Smart Smell

Lime, lemon, … Cinnamon. One of these things is not like the others! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Familiar aromas can bring back childhood memories — OR send a chill up your spine! But why do things get personal for the brain when it

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Stimulating Scents

Gee, your hair smells terrific! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. When we smell, odor molecules dock into special proteins that alert our brain. Mmmm…bacon! Biologists call these proteins olfactory receptors, or O-Rs, and they do more than just smell! All kinds of cells use

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Nose for Politics

Politics stink! But could your nose give away your voting history? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. It’s easy to determine someone’s politics these days. Just ask them their opinion on, well, anything! But if you had to guess, it pays to be a bit

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Smell Detector

Is the bathroom still smelly? Odorbot to the rescue! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Ever dream of having a day when smelling unpleasant odors is a distant memory? Kenshi Hayashi and colleagues at Kyushu University share this dream. And they’re working on a solution:

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Laundry Stinks!

Dirty laundry stressing you out? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Ahhh… the smell of freshly washed clothes. Some even find it relaxing. But what about DIRTY laundry? Enter Marlise Hofer from the University of British Columbia. Her team studied the laundry likes of almost

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Scents and Sensibility

Ew—this milk smells bad. What do you think? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. You and I are different. We have unique fingerprints, retinal prints, and—surprise—olfactory prints. We just don’t smell things the same way. There are roughly four-hundred different smell receptors, but we don’t

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