by Sarah C. P. Williams You might not be able to pick your fingerprint out of an inky lineup, but your brain knows what you smell like. For the first time, scientists have shown that people recognize their own scent based on their particular combination of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins, molecules similar to those used by animals to choose their mates. The discovery suggests that humans can also exploit the molecules to differentiate between people. "This is definitely new and exciting," says Frank Zufall, a neurobiologist at Saarland University's School of Medicine in Homburg, Germany, who was not involved in the work. "This type of experiment had never been done on humans before." MHC peptides are found on the surface of almost all cells in the human body, helping inform the immune system that the cells are ours. Because a given combination of MHC peptides—called an MHC type—is unique to a person, they can help the body recognize invading pathogens and foreign cells. Over the past 2 decades, scientists have discovered that the molecules also foster communication between animals, including mice and fish. Stickleback fish, for example, choose mates with different MHC types than their own. Then, in 1995, researchers conducted the now famous "sweaty T-shirt study," which concluded that women prefer the smell of men who have different MHC genes than themselves. But no studies had shown a clear-cut physiological response to MHC proteins. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17716 - Posted: 01.26.2013

By Laura Sanders Older people with hearing loss may suffer faster rates of mental decline. People who have hearing trouble suffered meaningful impairments in memory, attention and learning about three years earlier than people with normal hearing, a study published online January 21 in JAMA Internal Medicine reveals. The finding bolsters the idea that hearing loss can have serious consequences for the brain, says Patricia Tun of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., who studies aging. “I’m hoping it will be a real wake-up call in terms of realizing the importance of hearing.” Compared with other senses, hearing is often overlooked, Tun says. “We are made to interact with language and to listen to each other, and it can have damaging effects if we don’t.” Frank Lin of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and colleagues tested the hearing of 1,984 older adults. Most of the participants, who averaged 77 years old, showed some hearing loss — 1,162 volunteers had trouble hearing noises of less than 25 decibels, comparable to a whisper or rustling leaves. The volunteers’ deficits reflect the hearing loss in the general population: Over half of people older than 70 have trouble hearing. Over the next six years, these participants underwent mental evaluations that measured factors such as short-term memory, attention and the ability to quickly match numbers to symbols. Everybody got worse at the tasks as time wore on, but people with hearing loss had an especially sharp decline, the team found. On average, a substantial drop in performance would come about three years earlier to people with hearing loss. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Hearing; Aggression
Link ID: 17699 - Posted: 01.22.2013

by Jennifer Viegas The world’s largest archive of animal vocalizations and other nature sounds is now available online. This resource for students, filmmakers, scientists and curious wildlife aficionados took archivists a dozen years to assemble and make ready for the web. “In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary,” audio curator Greg Budney said in a press release, describing the milestone just achieved by the Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “This is one of the greatest research and conservation resources at the Cornell Lab,” added Budney. “And through its digitization, we’ve swung the doors open on it in a way that wasn’t possible 10 or 20 years ago.” The collection goes way back to 1929. It contains nearly 150,000 digital audio recordings equaling more than 10 terabytes of data with a total run time of 7,513 hours. About 9,000 species are represented. Many are birds, but the collection also includes sounds of whales, elephants, frogs, primates and more. “Our audio collection is the largest and the oldest in the world,” explained Macaulay Library director Mike Webster. “Now, it’s also the most accessible. We’re working to improve search functions and create tools people can use to collect recordings and upload them directly to the archive. Our goal is to make the Macaulay Library as useful as possible for the broadest audience possible.” © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Hearing; Aggression
Link ID: 17697 - Posted: 01.19.2013

Search recordings by species: 135793 recordings found

Keyword: Hearing; Aggression
Link ID: 17696 - Posted: 01.19.2013

by Elizabeth Norton To humans, all fire ants may look alike. But the tiny, red, stinging bugs known as Solenopsis invicta have two types of social organization, and these factions are as recognizable to the ants as rival football teams are to us. Researchers once thought that the groups' distinct physiological and behavioral profiles stemmed from a variant in a single gene. Now, a new study provides the first evidence that the gene in question is bound up in a bundle of some 600 other genes, versions of which are all inherited together. This "supergene" takes up a large chunk of what may be the first known social chromosome, analogous to the chromosomes that determine sex in humans. The differences between the two types of fire ants start with the winged queens, according to evolutionary geneticist Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. A so-called monogyne queen is large, fat, and fertile. Once she's mated, she can fly long distances to start her colony, nourishing her eggs from her fat stores, and then wait until her larvae grow up into workers. A monogyne colony will accept only the original queen and kill any other that shows up; these ants are very aggressive in general. By contrast, a polygyne queen is smaller and needs mature workers to help set up a colony. Thus polygyne communities will accept multiple queens from nearby nests—unless, that is, one happens to be a monogyne, in which case, they kill her. In 1998, working with entomologist and geneticist Kenneth Ross of the University of Georgia in Athens, Keller showed that the two groups of fire ants had distinct versions of a gene known as Gp-9. All of the monogynes had two copies of one form; among the polygynes, many had one normal and one mutated copy of the gene. At first glance, the finding made sense. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 17691 - Posted: 01.17.2013

