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Google has its own perfume—or at least one team of the company’s researchers does. Crafted under the guidance of expert French perfumers, the mixture has notes of vanilla, jasmine, melon, and strawberries. “It wasn’t half bad,” says Alex Wiltschko, who keeps a vial of the perfume in his kitchen.
— Read more in Now the Machines Are Learning How to Smell at Wired.
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The ursine nose is lined with a vast sheet of specialized tissue, called the epithelium, which is embedded with scent-detecting nerves. Like the human epithelium, these cells have the exceptional ability to regenerate themselves (unlike most other nerves). But a bear's epithelium dwarfs our own. "It is much, much larger than a human's," explained Heiko Jansen, a neuroscientist who researches human and animal physiology at Washington State University. "It's several orders of magnitude larger."
— Read more at What would it be like to smell the world like a bear? at Mashable.
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“In the Japanese study, when researchers did not tell participants what the odor was, they rated it as ‘inoffensive,’” Dr. [Johan] Lundstrom says. “But when they said it was from an old person, it was rated as ‘nasty.’”
— Dr. Lundstrom is with the Monell Chemical Research Center. Read more at Do Older People Have a Different Smell? at The New York Times.
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But these supersized snoots are constantly serving up surprises—and a group of researchers has now discovered that they’re discerning enough to distinguish more from less. Their study, published today in the journal PNAS, suggests elephants can use scent alone to differentiate between quantities of sunflower seeds that might flummox even the most hawk-eyed of humans.
— Read more at Elephants Can Use Scent to Distinguish More From Less at NOVA.
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People are born with synesthesia, and when you’re about a year old you lose it. Only five per cent of people walk around as adults with synesthesia. But the neurons you have now are the same ones you were born with. You can wake them up, and that’s what we’re going to try to do today.
— Perfumer Ron Winnegrad, talking to students at a workshop on synesthesia. Read more at Scents and Sensibility at The New Yorker.