Severe air pollution in Mexico City could be harming resident's sense of smell.

Although the human sense of smell is feeble compared to that of many animals, it is still very acute. We can recognise thousands of different smells, and we are able to detect odours even in infinitesimal quantities.

Our smelling function is carried out by two small odour-detecting patches – made up of about five or six million yellowish cells – high up in the nasal passages.

For comparison, a rabbit has 100 million of these olfactory receptors, a ...

ScienceDaily (May 29, 2008) — Is the smell of almonds closer to that of roses or bananas? Weizmann Institute scientists have now answered that question (roses) by showing for the first time that smells can be mapped and the relative distance between various odors determined. Their findings, which appeared recently in Nature Methods, may help scientists to unravel the basic laws underlying our sense of smell, as ...

The Monell Center is a non-profit independent scientific institute dedicated to interdisciplinary basic research on the senses of taste, smell, and chemosensory irritation.

To see research done by this institute, visit http://www.monell.org/