Links for Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)

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By Steve Mirsky All seemed well that morning when the rains came. I was warm and dry and didn’t need to leave the comfort of home. But that comfort swiftly departed. First, I heard the glug glug glug. Then I picked up a whiff both faint and foul. Something was entering the bathroom that should only exit the bathroom—raw sewage was reversing its natural course and fighting its way back into my house. The whiffs got stronger. Human waste includes some fascinating and fragrant organic compounds. Take skatole. (Please.) Skatole bears a heavy responsibility for making poo smell phooey. But remember the axiom: it’s the dose that makes the poison. Because in low concentrations, according to Wikipedia, skatole “has a flowery smell and is found in several flowers and essential oils,” such as orange blossoms and jasmine. It is even used—again, in very small amounts—in perfumes. Think about that when dabbing behind the ears. And Wikipedia notes that cigarette manufacturers add skatole as (drum roll) a flavoring ingredient. Just another reason to stop smoking. In addition, waste contains various stinky sulfur compounds, collectively called thiols or mercaptans. They are not your friends. When sewage is backing up into one’s home, the to-do list instantly becomes an un-doo list with only one item: get the plumbers to come immediately. Upon their swift arrival, they unsealed the trap to gain access to the line, which also sent the incoming waste fluid into the subbasement—still bad, but a big improvement. They then sent a camera down the line to examine the problem, performing their version of the closely related diagnostic technique of colonoscopy. © 2011 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 15257 - Posted: 04.23.2011

Hormone Helps You Sniff Out Food, Study Finds

(HealthDay News) -- A hormone called ghrelin enhances the nose's ability to sniff out food, researchers report. It was already known that ghrelin promotes hunger and fat storage. The new study suggests that the hormone may increase the ability to use smell to detect food and link that input with the body's natural regulation of metabolism and body weight, said University of Cincinnati scientists. Click here to find out more! The study, which included experiments with humans and rats, appears in the April 13 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. It was led by Dr. Jenny Tong and Dr. Matthias Tschop, both of the university's endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism division. "Smell is an integral part of feeding, and mammals frequently rely on smell to locate food and discriminate among food sources. Sniffing is the first stage of the smell process and can enhance odor detection and discrimination," Tong said in a university news release. "Other studies have shown that hunger can enhance odor detection and sniffing in animals," Tschop added in the release. "Since ghrelin is a hunger-inducing stomach hormone that is secreted when the stomach is empty, this hormone pathway may also be responsible for the hunger-induced enhancement of sniffing and odor detection." The researchers plan further research to identify the exact molecular pathways through which ghrelin affects sniff behavior. © 2011 HealthDay.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of Internal States
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 15209 - Posted: 04.14.2011

Fly sniffs molecule's quantum vibrations

by Rachel Courtland How does a nose generate the signals that the brain registers as smell? The conventional theory says it's down to the different shapes of smelly molecules. But fruit flies have now distinguished between two molecules with identical shapes, providing the first experimental evidence to support a controversial theory that the sense of smell can operate by detecting molecular vibrations. The noses of mammals, and the antennae of flies, are lined with different folded proteins that form pocket-shaped "receptors". It has been generally assumed that a smell arises when an odour molecule slides into a receptor like a key in a lock, altering the receptor's shape and triggering a cascade of chemical events that eventually reach the brain. But this "shape" theory has limitations. For one, it can't easily explain why different molecules can have very similar smells. In 1996, Luca Turin, a biophysicist now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed a solution. He revived a theory that the way a molecule vibrates can dictate it odour, and came up with a mechanism to explain how this might work. His idea was that electrons might only be able to pass across a receptor if it was bound to a molecule that vibrated at just the right frequency. Ordinarily, the energy needed for the electron to make this journey would be too great, but the right vibrational energy could prompt a quantum effect in which the electron "tunnels" through this energy barrier, and this would then be detected and registered as a particular smell (see diagram). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Taste

