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 […]
Tag: odour
Leveraging City Smells (for marketing purposes)
Do you associate the city of Parma (Italy) with scent of violets, or Bufallo (US) with the aroma of Cheerios™, or the city of York (UK) with the smell of horse hair & hoof oil? According to a new paper in the journal marketing theory some people do, and this has helped to inspire marketing […]
Dangerous smells (boxing study)
“Sixteen healthy male participants donated their body odor while engaging in a boxing session […]” An unusual occurrence perhaps, but less so if you were organising an experiment to investigate whether the body odor of a stranger with the intention to harm serves as a chemosignal of aggression. see: ‘You Smell Dangerous: Communicating Fight Responses […]
The Smell of Jazz
Would you say that Jazz music tends to go with the smell of coffee? How about Blues with leather, or Bach with peppermint? Rather than, say, fish*? If so, you’re very much attuned with the findings of a new study published in CogSci 2015 Proceedings, entitled ‘The Smell of Jazz: Crossmodal Correspondences Between Music, Odor, […]
Human-Milk-Smell Perfume, for the Benefit of Babies
What might be done to encourage babies to accept products which don’t naturally smell of human milk? “[…] babies prefer the odor attributes of human milk compared to those of artificial infant formula or milk products based on milk compositions of animal origin such as cow’s milk etc.” The Fraunhofer Society (owner, amongst much more, […]
The smell of macaroni [part 3]
“While vision did play an important role in the understanding of both the macaroni as a phenomenon and the pleasure garden as a space, to focus on vision, to the exclusion of other senses and embodiment, is to miss an important means of understanding both macaronis and pleasure gardens. We must understand the pleasure gardens […]
The smell of macaroni [part 2]
Q. How do Macaroni penguins smell? A. Pretty bad. For example, Lindeboom [1984] estimated that 220 kg NH3-N was volatilized daily from a rookery on Subantarctic Marion Island occupied by 350000 macaroni penguins, and reported that the odor was apparent up to 10 km from the source. More details can be found here. Previous article: […]
The smell of macaroni [part 1: snakes]
Q. Are garter snakes attracted to the smell of macaroni? A. Probably not, in general – though things can change dramatically if it’s coated in frog skin mucus. The picture shows a checkered garter snake (Thamnophis marcianus) enthusiastically attacking a macarono which has a light coating of frog skin mucus sauce. See:Identification and Characterization of […]
Computational gastronomy – part 2 – ‘Active Odor Cancellation’
The Varshney twins – Dr. Kush Varshney (currently at IBM) and Professor Lav Varshney (previously at IBM) – have authored a series of papers on the theme of computational gastronomy, one of which, on Food Steganography, we looked at recently. Example 2. Active Odor Cancellation. (IEEE International Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing, Gold Coast, Australia, June-July 2014.) […]
VR – Mysteries of the scent projector (part 2)
We recently profiled the work of the Yanagida Laboratory of Meijo university, Nagoya, Japan, where work is underway on a vortex ring scent projector to deliver accurately timed odours to participants in a virtual reality (VR) environment. But the projector (one of which is picture at right) had a drawback : “One of the problems is […]