by Gretchen Vogel All you graying, half-deaf Def Leppard fans, listen up. A drug applied to the ears of mice deafened by noise can restore some hearing in the animals. By blocking a key protein, the drug allows sound-sensing cells that are damaged by noise to regrow. The treatment isn't anywhere near ready for use in humans, but the advance at least raises the prospect of restoring hearing to some deafened people. When it comes to hearing, hair cells in the inner ear, so named for their bristlelike appearance, keep the process humming along, converting mechanical vibrations caused by sound waves into nerve impulses. Unfortunately for people, loud noises can overwork and destroy the cells. And once they're gone, they're gone: Birds and fish can regenerate the inner ear hair cells, but mammals cannot. Researchers have been looking for ways to reactivate the regenerative potential that other species enjoy. In 2005, scientists used gene therapy to prompt the growth of hair cells in the inner ears of adult guinea pigs, which restored some hearing. However, the drug approach would potentially be much easier to use in the clinic, says Albert Edge, a stem cell biologist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. He and his colleagues had previously found that a class of drugs called gamma-secretase inhibitors could prompt the growth of hair cells from inner ear stem cells growing in the lab. The lab also showed that the drugs worked by blocking the signaling of the Notch protein, which helps determine which cells become hair cells and which become support cells during ear development. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Aggression
Link ID: 17663 - Posted: 01.10.2013

By Diane Mapes The video touched millions: An 8-month old boy smiles with unabashed adoration at his mother as he hears her voice, seemingly for the first time, thanks to a new cochlear implant. Posted on YouTube in April of 2008, the video of "Jonathan's Cochlear Implant Activation" has received more than 3.6 million hits and thousands of comments from viewers, many clamoring for an update. Five-year-old Jonathan is “doing great,” according to his parents, Brigette and Mark Breaux of Houston, Texas. "He's in kindergarten and we're working on speech," Brigette, his 35-year-old stay-at-home mom, told TODAY.com. "He can hear everything that we say to him. It's of course artificial hearing but he can hear and understand what we're saying." After a bout with bacterial meningitis left him deaf, Jonathan Breaux regained hearing with the help of a cochlear implant, and is now a happy 5-year-old. "He's a flirt," adds Mark, a 36-year-old corporate controller. "He was chasing girls around the playground when Brigette went to see him for his class party. He's a handful." © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Hearing; Aggression
Link ID: 17656 - Posted: 01.07.2013

By SINDYA N. BHANOO The human brain responds to music in different ways, depending on the listener’s emotional reaction, among other things. Now researchers report that the same holds true for birds listening to birdsong. “The same regions that respond to music in humans, at least the areas that can also be found in the bird brain, responded to song in our sparrows,” said an author of the new report, Donna Maney, a neuroscientist at Emory University. Primed with estrogen to simulate their state during breeding, female white-throated sparrows responded to the songs of male sparrows in the same way as humans listening to pleasant music, she said. Females in a nonbreeding state responded no differently to birdsong than to generic tones of the same frequencies. “So during breeding season, birdsong is received differently by females,” Dr. Maney said. Moreover, male birds treated with testosterone showed a response in the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center, when they heard other males singing. The response is akin to the reaction humans have when they hear the sort of music used in a scary movie scene. “If you’re a male and you hear the song, it means that you’re invading territory or being invaded,” Dr. Maney said. “It’s an aggressive signal.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 17646 - Posted: 01.01.2013