by Kirsten Weir 1 Remember the tongue map you learned about in junior high—the one showing taste receptors for sweet flavors on the tip of the tongue, bitter in the back, and sour on the sides? It’s totally wrong. 2 That bogus map came from an English mistranslation of a German research paper. 3 In truth, any area can pick up any taste (although sensitivity does vary across the tongue). 4 We all know about sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Less widely known is the fifth taste: umami, that savory flavor of soy sauce, tomatoes, and many other foods high in glutamate. 5 Go with your gut: Japanese scientists recently identified umami receptors not only on the tongue but throughout the digestive tract. Their role in digestion and nutrition remains a mystery. 6 Those bumps on your tongue aren’t actually your taste buds. They are fungiform papillae—“mushroom-shaped nipples,” to any Latin speakers out there—and each houses 50 to 100 buds. 7 Scientists believe there are only a few receptor types each for sweet, sour, salty, and umami. But there are a lot more for bitter (at least 25), as anyone paying alimony is probably aware. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

The smelling test: The genetics of olfaction

In 2004, American neuroscientists Linda Buck and Richard Axel shared a Nobel Prize for their identification of the genes that control smell, findings which they first published in the early 1990s. Their work revived interest in the mysterious workings of our noses, interest which is now generating some surprising insights – not least that each of us inhabits our own, personal olfactory world. "When I give talks, I always say that everybody in this room smells the world with a different set of receptors, and therefore it smells different to everybody," says Andreas Keller, a geneticist working at the Rockefeller University in New York City. He also suspects that every individual has at least one odorant he or she cannot detect at all – one specific anosmia, or olfactory "blind spot", which is inherited along with his or her olfactory apparatus. The human nose contains roughly 400 olfactory receptors, each of which responds to several odorants, and each of which is encoded by a different gene. But, says Boris Schilling, a biochemist working for Givaudan, the world's largest flavour and fragrance company, based in Geneva, Switzerland, "unless you are dealing with identical twins, no two persons will have the same genetic make-up for those receptors." The reason, according to Doron Lancet, a geneticist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is that those genes have been accumulating mutations over evolution. This has happened in all the great apes, and one possible explanation is that smell has gradually become less important to survival, having been replaced to some extent by colour vision – as an indicator of rotten fruit, for example, or of a potentially venomous predator. ©independent.co.uk

You Smell Flowers, I Smell Stale Urine

By Laura Spinney Scientists have long known that people perceive scents differently. But emerging evidence from several large-scale studies shows that the variation is larger than previously known. It turns out that people differ in how they perceive many if not all odors, and most of us have at least one scent we cannot detect at all. “Everybody’s olfactory world is a unique, private world,” says Andreas Keller, a geneticist at the Rockefeller University. Over the course of evolution, partly because humans grew more reliant on vision and smell became relatively less important, the genes encoding our 400 or so olfactory receptors began to accumulate mutations. Once a gene has accumulated enough mutations, it becomes a “pseudogene,” notes geneticist Doron Lancet of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, meaning it no longer encodes a functioning receptor. Different people have different combinations of pseudogenes, however. “You end up with a bar code situation, whereby each individual has a slightly different bar code,” he says. That genetic variability seems to translate into behavioral variability. When Keller and his colleagues asked 500 people to rate a panel of 66 odors for intensity and pleasantness, they gave the full range of responses—from weak to intense and from pleasant to unpleasant. In an ongoing study at the University of Dresden, Thomas Hummel and his associates have tested 1,500 young adults on a panel of 20 odors and found specific insensitivities to all but one—citralva, which has a citrus smell. Based on these findings, Keller suspects that each person has an olfactory blind spot. © 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

