SOCIAL: quirky science story for the day

[Adrian.Cotter at sierraclub.org]

next time you have to track that wanted criminal through the woods... you
don't have to call out the dogs apparently.


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| Human Sense of Smell Underestimated                                |
|   from the we-got-something-of-a-hounddog dept.                    |
|   posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 19, @13:31 (Science)       |
|   http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/19/1753256      |
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Benjamin Long writes to note a study, by a team of neuroscientists and
engineers, that demonstrated that [0]humans can follow a scent trail — an
ability that most had assumed only animals possessed. Furthermore, the
study demonstrated for the first time that humans make use of
differential information from the two nostrils. The researchers
blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a
chocolate-scented trail. Here is the [1] abstract of the paper in Nature
Neuroscience. From the article: "The humans, however, still sniffed much
more slowly than dogs, which may partially account for canines' greater
efficiency at scent tracking. [A commentator] says that despite their
relatively sluggish speed, the fact that subjects improved with training
is noteworthy. 'I think that shows the effect of our distinctively
different behavior in actually using this sense,' he says. 'The dog [has]
been doing this its whole life, and humans [were] just asked to plunge in
the first time they've ever done it.'"

Discuss this story at:
    http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/12/19/1753256

Links:
    0.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=97CBB343-E7F2-99DF-3479369AA91D844B

    1. http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn1819.html