Benjamin P.C. Smith is the new executive director and president of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia’s independent research institution devoted to studying the senses of taste and smell. Trained as a toxicologist, Smith started in late August at the 132-employee center. He moved here from...
Scientists discovered long ago how to represent sounds and colors with raw numbers, paving the way for smartphones, flat-screen TVs, and other devices of the electronic world. But odor and fragrance have remained quaintly stuck in a pre-digital era, characterized only with the subjective tool of...
In a world that celebrates chicken nuggets, snack puffs and french fries, how do you convince a child to choose better foods like broccoli, fresh fish or apple slices? If it feels like a losing battle, you’re not alone. Raising a healthy eater is one of...
Sugar is among the most talked-about ingredients we use in cooking, right up there with salt. Often, it’s downright contentious. Over the years I have been publishing recipes, I’ve come to expect questions, comments and criticism about the amount of sugar, the type of sugar and...
When Matthew Kravitz enters The Carson, his apartment building in Northern Liberties, he associates its distinctive smell with home. The scent is hard to define, but it’s pleasing, something he can’t say about his last apartment. “It smells like a hotel,” said Kravitz, 25, who moved...
Sugar substitutes can be found in ingredient lists on food packages, often with names that many consumers don’t recognize, like adventame, neotame and acesulfame potassium. Foods that claim “no artificial sweeteners” often are sweetened with stevia and other so-called “natural” sugar substitutes. A variety of these...
Psychosomatic effects may be contributing to the symptoms of headaches, fatigue, or respiratory issues being reported by some residents of East Palestine, Ohio, following a hazardous chemical spill last month, experts say. But "psychosomatic" does not mean that the symptoms are made up, according to experts....
These are heady times for otolaryngologists, those who study and treat disorders of the nose. It was not always so. Darwin regarded smell as a rudimentary sense because its use in hunting, detecting danger, and other primal activities is now far less critical. And in...
There are bananas, and then there are banana-flavored things. Laffy Taffy is my personal favorite, but Runts, Hi-Chews, and jelly beans also capture perhaps not this fruit’s essence but an idea of it. Where did this banana-like flavor come from? The popular narrative is a tale...
On the way to the Institute of Contemporary Art, I passed Monell Chemical Senses Center, where the great golden nose of the sculpture Face Fragment inhales Market Street. It was the perfect preparation for Sissel Tolaas’s RE_____. Tolaas, a Norwegian researcher and artist, has spent...