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Do you find yourself completely lost whenever your friends go off on long-winded descriptions of a wine's aroma and bouquet? Well there may be hope for you yet, you uncultured brute. A new animal study — wherein researchers trained rats to distinguish between three very similar, albeit different, smells — suggests that with training, your sense of smell can actually improve on a neurological level. Here's how it works. More »
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The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second. The speed of sound is 761.2 miles per hour. That takes care of vision and hearing, but what about our other senses? Shouldn't there be a speed of smell? More »
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Relative to pretty much any other mammal, humans have an absolutely atrocious sense of smell. But even our weakest sense is powerful enough to affect how we think...starting, of course, with how attractive other people look. More »
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For over a century, our sense of smell has been explained with the "lock and key" hypothesis, which holds that each odor molecule has a particular shape that allows it to fit into particular smell receptors in the nose. But now a controversial study involving fruit flies suggests that hypothesis might miss the truth entirely - the secret, they say, is all in the vibrations. More »
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Popular wisdom holds that good smells are in the nose of the sniffer. You like the scent of roses; I like fresh coffee. But a scientific study using a robotic "eNose" proves that pleasant smells are universal - and predictable. More »
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This handheld device, which looks sort of like an old-fashioned iron, is one of the most sophisticated artificial noses ever created. It's used in industrial settings where you need to "smell" chemical leaks or toxins to know when they've happened. The best part? This nose, called the ScenTrak, uses a smear of specially-treated human DNA to sense multiple odors. Once the DNA slide is exposed to the air, the machine looks at how the molecules have changed and can determine what the nose has been smelling. We've got images of the DNA slides and a cool patent diagram below. More »
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