Bitter flavors boost hunger hormone

By Rachel Ehrenberg A nip of Pernod or Ouzo before dinner to stimulate the appetite may be a sound strategy. When mouse gut cells are stimulated with bitter compounds they trigger secretion of a hunger hormone, researchers report online January 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Whetting the appetite with a before-dinner drink, or aperitif — from the Latin aprire, to open — has long been associated with improved digestion. The often bitter drinks typically contain a secret mixture of herbs and spices, sometimes to deliberately quell the taste of another common aperitif ingredient — quinine. Quinine is one of a number of compounds that stimulate the bitter taste receptors — cells that, in the mouth, are seen as a first line of defense against ingesting toxins. So scientists thought that eating such compounds would inhibit appetite, not rev it up. But when mice were fed a bitter mixture, their levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin spiked, a research team from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium reports. These mice then went on a half-hour eating binge, unlike counterparts that had impaired machinery for sensing bitter compounds. Oddly, this binge was followed by several hours of fasting, and experiments revealed a delay in digestion of the large meal. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of Internal States; Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 14894 - Posted: 01.21.2011

Lonely teardrops: Just whiffing women's tears of sadness dampens men’s libido

By Bruce Bower Crying women may literally turn men off. Odorless chemical signals in a woman’s waterworks lessen any stirrings of sexual interest in a guy who whiffs her tear-stained cheeks, a new study suggests. In a paper published online January 6 in Science, a team led by neuroscientists Shani Gelstein and Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, presents the first evidence that human tears contain pheromones, substances that influence behavior via smell. “Our experiments suggest that women’s emotional tears contain a chemosignal that reduces sexual arousal in men,” Sobel says. Chemical compounds in tears that douse men’s desire have yet to be identified. “This new report makes a strong case for pheromones in women’s tears, but the results clearly warrant replication,” comments neuroscientist Robert Provine of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The reasons why people, but not any other animal, cry at sad thoughts or events remain poorly understood. Tears provide key visual cues to a person’s inner emotional distress, Provine says. In a 2009 study that he directed, men and women rated the faces of crying people with visible tears as much sadder than the same faces digitally altered to remove tears. Tear removal made faces appear emotionally ambiguous, with participants saying that awe, concern or puzzlement often outweighed sadness. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 14842 - Posted: 01.07.2011

Snot has the power to alter scents

By Laura Sanders A rose sniffed through a snotty nose may not smell so sweet. Enzymes in mice’s nasal mucus transform certain scents before the nose can detect them, a new study finds. The results, published December 1 in the Journal of Neuroscience, show that lowly mucus may feature prominently in the sense of smell. “It is completely unexpected that snot would play a potential role in changing how we perceive odors,” says neuroscientist Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University in New York City. “Most people and most scientists pay no attention at all to mucus.” But there’s more to mucus than what meets the nose: The thick goo that serves to lubricate the nose is teeming with proteins and protein-chopping enzymes. Some of these molecules are thought to catch smells and shuttle them to odor receptors in the nose. Other components may protect the body from toxic chemicals by chopping them up into less harmful pieces. But no one knew whether this chopping action had any effect on smell perception. In the new study, Ayumi Nagashima and Kazushige Touhara of the University of Tokyo added particular odorants to tiny amounts of mucus sucked out of a mouse’s nose and tested the resulting chemical composition of the mix. After five minutes of sitting in mucus, about 80 percent of almond-smelling benzaldehyde was converted into benzyl alcohol (a scent found in some teas and plants) and the odorless benzoic acid. Inactive enzymes in boiled mucus couldn’t do this odor conversion, the team found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Did scientists breed mice that 'smell' light?

By Wynne Parry, A group of scientists has genetically altered mice so they could "smell" light. That is their neurons responded to light in the same way they would to an odor. This allowed them to study the brain's response without having to deal with the complications associated with smelling. The approach the scientists used to help the mice "smell" the light is called optogenetics. The method uses light to control actions within other specific cells and is broadly applicable. The noses of mice (and humans) are chock-full of sensory neurons that respond to scent molecules that waft by. That odor information gets sent to the olfactory bulb, a part of the brain above the nasal cavities, where the sensory neurons meet up with relay neurons. These two types of neurons then meet within structures called glomeruli. "If you look at two cells receiving input from the same glomerulus, are they just passing it on [in] the same way, or is there something more to it?" said study researcher Venkatesh Murthy from Harvard University, who collaborated with others at Harvard, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in India. A mouse has about 200,000 relay cells, with between 60 and 100 connected to each glomerulus, or hub. Identifying pairs of relay cells that connect to the same glomerulus is difficult, because when a rodent catches a whiff of something, multiple glomeruli go into action, according to Graeme Lowe, a neuroscientist at the independent Monell Chemical Senses Center who was not involved in the research. © The Christian Science Monitor

