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But Donut, she says, likely has another trick up her furry leg that we humans don't use to tell time (or at least we don't realize we use): "That's olfaction," [Alexandra] Horowitz says. "Dogs are living in basically an olfactory world, and I think they are able to track time with smells."
— Read more in Can dogs smell time? Just ask Donut the dog at NPR.
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Recently, Debajit Saha, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan State University, and his team tapped into the odor-sensing circuitry of the locust brain to detect the scent signatures of human oral cancers. Saha previously used locusts for sniffing out bombs, making the transition to cancer detection an interesting one.
— Read more in Scents and Sense-Abilities: Using Bug Brainpower to Smell Cancer at TheScientist.
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Past research has shown that animals and insects navigate their way to these targets by sensing the intensity of odors and tracking back in the opposite direction of the wind.
However, following wind alone can lead them astray, for the same reason that smoke emanating from a chimney disperses and its trail does not always lead directly back to its source. A team of Yale scientists, led by Thierry Emonet and Damon Clark, wondered whether flies had a different trick between their two antennae: could they detect the motion of odor packets, independent of the wind?
— Read more in Flies smell the motion of odors and use it to navigate, Yale study finds at YaleNews.
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So adapted are dogs to smelling the outside world that they have little ability to smell food in their mouths. When humans chew food, we force gases escaping from the food up into our nasal cavity via passageways in the back of the throat. This process, called retronasal olfaction, partially reverses the flow of air in the nose, which normally comes in through the nostrils. [...] But the internal anatomy of a dog’s head allows little of this backward airflow. Dogs mostly lack the combined feeling of smell and taste that makes up flavor. As a result, they care little about the flavor of their food once it is in their mouths. Detecting the smells of edible things before opening their mouths is enough for them to take a bite.
— Read more in Do Dogs “See” Smells? at Psychology Today.
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A new study by researchers from Queens University, Belfast, and Newcastle University in the U.K. has investigated whether dogs can in fact smell when a person experiences stress. Given the excellent sense of smell that dogs have, and the fact that they have lived in association with humans for thousands of years, the researchers wondered whether dogs are able to perceive the chemical signals associated with stress in their owners.
— Read more in Stress has an odor, and dogs can smell it on us at Earth.com.