Green Eggs & Science

Did you know that the eggs of the African Clawed Frog have exemplary ability to express olfactory receptors?

Nobuo Misawaa, Hidefumi Mitsunob, Ryohei Kanzakic, and Shoji Takeuchi did. That’s why the University of Tokyo research team employed the eggs in creating their novel new robotic nose.
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Olfactory Mathematics

The lack of adequate equipment to study the motion of the planets in the 16th Century did not prevent Nicolaus Copernicus from accurately demonstrating that the sun was not, in fact, at the center of the cosmos. Through mathematics, the brilliant astronomer was able to disprove the convoluted logic of his contemporaries by mapping the trajectories of the planets correctly if and only if the sun - not the earth - was placed at the center.
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When we Smell, we Feel

“Mama’s perfume…is a scent that is softly shocking and deeply moving. A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet, and something else - something spicy, almost biting and exotic. Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only know the smell made me cry.”
-Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Sidda Walker was not experiencing a breakdown when she burst into tears on the streets of New York, she was merely reacting normally to a phenomenon the Whiff Guys have dubbed endorphin branding™. Read more

Scents and the City

From Mystery Methane Scents to Decidedly Good Scents to Inexplicable Maple Syrup Scents to city cops with Absolutely No Scents, New York City has provided a wealth of olfactory fodder for the Whiff-Guys over the years. And, as it turns out, we’re by no means the only entity to stick our noses into the diverse aromas of this diverse city.
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More on Scent and Emotional Bonding

New research at Edinburgh University may offer valuable clues about the role of scent in the way humans create emotional connections with one another, and also shed light on the causes of autism and anxiety disorders.
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Smell + Sound = SMOUND

Like so many discoveries, the possible link between our senses of smell and sound came to Dr. Daniel Wesson purely by accident.
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You May Unring the Bell but You Can’t Unsniff the Smell

You may occasionally forget a face, or a favorite old tune, but - whether or not you are consciously aware of it - you will almost certainly never forget a smell. It’s a phenomenon the Whiff-Guys have dubbed Endorphin Branding™.
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Big Nose = Big Heart?

Inspired by the works of such authors as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus, Rice University sociochemist Denise Chen decided to investigate the link between scent and emotion for herself. “The olfactory brain overlaps with the emotional brain, and is believed to have contributed to its evolution,” says Chen. “They share close functional and anatomical connections.”
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The War of the Noses

Those two separate nostrils aren’t just there so your nose can keep up aesthetically with your eyes and ears. According to a study from Rice University, the dual olfactory orifices–like most things–thrive on competition. When exposed separately to different odors, the nostrils do not smell a blend but rather an alternating sample of each individual aroma.

This “nostril rivalry,” as dubbed by the study published in Current Biology, is similar to what happens when the eyes are presented with different images, or the ears with different tones.
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How DO You Smell?

We live in an extremely smelly world. Even with our relatively unimpressive olfactory equipment, the human animal is capable of detecting around 10,000 distinct odors. And it goes without saying that we don’t encounter these odors one at a time, as we might in a controlled laboratory experiment. In the real world, we move through constantly shifting and drifting plumes of odor molecules in ever-varying sequences and combinations. How, then, can we–and our fellow creatures–detect and encode this ever-present, ever-changing information in such seemingly impossible quantities?
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