Humans are not the only animals that (in many cases) are attracted by the smell of coffee. This study focuses on ants’ attraction to coffee smells: “Olfactory behavior and response of household ants (Hymenoptera) to different types of coffee odor: A coffee-based bait development prospect,” Abdul Hafiz Ab Majid, Hamady Dieng, Siti Salbiah Ellias, Faezah […]
Tag: odor
He smells
One of NASA’s best noses got a good writeup in 2003, in an official bulletin called “NASA’s Nose: Avoiding smelly situations in space“: Thanks to George Aldrich and his team of NASA sniffers, astronauts can breathe a little bit easier. Aldrich is a chemical specialist or “chief sniffer” at the White Sands Test Facility’s Molecular Desorption […]
The dismaying danger of buying perfume as a gift
Craig Roberts, at the University of Stirling, warns you, based on his research, that there are “more reason to choose fragrances carefully“: there is no one-scent-fits-all effect here. Different fragrances suit different people. In a study with my Czech colleague [Ig Nobel Prize winner] Jan Havlíček, we found that some people get this spectacularly wrong. While […]
Identifying one’s pet(s) by how they smell
It’s (more or less) a given that dogs can reliably identify individual humans by their smell. But what about the other way around? To find out, Dr Deborah Wells and Professor Peter Hepper of the Canine Behaviour Centre, School of Psychology, at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, conducted a set of experiments. A 1m square blue […]