The Odor Threshold Bench

Two live pieces here. The first turns the paper's own reported odor detection thresholds into a dial you can push yourself: put a droplet of a real embalming compound into a container of a size you choose, and see whether a trained nose would find it. The second is a plain data explorer — click through all nine mummified bodies exactly as the paper tabulates them.

Model 1. How much air hides a droplet

The paper reports odor detection thresholds (ODTs) for exactly two compounds: γ-decalactone, at 0.005 to 0.01 parts per million, and γ-octalactone, at 0.01 to 0.02 ppm — the pair uniquely detected in body M9, giving it its distinctive sweet, fruity note. Choose a compound, set a droplet size and a container volume, and the bench computes the resulting concentration and checks it against the published threshold band. Everything below this point is the club's own arithmetic; the two threshold ranges are the only numbers taken directly from the paper.

Model 2. All nine bodies, as tabulated

Click a body to see exactly what the paper reports for it: where it is kept, its archaeological period where one is given, its conservation condition score on the paper's own 0-to-8 scale, and which of the four volatile-compound categories from the field note apply to bodies kept in that location.

Categories 2 (museum pest oil) and 3 (synthetic pesticide) are reported only for the four gallery bodies. Category 1 (resin and its degradation products) is universal. Category 4 (microbial volatiles) is reported for the collection generally rather than broken down body by body, so it is shown for every card as a plausible background presence, not a confirmed per-body detection.