Scientists name world's whiffiest cheese
...om five places in the smell league. Pungent smelling cheeses are becoming more popular in the UK - Epoisses de Bourgogne (probably the most pungent smelling cheese that is widely available here) is now sold in Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose, but in this st...Scientists find that the human nose is more complicated than a jumbo jet
...olds can give you a blocked up nose that stops you smelling chimney smoke, roasting chestnuts, warming winter puddings and the other seasonal scents. Now researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) have not only discovered how air moves through the nose bringing yo...Sardines may prevent toxic gas eruptions off the California and African coasts
...ious amounts of methane and poisonous "rotten egg" smelling hydrogen sulfide gas. As methane is 21 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, the resulting climate change may intensify this upwelling process and the possibility of even larger and more plentiful eruptions. ...Ophthalmologists and physicists team up to design 'bionic eye'
...The result? They may not have to settle for merely smelling the roses. Complex processing: The eyes have it The eye is a complex machine. It has more than 100 million photoreceptors. "If we compare it to modern digital cameras, for example, it will be 100 megapixels," Palanker said during an interview in th...PNAS highlights for the week of May 9 - 13
...en, and heterosexual men and women, in response to smelling EST, AND, and ordinary odors, such as lavender. The researchers observed that AND activated the hypothalamus in homosexual men and heterosexual women, but not heterosexual men. Conversely, EST activated the hypothalamus in heterosexual men alone. All...Decoding the logic of olfaction
...ciated with a whiff of skunk spray. The process of smelling an odor begins with odorant receptors that are located on the surface of nerve cells inside the nose. When an odorant receptor detects an odor molecule, it triggers a nerve signal that travels to a way station in the brain called the olfactory bulb. ...Researchers discover how bacteria sense their environments
...ells process the message to understand what we are smelling or tasting. But a bacterium is just a single cell, and it must use many different receptors to sense and interpret everything around it. Bacteria can sense in their environments changes in molecular concentrations as small as 0.1 percent, the equiva...Researchers find biological clock for smell in mice
...is have discovered a large biological clock in the smelling center of mice brains and have revealed that the sense of smell for mice is stronger at night, peaking in evening hours and waning during day light hours. A team led by Erik Herzog, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of Biology in Ar...Male sweat boosts women's hormone levels
... "a potential therapeutic mechanism whereby merely smelling synthesized or purified human chemosignals may be used to modify endocrine balance," the authors wrote. Sweat has been the main focus of research on human pheromones, and in fact, male underarm sweat has been shown to improve women's moods and affe......to cultural attractiveness standards; for example, smelling like a strawberry instead of mildew," he says.Next, there are pheromones, which are more mysterious to us humans. "Pheromones are unlearned, and perhaps unsmellable, signals that enter the brain through the olfactory system. They can function in sex...