Some swear that hanger, the intense anger or uncomfortable emotions that can come with being hungry, is real. Some people say it’s all in your head. It turns out, they both may be right. What we eat, or don’t eat, affects our brains and emotions in...
Recently, Debajit Saha, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan State University, and his team tapped into the odor-sensing circuitry of the locust brain to detect the scent signatures of human oral cancers. Saha previously used locusts for sniffing out bombs,4 making the transition...
Newborn female mice that sniff odours from adult female mice live 8 per cent longer than expected, possibly because their puberty gets delayed. — Click here for the full article....
Turkey is not my thing, but one dish I cannot live without on Thanksgiving is my mom’s Snowy Mashed Potatoes. The recipe is more sour cream and cream cheese than potato, which may be why it’s so delectable. I start looking forward to these potatoes...
Eating is a multi-sensory experience. Before food gets near your mouth, you see it, smell it, and maybe even hear it as you move it around a plate or feel its texture between your fingertips. You taste it when it hits your tongue, listen to...
The human brain registers at least four classes of compounds as the scent we call musk. Structurally, these compounds look nothing alike, yet they smell the same: gamy, rich, and leathery. Researchers at Duke University and Kao Corporation, a chemical and consumer products company in Tokyo,...
Nancy Bonini studies Parkinson’s and other human brain diseases by probing the genes of a lab animal smaller than the head of a pin: the fruit fly. Gary Beauchamp made fundamental discoveries about the human senses of taste and smell, showing how we can be weaned...
Growing up in the U.S., the scent and flavor of vanilla are practically baked into our childhoods thanks to sugar cookies, candy, frosting, whipped cream, pound cake, and beyond. And long before we duked it out with our elementary school classmates over a single glazed...
Candy corn — invented ages ago in Philadelphia, according to legend — may be even more polarizing than that other autumnal aroma, pumpkin spice. The police department in Fort Collins, Colo., once said (only partly in jest?) that this tricolored staple of Halloween should be a...
Researchers have long known that the chemical structure of the molecules we inhale influences what we smell. But in most cases, no one can figure out exactly how. Scientists have deciphered a few specific rules that govern how the nose and brain perceive an airborne...