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 14609 - Posted: 11.01.2010

Breathe better with bitter

By Rachel Ehrenberg Inhaling a blast of bitter fumes sends a breathe-easy message to the lungs, a new study shows. Stimulating bitterness receptors in the lungs relaxes and opens the airways, a counterintuitive finding that could lead to new asthma medications, scientists report online October 24 in Nature Medicine. Bitter-taste receptors just like the ones on the tongue abound on the smooth muscle tissue that wraps around the airway tubes leading to the lungs, reports a team from the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In mice bred to have asthma, inhaled bitter compounds such as quinine did a better job of relaxing airways than did the standard asthma drug albuterol. These bitter-taste receptors in lung muscles should be good targets for new asthma medications that are based on the multitude of molecules known to stimulate bitter receptors, says Mathur Kannan, a pharmacologist in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. The relaxation response to bitter-flavored air remains somewhat puzzling. In the mouth, bitter receptors are part of the body’s first line of defense against possibly poisonous compounds. Cells lining the upper part of the respiratory tract also have bitter-taste receptors, scientists reported earlier this year. But there, they can trigger an “out, out” reaction, stimulating the featherlike cilia of the airways to push whatever’s nearby up and away. So it seemed more logical that muscles controlling air flow to lungs would constrict when stimulated by potential toxins, says Stephen Liggett of the University of the Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, who led the new work. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Frog cells give artificial nose the power of super smell

by Paul Marks How do you give a robot a sharper sense of smell? By using genetically modified frog cells, according to Shoji Takeuchi, a bioengineer at the University of Tokyo in Japan. Today's electronic noses are not up to the job, he says. Although e-noses have been around for a while – and are used to sniff out rotten food in production lines – they lack accuracy. That's because e-noses use quartz rods designed to vibrate at a different frequency when they bind to a target substance. But this is not a foolproof system, as subtly different substances with similar molecular weights may bind to the rod, producing a false positive. Instead, Takeuchi believes there is nothing quite as good as biology for distinguishing between different biomolecules, such as disease markers in our breath. So he and his team have developed a living smell sensor. First, immature eggs, or oocytes, from the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis were genetically modified to express the proteins known to act as smell receptors. He chose X. laevis cells as they are widely studied and their protein expression mechanism is well understood. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Bacteria can 'smell' their environment, research shows

By Jason Palmer Research has shown that bacteria - among the simplest life forms on Earth - have a sense of smell. Scientists from Newcastle University in the UK have demonstrated that a bacterium commonly found in soil can sniff and react to ammonia in the air. It was previously thought that this "olfaction" was limited to more complex forms of life known as eukaryotes. The finding, published in Biotechnology Journal, means that bacteria have four of the five senses that humans enjoy. The discovery also has implications in the understanding and control of biofilms - the chemical coatings that bacteria can form on, for example, medical implants. Bacteria have already demonstrated the ability to react to light, in analogy to sight, and to change the genes that they express when confronted with certain materials, in analogy to touch. However, there is a distinction between an organism reacting to a chemical that it encounters directly (in analogy to the sense of taste) and a reaction to a chemical that is floating around in the air, says Reindert Nijland, lead author of the study. "The difference is both in the mechanism that does the sensing, as well as in the compounds that are sensed," Dr Nijland, now at University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands, told BBC News. "The compounds detected by olfactory organs are generally much more volatile than things you can taste like 'sweet' or 'salt', and therefore can provide information about things that can be much further away; you can smell a barbecue from a few blocks away whereas you have to physically touch and eat the steak to be able to actually taste it." (C)BBC

