“We felt the need to keep these olfactory memories,” says Rabeau. Along with chemist Geraldine Savary from the University of Havre, he and Apalategui spent eight years developing a technique to reproduce human scent. The process remains a closely guarded secret, but in a 2015 interview, Savary gave a few clues: “we take the person’s clothing and extract the odour—which represents about a hundred molecules—and we reconstruct it in the form of a perfume in four days.”

— Read more at Immortalizing Human Scents as Memory Perfumes at Atlas Obscura.

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new "smell virtual landscape" that enables the study of how smells engage the brain's navigation system. The work demonstrates, for the first time, that the mammalian brain can form a map of its surroundings based solely on smells.

— Read more at Brain can navigate based solely on smells at Science Daily.

"The Semaq Beri, like the Jahai, use abstract color words, but they also have abstract smell words they use for different qualities of smells," [Linguist Asifa Majid] says. For instance, the Jahai word Cηεs describes the seemingly dissimilar smell of petrol, smoke, bat poop, root of wild ginger and wood of wild mango. To the Jahai, all these scents have this quality of Cηεs.

— Another take on that hunter-gatherer study I mentioned the other day. Read more at That Smells Like ... Um, I Can't Think Of A Word For It! at NPR.

With funding from Parkinson’s UK and the Michael J. Fox Foundation, Barran’s team has already collected more than 800 samples of sebum, an oily substance secreted by skin, swabbed from the backs of volunteers. In preliminary tests they’ve found several molecules that are elevated in people with Parkinson’s disease. Together, the molecules could create a diagnostic fingerprint for the disease.

— Joy Milne thought her husband smelled different, starting about six years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Scientists are paying attention; read more at You Can Smell When Someone's Sick—Here's How at National Geographic.

What do we talk about when we talk about smell? Mostly other things. English speakers frequently describe a scent according to what it reminds us of, not using a specific name for the odor itself. [...]

But because a thing might hold true for Westerners or English speakers does not mean it is universal to the human experience. [Linguists Nicole Kruspe and Asifa Majid] are studying hunter-gatherer cultures in Asia, where people take a very different approach to odors. In 2014, Majid discovered that people who speak the Jahai language named odors as easily as English speakers identify colors.

— Read more at These hunter-gatherers are probably better at naming scents than you at The Washington Post.