Mershin, however, believes that we don’t really have to understand how mammals smell to build an artificial nose. He’s betting that things will work the other way around: To understand the nose, we have to build one first. In his efforts with a brilliant mentor named Shuguang Zhang, Mershin has built a device that can just begin to give dogs—his panting adversaries—a run for their money.

— Andreas Mershin of MIT is trying to build a nose. Read more at The Quest to Make a Bot That Can Smell as Well as a Dog at Wired.

Those who make a habit out of drinking coffee are more sensitive to its odor and are faster to identify its aroma. Additionally, their ability to sniff out the bean also increases the more they crave coffee. This study, its authors write, provides the first evidence that coffee addicts are more sensitive to the smell of coffee than the rest of us.

— Read more at Heavy coffee drinkers can smell its aroma much easier than other people — and it seems tied to craving at ZME Science.

These — and dozens of other differences in scent perception — are detailed in a new study, published this week in the journal PNAS. The work provides new evidence of how extraordinarily different one person’s “smellscape” may be from another’s. It’s not that some people are generally better smellers, like someone else may have better eyesight, it’s that any one person might experience certain scents more intensely than their peers.

— Read more at You Will Never Smell My World the Way I Do at The New York Times.