Conservation dogs perform vital roles across Australia. Some are guardians protecting wildlife from predators while others put their powerful sense of smell to use as sniffer dogs or detection dogs.
The scent emitted from your hands could offer clues about who you are.
Siro Rodenas Cortes/Moment via Getty Images
The microbiome and its signature smells are crucial for most organisms, whether human, insect or plant. The silent signals sent by the microbiome are essential communications that influence behaviour.
In what form do you eat your annual share of the approximately 5 million tons of cocoa produced worldwide?
Tracey Kusiewicz/Foodie Photography/Moment via Getty Images
There’s a lot of interesting science behind the fermenting, roasting, grinding and melting that turns chocolate into the bars, bonbons and baked goods you know and love.
Research into fox scents suggests a complex form of ‘chemical communication’ underlies the animal’s behaviour. The findings could help improve pest control methods and protect native wildlife.
A floral scent can be enjoyable for a person, but it has an important job for the flower.
Richard L. Harkess
Brains recognize a smell based on which cells fire, in what order – the same way you recognize a song based on its pattern of notes. How much can you change the ‘tune’ and still know the smell?
Cookies taste so good. Smell tells us that before we even take a bite. How?
Jennifer Pallian/Unsplash
Rakaia Kenney, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Kayla Lemons, University of Maryland, Baltimore County e Weihong Lin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Mmmmmmm. That smells delicious. Wait, how do you know that?
‘Living Mady Easy: Revolving hat’, a satirical print with a hat supporting a spy glass, an ear trumpet, a ciggar, a pair of glasses, and a scent box, 1830, London.
Wellcome Images CCBY
Perhaps you’ve noticed something unusual in the bathroom after you consume this healthy spring vegetable. A Speed Read explains there’s two parts to the stinky puzzle: production and perception.
A honeybee (left), a scarab beetle (middle), and a fly (right) feeding on flowers of the white rock rose in a Mediterranean scrubland.
Aphrodite Kantsa.
Rather than trying to out-compete each other, flowers may work together to attract bees en masse. It’s the sort of approach that is effective in the world of advertising too.
Many literary questions about smell are quite philosophical. Why do humans get pleasure from perfumes? Do rich bodies smell differently from poor ones?
from www.shutterstock.com
Smell is the Cinderella of the senses in Anglophone literature, but James Joyce wrote an olfactory revolution. His treatment of the science of smell was astonishingly prescient.
What’s the smell you associate with your childhood home? Or road-trips? Or fear? Conceptual artist Cat Jones has created the Scent of Sydney for the Sydney Festival, exploring the city in smells.
Puff adders can become motionless and scentless to avoid detection by those preying on them.
Shutterstock