It's not hard to tell when you've walked into a room, or a house, in which a person is sick with with a flu or a bad cold. There's an immediate smell of stale sweat, cough medicine, and human misery. But can it be done with other diseases? According to doctors, there are some diseases, physical and mental, that can be…

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 …

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?

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.

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…

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.