The nature of human imagination, or, Roses IIIINN SPAAAAAAACE

Roses smell different when they're in micro-gravity, and there are already commercial applications.

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The Space Shuttle is currently in orbit, and part of its 16-day science mission is seeing what happens to roses and rice flowers in micro-gravity (via Boing Boing). They're also doing boring stuff about air pollution and prostate cancer.

Specifically, they want to know what happens to the smell of the flowers, and the fascinating thing is this is not the first time they've done this. A perfume company sent some roses into space a few years ago, which produced a new kind of scent that was brought back to Earth, analysed, synthesised and incorporated into, for instance, a variety of Unilever's Impulse body spray. AFAIK, they're not marketing it as space rose smell, they're just looking for new smells, and apparently it's easier to take roses into space and see what happens, than to mess about in the lab trying to make new smells.

Incidentally, when people were lobbying for a space station because that would let us create special materials that could only be manufactured in zero-G, I bet nobody thought one of the first results would be a perfume.

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