Lemurs on contraceptives don’t smell right

By Susan Milius WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Putting a female lemur on birth control turns her normally informative scents to nonsense, researchers report. Doses of Depo-Provera, a common contraceptive for people, shift the odor secretions of female lemurs so dramatically that their scents no longer give clear cues to kinship, identity and genetic quality, says study coauthor Christine Drea of Duke University in Durham, N.C. A female lemur whose hormones are disrupted by contraceptives may have real trouble attracting a compatible mate, Drea said July 26 at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society. As for people, men and women might not think they’re influenced by each others’ scents, but “Oh, we are!” said behavioral biologist Susan Jenks of the Sage Colleges in Troy, N.Y., after Drea’s presentation. If women react to the hormones the way lemurs do, “maybe you don’t want to be on contraceptives when you’re picking your mate.” Also, said behavioral ecologist Jill Mateo of the University of Chicago, “For any zoo that is chemically contracepting animals, this could have big implications.” Drea and her colleagues have identified more than 300 compounds in the scent secretions of female lemurs. “There is a rich communication system,” she said. Glands on the forelimbs, tail and other parts of the body secrete chemical cues that the lemurs rub onto branches or other community bulletin boards, where neighbors sniff out the news. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Whale 'sense of smell' revealed

By Matt Walker Bowhead whales have a previously undiscovered ability to smell the air. The finding could change our understanding of how baleen whales locate prey, as scientists suspect the bowhead whales sniff out krill swarms. The whales' sense of smell was revealed when scientists dissected their bodies and found olfactory hardware linking the brain and nose, and functional protein receptors required to smell. Previously, whales and dolphins were thought to lack the ability. Details are published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. Cetacean expert Professor Hans Thewissen of the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and colleagues based in Japan and Alaska made the discovery while evaluating the brain size of bowhead whales. The whales had been landed as part of the biannual Inupiat subsistence hunt along the north coast of Alaska, and Prof Thewissen's team was allowed to dissect the brain cavities, to evaluate how much of the brain casing a bowhead whale's brain actually fills. "Upon taking a brain out, I noticed that there were olfactory tracts, which, in other mammals, connect the brain to the nose," Prof Thewissen told the BBC. "I followed those to the nose, and noted that all the olfactory hardware is there." BBC © MMX

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 14293 - Posted: 07.27.2010

When a person loses his sense of smell, does he also lose any memory associated with a smell?

When a person loses his sense of smell, does he also lose any memory associated with a smell? —Ana Artega, via e-mail David Smith, a professor of psychology and a researcher at the Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida, replies: Normally people can detect a cacophony of odors using the 40 million olfactory receptor neurons that reside in the nasal cavity. When we encounter a new odor, these neurons send information about the whiff to a brain area called the olfactory cortex, leaving an imprint of the smell there. These memories accumulate over time to create a library of odors. Although we do not fully understand how the olfactory cortex encodes these memories, we do know that olfactory memories seem to be particularly rich—perhaps because the olfactory cortex is closely connected to the brain regions important for recollection. These areas include the amygdala, which processes emotions, and the hippocampus, which encodes and stores memories. Damage to the olfactory receptor neurons because of a respiratory infection, a head injury or a neurodegenerative disease can disrupt the brain’s ability to process different smells. When olfactory neurons stop working altogether, a person develops anosmia, or the inability to discern odors. According to a 2008 report from the National Institutes of Health, 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. population younger than 65 years old, and more than half older than 65, have almost completely lost their sense of smell. © 2010 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 14255 - Posted: 07.13.2010

