20% of people have impaired smell. Almost no cookbooks account for that. #LongCOVID #anosmia Rediscovering Flavor, a new type of cookbook, changes that — science, practical guidance, and recipes co-created with smell loss patients. Preorder open now. 🧪 📖 🍽️
Rediscovering Flavor: A Practical Guide for Smell Loss
Rediscovering Flavor: A Practical Guide for Smell Loss: 9783032080554: Medicine & Health Science Books @ Amazon.com
amazon.com
Excited to see our paper describing a stereotyped receptor map for smell (led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social ) out in the world! See below for short thread with open access link to paper www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/s...
Scientists Unveil ‘Long Lost’ Map for Smell
nytimes.com
🎉Congratulations #AChemS2026 Career Award Winners! Don't miss their award presentations tonight at 7:30 PM.
Can we predict what a molecule smells like from its structure? A new exchange in @ChemSenses debates this question. 🧪 @kingfunk.bsky.social
1/3 The humble glass jar is a workhorse in olfactory research, but comes w/ hidden problems: - Unknown headspace concentration - Concentration dilution by ambient air These add noise to odor measurements. Our preprint introduces something new, something bag.🧪 @jmainland.bsky.social & Matt Andres
Odor Sampling Bags Enable Reliable Delivery of Controlled Odor Concentrations
Precise control of odorant concentration is essential for reliable olfactory research, yet existing odorant delivery methods often suffer from solvent interactions and dilution from ambient air, limiting stimulus consistency in olfactory research. We developed an odor sampling bag system using Nalophan plastic to create a closed headspace with air as the carrier medium, eliminating solvent-related variability and ambient air dilution. In two independent experiments, 15 trained panelists each rated the perceived intensity of seven concentrations of benzaldehyde and 2-heptanone using both gas-sampling bags and glass jars. Bags produced higher maximum perceptual intensities (p < 0.001) and greater test-retest reliability than jars (Experiment 1: r = 0.89 vs. 0.81, p < 0.001; Experiment 2: r = 0.86 vs. 0.72, p < 0.001). Notably, the two tested odorants showed different maximum intensities in bags (p < 0.001) but not jars (p = 0.85), suggesting bags better preserve odorant-specific concentration differences. Photoionization detector measurements confirmed stable headspace concentrations over time, comparable to industry-standard Tedlar bags. This cost-effective approach offers improved stimulus control for olfactory psychophysics research. ### Competing Interest Statement Joel D. Mainland serves on the scientific advisory board of Osmo Labs, PBC and receives compensation for these activities. National Institutes of Health, https://ror.org/01cwqze88, F32 DC020380, T32 DC000014, U19 NS112953, R01 DC017757, R01 DC021663
biorxiv.org
High-Fidelity Tuning of Olfactory Mixture Distances in the Perceptual Space of Smell Through a Community Effort https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.13.694160v1
Cool new post-doctoral position in my lab on the area of human social chemosignaling. What role does odor and olfaction play in shaping social behavior? (Here also is a 10-minute video about this new line of work in the Human Nature Lab: humannaturelab.net/making-of/so... .) Please share.
Yale University, Sociology - Human Nature Lab
Job #AJO30989, Postdoctoral Associate Position in Biosocial Science, Sociology - Human Nature Lab, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, US
academicjobsonline.org
Scientists at Firmenich buff.ly/jq1TyYa and now Givaudan buff.ly/u2gP5Ow report several olfactory receptors that appear to map cleanly onto specific odor notes (earthy, grapefruit, woody, etc.). 🧪
Decoding human olfaction by high heterologous expression of odorant receptors detecting signature odorants
Emter et al. improve in vitro expression of odorant receptors (OR) by engineering the C-terminal domain. With a library of engineered ORs, they discover ORs for signature odorants, which they relate…
cell.com
New preprint from the very talented Bob Pellegrino! 🧪
Bob Pellegrino@kingfunk.bsky.social · 12mo ago1/5 Odor intensity isn’t just about concentration! We have a new preprint to prove it: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... In cahoots with @jmainland.bsky.social, @alexkoulakov.bsky.social, Rick Gerkin, Khristina Samoilova and others not on bluesky. 🧪 Which of these molecules smells stronger?
Analysis of over 21,000 individuals identifies seven new genetic regions linked to odor perception, with some effects differing between men and women and connections to Alzheimer's risk. doi.org/g9vn4j
How do our genes influence our sense of smell? Study finds sex-specific effects
How we smell is not just a matter of taste—it's also influenced by our genes. An international team of researchers led by scientists from Leipzig University has conducted the largest genetic study to date on the human sense of smell.
medicalxpress.com
In May we launched the DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025. The leaderboard round closed yesterday and 71 teams submitted predictions! Even if you missed the leaderboard phase, you can still submit a final model for the August 8th deadline.
