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...
Zombies are just regular people, or at least they were before — well, you know. With that in mind and with Halloween approaching, The Washington Post asked experts in several fields to address some zombie mysteries based on what is known about human bodies and brains....
Dr. Nancy Rawson is a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and serves on the Science and Medical Advisory Council for the Smell and Taste Association of North America (STANA). She discusses the long-term COVID side effect of loss of taste and/or...
It’s been over 2 years since the pandemic began, and COVID-19 still dominates small talk. Sharing personal experiences with the disease was also how the conversation started when Christine Kelly, who lives in London, spoke with C&EN: “I got it three times,” she says. “The...
Olfaction has always been our underdog sense. It’s both primitive and complex, which makes it hard to study and harder still to transfer to our increasingly digital existence. Our scientific understanding of how smell works lags so far behind our grasp of hearing and (especially)...
If the taste of kale makes you screw up your face, you are not alone: researchers have observed foetuses pull a crying expression when exposed to the greens in the womb. — Click here to read the full article....
Over the weekend, Monell Faculty Member Guillaume de Lartigue, attended the 2022 Europhysiology Meeting, where his lab was awarded the prize for the best Acta Physiologica paper of 2021. Held in Copenhagen, Europhysiology 2022 is a product of the ongoing partnership between the Physiological Society, the Scandinavian...