Stomach’s Sweet Tooth

By Rachel Ehrenberg People deceive their taste buds every day — a dash of Sweet'N Low in the coffee, perhaps, a diet soda or a stick of sugarless gum. These little white lies seem to cover up harmless, even healthy choices. After all, fooling the mouth with artificial sweeteners provides a fix without the calories or the cavities. But these sweeteners aren’t just tricking the taste buds on the tongue. Taste, scientists are discovering, is a whole-body sensation. There are taste cells in the stomach, intestine and, evidence suggests, the pancreas, colon and esophagus. These sensory cells are part of an ancient battalion tasked with guiding food choices since long before nutrition labels, Rachael Ray or even agriculture existed. While taste cells in the mouth make snap judgments about what should be let inside, new work suggests that gut taste cells serve as specialized ground forces, charged with preparing the digestive system for the aftermath of the tongue’s decisions. Stimulating these gut cells triggers a complex series of events that can dial down, or amp up, the digestion and absorption of the body’s fuel. When hit by bitter — potentially toxic — substances, gut taste cells sound an alarm that may lead to slower absorption or spur vomiting. And when the gut’s taste sensors encounter something sweet, they send a “prepare for fuel” missive that results in cranked-up insulin levels in the blood. Though scientists don’t fully understand what follows, studies hint at a tantalizing, if convoluted, connection between gut taste cell activity and metabolism. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Male sweat sells men’s lifestyle magazines

The best place to sell magazines could be in the gym locker room, according to a study which found that pheromones in male sweat makes men opt for a manly read. Men under the influence of androstenol – a pheromone found in men’s underarm sweat – find men’s lifestyle magazines to be more attractive and are more likely to purchase them than those not exposed to the pheromone, suggests the research. Michael Kirk-Smith, from the University of Ulster, UK, and Claus Ebster, from the University of Vienna, Austria showed 120 student volunteers three magazines: the female lifestyle magazine Allure, the neutrally pitched National Geographic, and the male lifestyle magazine Men’s Health. The students were split into two groups with equal numbers of men and women. The first group wore a mask sprayed with androstenol and the second wore a mask permeated with a control solvent. The concentrations of the solvents in the masks were low enough as to have imperceptible odour to the wearers. The two groups were asked to rate the magazines according to how masculine they found each, how appealing and how likely they were to purchase them. The male participants exposed to androstenol rated Men’s Health as significantly more masculine and more appealing compared with the control group. They also had a higher tendency to report that they might buy the magazine. Women appeared to be completely unaffected by the pheromone. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Study shows synthetic pheromone in women’s perfume increases intimate contact with men

Researchers conclude men are more attracted to women wearing pheromones, resulting in more formal dates, kissing, affection, sexual intercourse SAN FRANCISCO, — Women’s perfume laced with synthetic pheromones acts as a sexual magnet and increases the sexual attractiveness of women to men, San Francisco State University researchers conclude in a study appearing in the current issue of the quarterly journal Physiology and Behavior. The study, the first of its kind to independently test a sex attractant pheromone for women, showed that of the 36 women tested, 74 percent of those wearing their regular perfume with the pheromone saw an overall increase in three or more of the following sociosexual behaviors: frequency of kissing, heavy petting and affection, sexual intercourse, sleeping next to their partner, and formal dates with men. In contrast, only 23 percent of the women who had a placebo added to their perfume saw an increase in these sociosexual behaviors. Researchers conclude from these data that the pheromone users were more sexually attractive to men.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 1724 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Unleash your inner bloodhound – start sniffing

Linda Geddes Humans can follow scent trails across a field in the same way that dogs can – and they improve with practice – a intriguing new field study has revealed. Jess Porter and Noam Sobel at the University of California in Berkeley, US, and colleagues tested whether 32 people were able to follow a 10-metre-long scent trail of chocolate essence through open grass using only their noses. Two-thirds of them could. They then trained four of the subjects three times a day for three days over a two week period to see whether they improved with practice. After training the subjects followed the trail more accurately and at more than double the speed. Watch a human sniffer dog in action (2.1MB, requires QuickTime player). “Once people realised that they could do this, they seemed to develop a good sense of how to zig-zag their noses back and forth across the odour plume in order to pick up the scent most effectively,” says Porter. The findings also shed new insight into how mammals smell. Sensory biologists have long-argued about whether mammals compare the scent inputs coming into each nostril in order to localise where a smell is coming from, in the same way they use their left and right ears. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

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