People with sharper senses of smell really have a nose for relating to others' emotions, new research suggests.
— Read all about it at Better Smellers are More Sympathetic, Study Says at National Geographic. Many thanks to Sarah for the link!
A bouquet of buttery and fruity fragrances
They showed that the bubbles carry aromas up to the surface and leave them hovering above the sparkling liquid in a fine mist.
As a result, when you lower your head to take a sip, your nose is met by a bouquet of buttery and fruity fragrances that defines the drink.
— From French scientists explain how champagne bubbles improve the flavour at the UK Times Online.
During prolonged stress
“Specifically it greatly reduces the structural changes that occur in the hippocampus [a part of the brain associated with memory and spatial orientation] during prolonged stress thus maintaining normal memory function,” he explained.
— Dr Nickolas Lavidis of Queensland University, Australia, explains how his product, SerenaScent (which apparently smells like freshly cut grass), works. You can read more at Stress relieving scent has ‘enormous’ potential for fragrances and cosmetics at Cosmetics Design, or check out the SerenaScent website, where a 50 ml spray is $7.90 AUD.
One after the other
In the lab, researchers exposed each nostril of study participants to a different smell at the same time. Instead of the brain interpreting the two smells as a mixture of scents, participants reported perceiving the smells one after the other, "as if the nostrils were competing with each other," Denise Chen, of Rice University in Houston, said in a news release from Cell Press, which is publishing the study online Aug. 20 in Current Biology.
— From Nostrils Compete to Relay Key Fragrance at US News.
Smell of death
An electronic nose that can detect the "smell of death," helping searchers recover bodies from disaster areas and aiding crime scene investigators to determine the exact time of death, is one step closer to wafting from the pages of science-fiction into real life.
— From Scientists on scent of death-detecting electronic nose at Canada.com.