Julian Richards, deputy editor, newscientist.com Let's take it from the top again... Human singing stars these days rely on Auto-Tune technology to produce the right pitch, but this songbird does it the old way - by listening out for its own mistakes. And it's also smart enough to ignore notes that are too far off to be true. Brains monitor their owners' physical actions via the senses, and use this feedback to correct mistakes in those actions. Many models of learning assume that the bigger the perceived mistake, the bigger the correction will be. Samuel Sober at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Michael Brainard of the University of California, San Francisco, suspected that the system is a bit cleverer than that - otherwise, for instance, a bird might over-correct its singing if it confused external sounds with its own voice, or if its brain made a mistake in processing sounds. They decided to fool Bengalese finches into thinking that they were singing out of tune, and measured what happened at different levels of this apparent tone-deafness. To do this, they fitted the birds with the stylish headphones shown in the photo above and fed them back the sound of their own singing, processed to sound sharper than it really was. The researchers sharpened the birdsong by degrees ranging from a quarter-tone to one-and-a-half tones. They found that the birds learned to "correct" their pitch more accurately and more quickly when they heard a smaller mistake than when they heard a large one. It was also clear that the bird brains took "errors" seriously when they fell within the normal range of pitches in the bird's song: the birds seemed to ignore errors outside this range. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Hearing; Aggression
Link ID: 17627 - Posted: 12.22.2012

By Wynne Parry and LiveScience NEW YORK — While jazz musician Vijay Iyer played a piece on the piano, he wore an expression of intense concentration. Afterward, everyone wanted to know: What was going on in his head? The way this music is often taught, "they tell you, you must not be thinking when you are playing," Iyer said after finishing his performance of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," a piece that requires improvisation. "I think that is an impoverished view of what thought is. … Thought is distributed through all of our actions." Iyer's performance opened a panel discussion on music and the mind at the New York Academy of Sciences on Wednesday (Dec. 13). Music elicits "a splash" of activity in many parts of the brain, said panelist Jamshed Bharucha, a neuroscientist and musician, after moderator Steve Paulson of the public radio program "To the Best of Our Knowledge" asked about the brain's response to music. "I think you are asking a question we can only scratch the surface of in terms of what goes on in the brain," Bharucha said. [Why Music Moves Us] Creativity in the brain scanner Charles Limb, a surgeon who studies the neuroscience of music, is attempting to better understand creativity by putting jazz musicians and rappers in a brain-imaging scanner called a functional MRI, which measures blood flow in the brain, and asking them to create music or rap once in there. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing; Aggression
Link ID: 17618 - Posted: 12.19.2012

By DOUGLAS MARTIN Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89. The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said. Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty. Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor. Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help. Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve. Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Aggression
Link ID: 17610 - Posted: 12.17.2012

by Kai Kupferschmidt Human beings tend to avoid places that smell of urine. But to mice, there is something positively addictive about the scent; they like to go back to a spot where they found the excretions again and again. Now, researchers have discovered that this behavior is triggered by a single protein in the urine of male mice. Mice use scent to mark their territory, advertise their social dominance, and convey information about their health and reproductive status. But these are usually volatile pheromones that disperse quickly, and it has remained unclear what exactly stimulates a female to be attracted to a specific male. Previous research had shown that female laboratory mice often return to a place where they have come across cage bedding soiled by males. Now, researchers at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom have confirmed this. Female mice spent five times as much time in a place where they had encountered a dish with male urine than at a place where they encountered water. Just 10 minutes of exposure to the urine was enough for the mice to show this place preference even after 14 days. However, if the mice were prevented from by a mesh screen touching the urine with their nose, the place seemed to lose its attractiveness. "That suggested that the story was not as simple as everybody assumed and volatile pheromones were not responsible," says behavioral ecologist Jane Hurst, one of the authors of the study. By separating the urine into different fractions, the scientists showed that a protein called darcin that they had identified in 2005—and which mice can only detect if their noses touch the urine—is responsible for the frequent visits. Pure darcin, produced in cell culture in the lab, elicited the same reaction, the authors report online today in Science. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Aggression
Link ID: 17606 - Posted: 12.14.2012

By Scicurious I would like to start this post with a challenge. Can you get through this entire post WITHOUT feeling itchy? I know I couldn’t even write the first line. And I’m not alone. Itch is contagious. Watching someone else scratch can make you itch, and you should try to get through a lecture on a skin condition. I wonder how dermatologists can take it. What IS an itch? The clinical definition is that it’s an “unpleasant sensation associated with the urge to scratch”. Ok, then. Itching is a very important part of clinical diagnosis, from things like poison ivy to allergies to severe use of methamphetamine. In addition, there is a psychological disorder of severe itch which can be both disfiguring and incredibly distressing. But where does it come from and why do we itch? There’s an obvious evolutionary reason (OMG a spider on my arm getitoffgetitoffgetitioff!!!!), but what about social itch? We know about the neurobiological “itch matrix”, which involves areas of the brain associated with touch and somatosensory processing, the premotor areas (for scratching), the anterior insula, prefrontal cortex, thalamus, and cerebellum. From a combination of all of these areas (accompanied, of course, by other things like the visual areas to process seeing the spider on your hand), you get an itch and a scartching response, and other involved areas (like the insula and cingulate) may help make it unpleasant enough for you to want to deal with it. All of these areas are also associated with the processing of other stimuli, like touch and pain, which may contribute to the sensation of itch. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Aggression
Link ID: 17590 - Posted: 12.11.2012

