Scent

Scientists have discovered that the giant panda, long considered a bit of a loner, has a surprisingly active social life, communicating with friends and family in a way that's akin to sharing status updates on Facebook.

A new computer-trained scent model has done better than humans at identifying odors. In analyzing 500,000 potential odor molecules that had never before been synthesized, it also handily did work that would take 70 person-years to complete.

Our sense of smell seems to be the least understood. To help shed some light on the system, researchers at Rockefeller University have taken the first cryo-electron microscope images of an olfactory receptor at work in the simple system of an insect.

Although we've already heard about plants that mimic the smell of rotten meat in order to attract scavengers, botanists have now discovered that a certain plant focuses that concept – it mimics the smell of dead beetles, to draw in one type of fly.

​It's important for us to be able to detect odors such as those emitted by spoiled food. However, what if there were a low-cost "electronic nose" that was better at detecting those things, providing us with an earlier warning? That's what's being developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.