One time-consuming way to make instant coffee from coffee—in a factory—involves removing most of the coffee aroma, then later adding it back to the coffee, so that later still—when someone makes the instant coffee in preparation for serving it to someone who will, still later still, drink it, it smells like coffee. A new study […]
Tag: smell
“Humans smell in stereo” [new study]
Can we smell in ‘stereo’? Recent experiments performed at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing suggest that, to some extent, in some circumstances, the answer could be ‘yes’ – and, moreover, this stereo sense may be a navigational aid. The research team write that : “The human nose, the most protruding part of […]
Podcast Episode #206: “Flatulence in Dogs”
Flatulence in Dogs, the Real-Life Wizard of Oz, Triskadekaphobia When People Buy a House, Boys Will Be Boys, Why Your Doctor Should Smell, Soft is Hard, You Bastard, and Personal Space at the Beach. In episode #206, Marc Abrahams shows some unfamiliar research studies to Nicole Sharp, Robin Abrahams, Melissa Franklin, Chris Cotsapas, Jean Berko […]
Smell and Laugh, Tickled Rats
This study tells of a new (and perhaps the first) advance in the effort to explore the relationship between rats and laughter and odor: “Odour Conditioning of Positive Affective States: Rats Can Learn to Associate an Odour with Being Tickled,” Vincent Bombail, Nathalie Jerôme, Ho Lam, Sacha Muszlak, Simone L. Meddle, Alistair B. Lawrence, and […]
Prize-winning underwear that traps bad smells
A quick video visit with the winner of the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize for biology:
Smell-and-Hair and Sounds-and-Cheese Experiments
Smells have effects on hair follicles and sounds have effects on the taste of cheese, sometimes, suggest two recent—but not necessarily related studies. The sound-and-hair study is described in LiveScience (thanks to Francesca Bewer for bringing this to our attention): Like your nose, your hair can detect odors. In a new study, researchers found that […]
Wine expert expertise news (2 items)
Two recent bits of news, unrelated to each other, about people who celebratedly taste wine: 1. The 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded to Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall, for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence […]
Did You Smell the Coffee? [In the Footsteps of the Invisible Gorilla]
Charles Spence (Ig Nobel Prize winner for the electronically-modified-sound-of-a-potato-chip experiment) and a colleague have a new study that explores an unexplored aspect—smell—of what’s known as “inattentional blindness.’ Inattentional blindness became widely noticed because of the “invisible gorilla experiment” that won an Ig Nobel Prize for Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. The new study asks, in essence, […]
Some Kinds of Coffee Are More Fragrantly Attractive to Ants
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 […]
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 […]