By WILLIAM J. BROAD When a hurricane forced the Nautilus to dive in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” Captain Nemo took the submarine down to a depth of 25 fathoms, or 150 feet. There, to the amazement of the novel’s protagonist, Prof. Pierre Aronnax, no whisper of the howling turmoil could be heard. “What quiet, what silence, what peace!” he exclaimed. That was 1870. Today — to the dismay of whale lovers and friends of marine mammals, if not divers and submarine captains — the ocean depths have become a noisy place. The causes are human: the sonar blasts of military exercises, the booms from air guns used in oil and gas exploration, and the whine from fleets of commercial ships that relentlessly crisscross the global seas. Nature has its own undersea noises. But the new ones are loud and ubiquitous. Marine experts say the rising clamor is particularly dangerous to whales, which depend on their acute hearing to locate food and one another. To fight the din, the federal government is completing the first phase of what could become one of the world’s largest efforts to curb the noise pollution and return the sprawling ecosystem to a quieter state. The project, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, seeks to document human-made noises in the ocean and transform the results into the world’s first large sound maps. The ocean visualizations use bright colors to symbolize the sounds radiating out through the oceanic depths, frequently over distances of hundreds of miles. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 17589 - Posted: 12.11.2012

By David Brown, We all know that when it comes to enjoying food, taste and smell go hand in hand. But how and where they hold hands in the neural circuits of the brain has been something of a mystery. Neuroscientists have known for a while that odor receptors in the nose send signals to the the brain’s taste center, also known as the gustatory cortex. But does the converse happen? Do taste receptors in the tongue talk to the smell center, the olfactory cortex? New research suggests the answer is yes. The smell center gets and uses information from the tongue even if an animal is not consciously sniffing — or even inhaling. “We know there is a sense of smell in the taste system. What’s new is that we now know that smell, like taste, can’t really work on its own, either,” said Donald B. Katz, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University who co-authored the study. “What this means is that the different senses are really interacting with each other at a much earlier level than previously thought,” said Joost X. Maier, the postdoctoral researcher at Brandeis who did the experiments reported in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. One can construct reasons why this might be the best way to design the brain. But the brain arose by chance, interacting with the world and sculpted by natural selection. For virtually all forms of life, taste and smell were experienced together in the act of finding and consuming food. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17573 - Posted: 12.04.2012

A fondness for the burn of spicy food has less to do with tolerance and far more to do with personality, according to a new study. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have found a love of chili is associated with sensation seeking and reward, but found no evidence that chili lovers get desensitized to chili burn over time. "Rather than merely showing reduced response to the irritating qualities of capsaicin (the compound that gives chili its burn) as might be expected—these findings support the hypothesis that personality differences may drive differences in spicy food liking and intake," the authors wrote in the journal Food Quality and Preference. "We always assumed that liking drives intake—we eat what we like and we like what we eat. But no one had actually directly bothered to connect these personality traits of sensation seeking with intake of chilli peppers," says lead author and self-confessed chili lover Professor John Hayes. The discovery of a relationship between fondness for chilli and sensitivity to reward was also new, says Hayes who is an assistant professor of food science at Pennsylvania State University. Nearly one hundred volunteers were given liquid samples of capsaicin and asked to swill it in their mouth for three seconds before spitting out. They were then asked to rate the burning sensation and, in a separate questionnaire, rate their liking of various foods. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17572 - Posted: 12.04.2012

