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, […]
Tag: smell
Chemistry perfume PR innovation: In the future, “better” means “more”
Under a new interpretation — call it, perhaps, “The Belfast Interpretation” — more means better. To see how this works, read a publicity release issued by Queen’s University Belfast with the headline “Queen’s scientists develop first perfume which smells better the more you sweat“: Researchers in the Queen’s University Ionic Liquid Laboratories (QUILL) Research Centre have developed a […]
Estimating intranasal volume – the easy way
One way to measure a human subject’s intranasal volume is to perform a structural whole-brain T1-weighted MRI scan, and then use computerised volumetric image analysis software on the resulting data. But is there an easier way? Yes, there is, according to a group of researchers from the Taste and Smell Clinic, University Hospital Carl Gustav […]
Smelling bodies at the office (corporeal porosity)
As Dr. David Abram wrote in his 1996 book ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ : “[…] the boundaries of a living body are open and indeterminate: more like membranes than barriers … so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends.” Such indeterminacies […]
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 […]
Boar Taint Smells Different to Different People, Probably
What smells like boar taint to you might not smell like boar taint to other people, suggests this study: “How olfactory acuity affects the sensory assessment of boar fat: A proposal for quantification,” Johanna Trautmann, Jan Gertheiss, Michael Wicke, Daniel Mörlein [pictured here], Meat Science, Volume 98, Issue 2, October 2014, Pages 255–262. The authors, […]
Old books up your nose [2]
Are E-book enthusiasts missing out on the olfactory aspects of reading a good-smelling book? The technical aspects of volatile degradation products emitted by books has been examined before, see: Improbable Research, Old books up your nose [1], but a later paper in the Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management (Vol 7, 2011) goes on to examine […]
Mirror Sniffing – contagious?
If you watch a movie which shows actors engaging in acts of sniffing, are you likely to sniff along with them? The Olfactory Research Group, of the Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel have investigated the possibilities, and name such behaviour ‘Mirror Sniffing’. [That’s in the sense of a mirrored or copied […]