Compared to other senses, our sense of smell is often overlooked. Our noses can alert us to risks such as rotten food, gas leaks and burning toast. But for advanced tasks such as detecting bombs or contraband, or diseases ...
Biotechnology
Dec 15, 2022
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33
Recreating long-faded smells from history to evoke the past is a new way to experience culture in museums and tours.
Archaeology
Nov 8, 2022
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1
Most languages lack a specialized vocabulary to describe smell experiences. People instead use words from other domains, such as "heavy", "good", or "fruity", when talking about smells. But which words are really used and ...
Other
Nov 7, 2022
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1
Jeholornis was a raven-sized bird that lived 120 million years ago, among the earliest examples of dinosaurs evolving into birds, in what's now China. The fossils that have been found are finely preserved but smashed flat, ...
Evolution
Oct 24, 2022
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243
Fruit flies—Drosophila melanogaster—have a complicated relationship with carbon dioxide. In some contexts, CO2 indicates the presence of tasty food sources as sugar-fermenting yeast in fruit produces the molecule as a ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 8, 2022
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64
When female mosquitoes are looking for a human to bite, they smell a unique cocktail of body odors that we emit into the air. These odors then stimulate receptors in the mosquitoes' antenna. Scientists have tried deleting ...
Cell & Microbiology
Aug 18, 2022
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53
The immune system is under the constant challenge of specifically detecting dangerous microbes to remove them. Dr. Andrea Puhar and her team at The Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS) at Umeå University, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Aug 11, 2022
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35
Soil-dwelling nematodes depend on their sophisticated sense of smell for survival, able to distinguish between more than a thousand different scents—but the molecular mechanism behind their olfaction has baffled scientists ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 3, 2022
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300
A study published in the journal Cell on June 30 shows that when humans and mice are infected with dengue or Zika viruses, they secrete a chemical that may make them more attractive to mosquitoes, the vector that transmits ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 30, 2022
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1
Animals—both herbivores and predators—follow their noses for a broad range of food sources. The principle applies to hunters trying to ferret out easy prey or grazers searching for the richest plants.
Plants & Animals
Jun 21, 2022
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