, and I alway hear "laurel."
What others are there?
I sneeze from sunlight, luckily it's only the first time for the day or very bright light.
I have the sunlight sneeze. I would much rather be able to smell ants.
This feels like a shitty superpower what-if.
Maybe not genetically, but fun fact about sneezing-quirks: There exists "Sneezing induced by sexual ideation or orgasm. Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2084455232396039941&hl=de&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1716906331494&u=%23p%3D-Y8j_fJVLLsJ
That'd be me. Nobody else I know does it, either. I try to explain it and they're like "yeah, I try to look up at a light to help sneeze" and that's just not it.
Smell is how ants communicate with one another so maybe these ant sniffers will be the first humans who can speak ant.
Ants part of a super-organism often compared to a computer, so probably these people are sniffing their information packets.
https://academic.oup.com/ae/article/61/2/85/1756864
https://www.livescience.com/why-ants-smell-weird
Specifically, the house ~~hippo~~ ant.
*The actual factual paper was actually literally published in 2015, no cap.
So American house ants, rotten coconuts and blue cheese all smell the same. Life is weird.
Uh oh. They smell like blue cheese? That means they smell delicious!
Thats what i was thinking, i love bluecheese!
cant say for ant. but i can smell cockroaches
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfasMe who spent months taking Tupperware boxes full of cockroaches out of the freezer and separating them by hand because our ants were picky eaters: I still smell them, to this day.
Thanks ants. Thants.
I have questions.
just bio major things
The smell like pepper to me. Well, you know how when you crush bricks or rocks it kinda has a peppery smell? It’s that pepper scent.
what bricks are you crushing mon
maybe it's smell of dust, like what you can smell on dusty unpaved road in summer
Nah it’s specifically when they’re crushed. Not gravel smells, that smells different. You never crushed a rock or a brick?
I have, many times, and I don't think I would describe the smell as "pepper." It is sharp though.
100%
I can smell them to the point I know when an area has an abundance of ant hills.