Dr Shane Bergin

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581 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 10 Sep

Dr Shane Bergin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Today with David McCullagh · A Beginner’s Guide to Chemicals · 10 Sep 2026 podcast

It's that smell we get from the soil and the rain.

You know that and and humans are able to detect it uh at very small amounts.

And I was out in the field last night and uh just walking along and th it had just rained and you get that beautiful, very distinctive Irish smell of wet and soil.

And uh yeah, it's an it's all from a chemical.

It's caused by a microorganism.

There's also um uh a cap uh capicin, which is the molecule that is associated with uh chili peppers.

It doesn't burn you, but what it does is it tells there's it it gives you a chemical signal to your body to basically say, something hot is coming, prepare yourself.

Yeah, so smell is often a very uh interesting way to perceive these things.

Menthol is the opposite.

So it tells you something cool is coming, which is why when you take something that has menthol in it, like a mint, your mouth can start to feel cold even though there's no temperature change.

As another one, nitroglycerin, right, which we all think about as uh Explosives.

Explosives, yeah, but it's also used in in in medical treatments for treating angina.

Uh there's another smelly one here, dimethyl sulfide or DMS.

It's the smell of the sea and ultimately it comes from marine organisms.

Uh when I think of the smell of the sea though on holidays in West Cork, I just think of rotting seaweed.

Then there are horrible things.

There were chemists down the corridor from me when I was doing my PhD that used to work with thiols, things that contain sulfur.

And oh my god, these people needed to be out in a prefab, far, far away from the rest of them.

Chemical warfare, yeah.

And there's hydrofluoric acid, um, which I think uh um aficionados of breaking bad might be familiar with.

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