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Meet Olly, a "web connected smell robot" that converts tweets, Facebook notifications, RSS feeds - whatever you want - into smells:
Olly has a removable section in the back which you can fill with any smell you like. It could be essential oils, a slice of fruit, your partner's perfume or even a drop of gin. [...] Olly is stackable, so if you have more than one, you can assign each one to a different service with a different smell. Connect one to Twitter and another to your calendar. Before you know it, you'll have a networked internet smell centre.
Now, Neatoramanauts, what should Neatorama smell like? Link - via The Next Web
Oh sure, blame it on the plant! No word on where this photo was taken, as it was posted without a source. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
One way mammals are different from most animals is their large brains, in relation to the rest of the body. A new study says that the larger brains were developed for the sense of smell. CT scans of 190-million-year-old mammal fossils indicate that much of the the brain growth was in the area dedicated to the sense of smell.
“We studied the outside features of these fossils for years,” said Tim Rowe, professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences and director of the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, and lead author of the new study. “But until now, studying the brains meant destroying the fossils. With CT technology, we can have our cake and eat it, too.”
According to the study, other factors leading to larger brains in early mammals included greater tactile sensitivity and enhanced motor coordination. Fossils of some of the earliest mammals, such as Hadrocodium, bore full coats of fur, explaining the need for enhanced tactile sensitivity.
Researchers scanned a dozen early mammal fossil and more than 200 current species over ten years for this study. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
(Image credit: Matt Colbert)
Researchers in Japan are developing an ink-jet printer that can embed paper with particular smells:
In the most common type of ink-jet, a pulse of current heats a coil of wire, creating bubbles that force a small volume of ink down a tube and onto the page at high speed. The Keio team use the same hardware to squirt scent. Working with printer maker Canon, they converted the guts of an off-the-shelf printer into what they call an olfactory display, capable of rapidly switching between four aromas.
They found that a standard Canon ink-jet can eject as little as a picolitre of scent droplets in 0.7 milliseconds. That is too little to smell, but pulses 100 milliseconds long produced perceivable aromas of lemon, vanilla, lavender, apple, cinnamon, grapefruit and mint. Better still, a 100-millisecond ink-jet burst dissipates fast, at least in the team’s small-scale experiment. After an average of two human breaths it has gone, allowing a different smell to be activated.
Link via Fanboy | Photo by Flickr user CarbonNYC used under Creative Commons license
We’re coming one step closer to smell-o-vision, and it’s great news for meat-eaters. Actually, the more I think about it, I’m not sure it’s great news for anybody.
A new Billboard on River Highway in North Carolina not only shows a gigantic piece of steak on an even more giant fork, but it actually pumps out the smell of steak for passing drivers to suffer through.
Let’s hope the cabbage farmers don’t get the same idea…
Image and Story via Gizmodo
A mouse doesn’t have to have experience with a cat to be afraid, be very afraid. But they must have the nose to pick up the chemical signals of danger.
Mice have a specialized organ in their noses that picks up chemical signals, called the vomeronasal organ, which helps them detect pheromones emitted by other mice. These mice pheromones have a direct effect on behavior–most obviously in the realms of mating and fighting. In this new study, published in the journal Cell, neurobiologist Lisa Stowers decided to investigate whether the vomeronasal organ was capable of picking up signals from other species as well.
The reseachers took normal lab mice and mutant mice with inactive vomeronasal organs and presented them with cotton balls laced with predator smells, including cat saliva and rat urine. The normal mice backed into the corners of their cages as if trying to escape a predator’s attention, but the mutant mice showed no signs of concern. The mutants were so relaxed that they didn’t even react when a live but anesthetized rat was placed in their cages.
By process of elimination, the scientists were able to isolate some proteins that spelled “cat” to the mice’s vomeronasal organs. Link
Natalie Dee of the webcomic Married to the Sea organized and categorized elemental smells into a periodic table. Sure, you can probably think of other smells, but they’re really just compounds of these, right?
Link via Geekologie | Natalie Dee’s Website
The scintillating smell of yummy, oh-so-delicious bacon or the faint smell of throw-up? Well, duh! No wonder we prefer the smell of bacon to newborn baby, according to a survey of thousands of Brits by OnePoll:
TOP 20 SMELLS WHICH MAKE BRITS HAPPY
1. Freshly baked bread
2. Clean sheets
3. Freshly mown grass
4. Fresh flowers
5. Freshly ground coffee
6. Fresh air after rain fall
7. Vanilla
8. Chocolate
9. Fish and chips
10. Bacon frying
11. Roast dinner
12. Babies
13. Lemon zest
14. Lavender
15. Petrol
16. Apple and blackberry crumble in the oven
17. A freshly lit match
18. Roses
19. Party poppers
20. Rubber tyres
Freshly lit match? Petrol? Rubber tires? What's up with that?! Link
Katie Liljenquist of Brigham Young University led a study that suggests that clean-smelling environments subtly encourage people to avoid abberant behavior. From Science Daily:
The study titled “The Smell of Virtue” was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.
The first experiment evaluated fairness.
As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic “trust game.” Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.
Link via Instapundit | Image: flickr user rq?
Matt Kaplan writes in National Geographic about a new study that suggests a link between a person’s olfactory sensitivity and awareness of the emotions of other people. Denise Chen of Rice University in Texas led the research process:
Women have a more uniform sense of smell than men, and are also thought to be more sensitive to emotional cues.
So Chen and graduate student Wen Zhou presented 22 pairs of young women living in university dormitories with identical t-shirts to sleep in.
After being worn for one night, the t-shirts were later presented to the same women to smell.
Each woman was given three t-shirts and informed that one of the shirts had been worn by her roommate, and that the other two had been worn by other university students.
The subjects were asked to identify the shirt that had been worn by their roommate.
The women then took a series of recognized emotional-sensitivity tests.
Subjects who correctly selected the t-shirt worn by their roommates tended to score high on the emotional tests.
Link | Photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Maureen Burns in Rugby, England has a 10-year-old mixed breed collie named Max who probably saved her life. Max started actingly strangely, sniffing his owner’s breath and rubbing against her right breast.
Mrs. Burns discovered a lump but it did not show up on a hospital mammogram. She convinced doctors to do a biopsy and sure enough, the tumor was malignant.
She’s had surgery to remove the lump, followed by radiation treatment, and her prognosis is excellent. Mrs. Burns is convinced that she is alive today because of her dog’s keen sense of smell.
“It was his peculiar reaction that alerted me to the fact that something was wrong. At first I thought he was just getting old, he was not so playful and his eyes were sad. He’d sniff my breath in an odd way — I even asked my husband Roger if I had halitosis.”
– Maureen Burns
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
And together, we smell like a quesadilla? OK, maybe not. But a company in Geneva that researches flavors and smells for the food and perfume industry did find that men and women smell like those respective foods when they sweat. Women release a compound containing sulphur that smells like onion when mixed with bacteria like that found in armpits, and men release high levels of a fatty acid that smells like cheese when mixed with the same bacteria.
Weird.
