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Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology used behavioral experiments to show that desert ants are able to quickly learn many different food odors and remember them for the rest of their lives. However, their memory for nest odors seems to differ from their food odor memory: Whereas food odors are learned and kept after a single contact, ants need several trials to memorize nest odors.
— Read more at Desert ants have an amazing odor memory at Science Daily.
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But a handful of [research groups] are choosing what may at first seem like an unlikely starting point: the sense of smell, or olfaction. Scientists trying to gain a better understanding of how organisms process chemical information have uncovered coding strategies that seem especially relevant to problems in AI. Moreover, olfactory circuits bear striking similarities to more complex brain regions that have been of interest in the quest to build better machines.
— Read more at New AI Strategy Mimics How Brains Learn to Smell at Quanta Magazine.
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If you can tell the difference between a merlot and a cabernet franc just by smell, it’s probably all in the timing.
That’s because the odor-decoding centers of the brain will pay more attention to the first smell signals to reach them, regardless of how long or strong the remainder of the sniff may be, according to a pair of Duke University neurobiologists who have teased apart the neural circuitry of smell in mice.
— Read more at Fine-tuned Sense Of Smell Relies On Timing at Duke Today.
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Using this strategy, the scientists found that odor molecules could similarly be mapped onto a curved surface in three dimensions. But instead of a sphere, like Earth, it turned out to be the shape of a Pringles potato chip -- a shape mathematicians call a hyperboloid.
— It's Science Friday! Read more at What's that smell? Scientists find a new way to understand odors: A mathematical model reveals a map for odors from the natural environment at Science Daily.
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Most of us have heard of visual hallucinations i.e. seeing things that are not actually there. It is relatively lesser known that some people can experience something similar related to their sense of smell.
Smelling something foul (like an ashtray or burning hair) despite no source could mean that a person is affected by something known as phantom odor perception. New findings suggest that nearly 6.5 percent of Americans over the age of 40 have experienced it.
— Read more at What Is Phantom Odor Perception? at Medical Daily.