Letter from Albert Einstein to J.E. Switzer, April 23, 1953:

Dear Sir

Development of Western Science is based on two great achievements; the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationship by systematic experiment (Renaissance). In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

Sincerely yours,

A. Einstein

The “Lo Shu square” is the 3 × 3 square enclosed in dashed lines at the center of the diagram above. It’s “magic”: Each row, column, and long diagonal (marked in red) sums to 15. William Walkington has discovered a new magic property — imagine rolling the square into a tube (in either direction), and then bending the tube into a torus. And now imagine hopping from cell to cell around the torus with a “knight’s move” — two cells over and one up. (The extended diagram above helps with visualizing this — follow the blue lines.) It turns out that each such path touches three cells, and these cells always sum to 15. So the square is even more magic than we thought.

More info here. (Thanks, William.)

English chemist Septimus Piesse likened scents to music:

Odors seem to affect the olfactory nerves in certain definite degrees, as sounds act on the auditory nerves. There is, so to speak, an octave of smells, as there is an octave of tones; some perfumes accord, like the notes of an instrument. Thus almond, vanilla, heliotrope, and clematis, harmonize perfectly, each of them producing almost the same impression in a different degree. On the other hand, we have citron, lemon, orange peel, and verbena, forming a similarly associated octave of odors, in a higher key. The analogy is completed by those odors which we call half-scents, such as the rose, with rose-geranium for its semitone; ‘petit-grain’ and neroli, followed by orange-flower. With the aid of flowers already known, by mixing them in fixed proportions, we can obtain the perfume of almost all flowers.

Using an “odaphone,” or scale, on which harmonies and discords of odors might be studied, his London perfumery Piesse and Lubin produced some of the most important scents of the Victorian era, such as Ambergris (1873), Hungary Water (1873), Kiss Me Quick (1873), The Flower of the Day (1875), White Rose (1875), and Frangipanni (1880).

It had been thought that none of these had survived, but in 2011 two unopened bottles were discovered in the bow of the Mary Celestia, a Civil War blockade runner that had foundered off Bermuda in 1864. The bottles contained Bouquet Opoponax, one of the company’s most popular fragrances, and after analysis with a gas chromatograph, Germany’s Drom Fragrances managed to reproduce the scent in 2014.

“I was shocked at how fresh and floral it was and by the amount of citrus in it,” senior perfumer Jean-Claude Delville told the Star-Ledger. “When the fragrance has been sitting at the bottom of the ocean and aging for so many years you expect something that is oxidized or damaged,” he told CTVNews. “But my first impression was ‘wow’.”