Sweet Smell of Success: Human Nose Discerns Giant Array of Odors

What does your nose know? A lot more than you might expect. Scientists studying the breadth of people's sense of smell said on Thursday the human nose can discern far more than the 10,000 different odors long cited as the outer limit of our olfactory abilities. They concluded that the human nose can differentiate an almost infinite number of smells - more than a trillion - based on their extrapolation of findings in laboratory experiments in which volunteers sniffed a large...

© La Voix de l'Amérique - jeudi 20 mars 2014