Sniff

At Vancouver Coastal Health, a unique canine care team helps detect diseases. Our science and climate specialist Darius Mahdavi spent the day with some of the dogs to learn how they do what they do. At Vancouver Coastal Health, a unique canine care team helps detect diseases. Our science and climate specialist Darius Mahdavi spent the day with some of the dogs to learn how they do what they do. FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS Read original article here Denial of responsibility! Techno Blender is an automatic…

Wolverine's super-sniffing also comes in handy against one hero who doesn't have any scent whatsoever: Fantomex. Fantomex is one of the more mysterious Marvel mutants, gaining powers from the Weapon Plus program as Weapon XIII. Being part of the project gave him a secondary nervous system called E.V.A., allowing him a host of other powers and skills, including having multiple brains, the ability to create illusions, super-intelligence, and nano-active blood. As a result of his physical transformation, he…

December 22, 20235min readScents are not only important in our relationship to food and the natural world. They also play a role in how we communicate with people we knowBy Marta Zaraska After a viral infection robbed Chrissi Kelly, an American archeologist living in the U.K., of her sense of smell, she no longer felt like herself. It was as if she were “floating away,” untethered from the rest of the world. Smell, she says, is something that binds us to nature and to our family, and without it, we cannot fully…

Everyone has a characteristic odor; a distinctive scent. Now scientists have found that with just a whiff of someone's hand – and a fancy protein analysis machine – they can distinguish between sexes with darn-good accuracy.In the study of 60 people, consisting of 30 men and 30 women, a person's sex could be correctly determined 96 percent of the time using odor samples swept off people's palms.The team of researchers, led by biochemist Chantrell Frazier at Florida International University's Global Forensic and Justice…

CLIMATEWIRE | U.S. scientists plan this month to launch a multiyear study of the stratosphere to help world leaders better understand whether it’s possible to use solar geoengineering to counter global warming. And they're going back in time to do it. The concept itself may sound futuristic — as one method of solar geoengineering calls for artificially changing Earth’s atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back into space. But the new NOAA mission will use retro equipment. Its main vehicle will be a…

One day, ants might help save lives by acting as inexpensive bio-detectors. Their powerful sense of smell allows them to distinguish subtle molecular differences in biological samples that we would otherwise require expensive equipment to detect.A new proof-of-concept study just demonstrated this skill could be harnessed to detect cancers in urine samples, at least from lab mice."Ants show the potential to become a fast, efficient, inexpensive and non-invasive tool for detection of human tumors," Sorbonne University…

Ants don’t have a nose, but that doesn’t stop them from sniffing out cancer. Thanks to an abundance of olfactory receptors on their antennae, the insects have an incredible sense of smell—and they can use it to detect tumors. Cancerous tumors release distinctive versions of chemicals called volatile organic compounds that often show up in bodily fluids such as sweat and urine and in breath vapor. Ants can sniff out those compounds in urine, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The…

The eyes are often said to be the window to someone's soul, but the nose could be a backdoor to their bedroom. Experiments have found heterosexual women can actually smell which suitors are available and which are taken.In recent years, the science of human scent has been sniffing up a storm in the lab, and recent results suggest that people who like to take deep whiffs of another's natural fragrance are likely to be more sexually motivated overall.Straight men also seem to be more attracted to a woman's scent when their…

Being under stress can cause all kinds of physiological shifts in the human body, from heart rates to the chemicals released into the bloodstream – and it turns out our canine pals can sniff out those stress-related changes, even in strangers.Of course, we already know that dogs are super-sniffers, but this new study is the first time that researchers have explored in tightly controlled lab experiments how a doggo's knack for recognizing odors could help them identify when humans are in a stressful situation.Besides…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A trio of researchers, two from Southern Medical University, in China, and the third from Technische Universität Dresden in Germany, has found a connection between people who place high importance on olfaction and body odor sniffing and a strong sexual desire. In their paper published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, Zi‑lin Li, Thomas Hummel and Lai‑quan Zou, describe…