Joel Mainland@jmainland.bsky.social · last yr.With a contemporary smartphone, capturing, transmitting, and replicating sounds and visuals is a breeze, yet replicating scents remains elusive. If you want to change this, consider joining the 2025 DREAM Olfaction Challenge at www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn6.... @oldbap.bsky.social
With a contemporary smartphone, capturing, transmitting, and replicating sounds and visuals is a breeze, yet replicating scents remains elusive. If you want to change this, consider joining the 2025 DREAM Olfaction Challenge at www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn6.... @oldbap.bsky.social
DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025
'DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025' (Synapse ID: syn64743570) is a project on Synapse. Synapse is a platform for supporting scientific collaborations centered around shared biomed...
synapse.org
After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health. My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology.
Check out our review comparing typical experimental to naturally-occurring odor concentrations. You might be surprised. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/1... Thanks to Matt and Betty for asking me to take part!
Recalibrating Olfactory Neuroscience to the Range of Naturally Occurring Odor Concentrations
Sensory systems enable organisms to detect and respond to environmental signals relevant for their survival and reproduction. A crucial aspect of any sensory signal is its intensity; understanding how...
jneurosci.org
A long post about what’s happening to the science funding agencies in the US and why. As mentioned, this one just kept getting longer even as I kept stripping curse words from it. www.science.org/content/blog...
What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF
science.org
SOME GOOD NEWS ABOUT NIH FUNDING Closed sessions of institute and center Advisory Counsel meetings are now permitted. This is where grant applications are discussed and approved for potential funding. Open sessions where there are public presentations and discussions are still not allowed.
a man with glasses and a black shirt says " it 's a small step that really goes a long way "
ALT: a man with glasses and a black shirt says " it 's a small step that really goes a long way "
media.tenor.com
Alexander Fjaeldstad and I have a new chapter in the book Smell, Taste, Eat: The Role of the Chemical Senses in Eating Behaviour, edited by @LorenzoDStafford. Lots of great insights here. From our chapter, it’s clear that smell loss and its impact on ingestion remain vastly underexplored."
The Effect of Olfactory Disorder (and Other Chemosensory Disorders) on Perception, Acceptance, and Consumption of Food
People with changes in the overall sensory experience of food often complain of taste disturbances, although the problem is normally caused by the loss of aroma in the food (thus an olfactory disorder...
link.springer.com
doi.org/10.1073/pnas... Olfaction in spiders. We found that the wall pore sensilla in spiders look similar from the outside to those of insects, but differ ultrastructurally in various ways. Independent evolution! 🧪
Olfaction with legs—Spiders use wall-pore sensilla for pheromone detection | PNAS
The sense of smell is a central sensory modality of most terrestrial species. However, our knowledge of olfaction is based on vertebrates and insec...
doi.org
Our DeepNose paper is in arxiv. In it, we present an equivariant CNN which can predict human olfactory perception based on molecular shapes, including mixtures. Comments/suggestions are very welcome. arxiv.org/abs/2412.08747
DeepNose: An Equivariant Convolutional Neural Network Predictive Of Human Olfactory Percepts
The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filter...
arxiv.org
A background in physics, and his own curiosity, have helped Dmitry Rinberg tackle the complexities of the neuroscience of smell. More on Rinberg sniffing out the mysteries of olfaction. By Lina Zeldovich www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sn...
The core figure, showing review counts from Publons data, indeed shows the intended effect but buries the lede: No one uses Publons anymore.
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2y agoI would have to spend a lot more time with the methods of this paper to know what to make of it, but the conclusion they draw is amusing. Giving people awards for peer reviewing lots of papers leads them to review fewer papers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Important paper! www.biorxiv.org/content/bior... Im not sure the Discussion fully delineates its radical implications. No more... * Place cells * Grid cells, splitter cells, border cells * Mirror neurons * Reward neurons * Conflict cells (continued)
biorxiv.org
New paper in Nature showing how smell works in humans - no quantum woo involved, surprise surprise. Terrific stuff from Claire de March, Hiro Matsunami and others. Summarised here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Engineered receptors show how humans tell countless odour molecules apart
The structures of engineered odorant receptors.
nature.com
My lab is looking for a postdoc to record lots of neurons while mice sniff each other. Basically I think that will tell us something more interesting about sensory processing than blasting pineapple smell into their noses. You don’t have to be an olfactionist to apply. apply.interfolio.com/139308