Roger Dobson Love, according to romantics, can have a dramatic effect on the senses: striking lovers blind, deaf or rendering them tongue-tied. But the simple answer to the question of whether any relationship is "the one" seems to be that your ideal man or woman gets up your nose. New research suggests a sense of smell is vital for a good long-term relationship. In the new study, reported in the journal Biological Psychology, researchers looked for the first time at the effect of being born without a sense on smell on men and women's relationships. The research involved analysing data on men and women aged 18 to 46 with no sense of smell and comparing it with information gleaned from a healthy control group. The results showed that men and women who were unable to smell had higher levels of social insecurity, although this manifested itself in different ways. In men, but not in women, it led to fewer relationships. The men with a faulty sense of smell averaged two partners compared with 10 for healthy men. One theory is that the lack of a sense of smell may make men less adventurous. They may have more problems assessing and communicating with other people. They may also be concerned about how they are perceived by others, and worry about their own body odour. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Aggression
Link ID: 17566 - Posted: 12.03.2012

By Christina Agapakis White is a mixture, made by a combination of signals at equal intensity across a perceptual space. White light can be split up into all the colors of the visible spectrum, and white noise covers a range of frequencies within the audible range. Our other senses don’t have as clearly defined ranges of perception. We can’t give a smell, a taste, or a texture a number the same way that a color or a tone can be defined by a wavelength, but a fascinating recent paper shows that by mixing many different smelly molecules at equal intensities, our perception of the odor will converge on “olfactory white.” The researchers created this strangely neutral smell from different mixtures of up to thirty odors, chosen from a set of 86 molecules that represent a wide range of the kinds of things that we can smell. Human “olfactory stimulus space” contains thousands of molecules, from the fragrant and floral to the putrid. We can distinguish and name many smells, but odors don’t map neatly onto a one dimensional spectrum. Sampling the multidimensional stimulus space of odors requires a much more complicated mapping of the smell universe. The figure on the left shows the position of the 86 molecules within two maps of olfactory stimulus space. The first is based on the way that we perceive odors (perceptual space, A) and the second based on the chemical structures of the molecules (physicochemical space, B). The perceptual map is built with data from Dravnieks’ Atlas of Odor Character Profiles of 144 different molecules. Each smell was compared by 150 professional noses against a list of 146 different odor descriptions like “fruity” “etherish” “decayed” or “seasoning for meat.” © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17547 - Posted: 11.28.2012

Alla Katsnelson Human eyes, set as they are in front-facing sockets, give us a limited angle of view: we see what is directly in front of us, with only a few degrees of peripheral vision. But bats can broaden and narrow their 'visual field' by modulating the frequency of the squeaks they use to navigate and find prey, researchers in Denmark suggest today in Nature1. Bats find their way through the night by emitting sonar signals and using the echoes that return to them to create a map of their surroundings — a process called echolocation. Researchers have long known that small bats emit higher-frequency squeaks than larger bats, and most assumed that the difference arises because the smaller animals must catch smaller insects, from which low-frequency sound waves with long wavelengths do not reflect well. That didn't sound right to Annemarie Surlykke, a neurobiologist who studies bat echolocation at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. “When you look at the actual frequencies, small bats would be able to detect even the smallest prey they take with a much lower frequency,” she says. “So there must be another reason.” Surlykke and her colleagues decided to test the hypothesis by studying six related species of bat that varied in size. They captured the animals in the wild and set them loose in a flight room — a pitch-dark netted corridor 2.5 metres high, 4.8 metres wide and 7 metres long, rigged on all sides with microphones and infrared cameras. “It’s a pretty confined space, so this corresponds to flying close to vegetation,” says Surlykke. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 17536 - Posted: 11.26.2012

by Sid Perkins If you play sounds of many different frequencies at the same time, they combine to produce neutral "white noise." Neuroscientists say they have created an analogous generic scent by blending odors. Such "olfactory white" might rarely, if ever, be found in nature, but it could prove useful in research, other scientists say. Using just a few hundred types of biochemical receptors, each of which respond to just a few odorants, the human nose can distinguish thousands of different odors. Yet humans can't easily identify the individual components of a mixture, even when they can identify the odors alone, says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Now, he and his colleagues suggest, various blends made up of a large number of odors all begin to smell the same—even when the blends share no common components. For their study, the researchers used 86 nontoxic odorants that had a wide variety of chemical and physical properties such as molecular structure, molecular weight, and volatility. Those chemicals also spanned a perceptual scale from "pleasant" to "unpleasant" and another such scale on which scents were judged to range from "edible" to "poisonous." The researchers then diluted the chemicals so that their odors were equally intense. Finally, they created mixtures by dripping individual odorants onto separate regions of an absorptive pad in a jar, a technique that prevented the substances from reacting in liquid form to create new substances or odors. The odor blends contained anywhere from one to 43 of the chemicals, Sobel says. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17510 - Posted: 11.20.2012