The nose knows
Harvard researchers have illuminated how the brain processes information about odor, linking a temporal pattern of electrical spikes traveling through the nervous system with specific smells and...
View Article‘Circuits of sense and sensibility’
Sometimes when we eat something that makes us sick, we lose our craving for that food forever. C. elegans feels our pain, and a Harvard biology professor has used that fact to map for the first time...
View ArticleSniff mechanics
Harvard scientists are shedding light on a neural feedback mechanism that may play a key role in how the olfactory system works in the brain. The mechanism was first identified more than a century...
View ArticleSomething doesn’t smell right
For most animals, the scent of rotting meat is powerfully repulsive. But for others, such as carrion-feeding vultures and insects, it’s a scent that can be just as powerfully attractive. The question...
View ArticleSense of scents
For many animals, making sense of sensory stimuli is often a matter or life or death. Exactly how animals separate objects of interest, such as food sources or the scent of predators, from background...
View ArticleTeaching computers to identify odors
Though scientists have long known that mice can pick out scents — the smell of food, say, or the odor of a predator — they have been at a loss to explain how they are able to perform that seemingly...
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