About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the future of humanity.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/your-sense-of-smell-is-actually-pretty-amazing/
Apr 27, 2017...
Our sense of smell is incredibly fine tuned. Pixabay
The following is an excerpt from FLAVOR: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense by Bob Holmes:
Our noses are a much more powerful tool than most of us realize—more sensitive, in many cases, than the most expensive piece of laboratory equipment.
Case in point: If you had happened to cross the University of California at Berkeley campus in the early 2000s, you might have noticed an undergraduate—blindfolded, earplugged, and wearing coveralls, knee pads, and heavy gloves—crawling across the lawn with nose to ground, zigzagging slightly back and forth. Was he rolling a peanut across the campus with his nose as punishment for some arbitrary offense during a fraternity initiation? Was he groveling before more senior fraternity brothers? No. He was following a scent trail laid down by a chocolate-soaked string—and doing it almost perfectly.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/not-to-be-sniffed-at/
Dec 09, 2010...
For those people who have no other means of communication, sniffing could provide liberation
To suffer from locked-in syndrome—to be mentally alert but physically paralysed—is one of the worst fates imaginable. Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute, in Israel, may have found a way to make this fate slightly more bearable.
He starts from the observation that even those who are otherwise paralysed can sniff. Sniffing is regulated by the soft palate, a flap of tissue in the back of the throat that directs the flow of air through the mouth and nose. The soft palate is controlled by cranial nerves—in other words, nerves that do not pass through the spinal cord. So spinal damage, a common cause of paralysis, does not affect these nerves. Nor does brain damage, unless it is to the exact part of the brain that controls the soft palate.
Feb 24, 2020... Think about the last time you had a cold. Think how weird it felt to not be able to smell or taste anything just because your nose was clogged up. That is, to an extent, the life of people with anosmia: the term for not being able to smell. Some patients are born with it. For others, it is the result of a neurological diseases, and for others still, it comes from a surgery that removed or damaged the olfactory bulb (OB). For a long time, it was believed that without an OB, a person would not be able to smell, but a team of researchers in Israel found patients who might prove that notion wrong.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-june-2015/
Jun 29, 2015...
Normal human colonic crypts. SMOC-2 expression (red) in the colonic stem cells demonstrates that these cells are localized in the bottoms of the crypts. Bars represent 100 micrometers (left) and 50 micrometers (right)
Recent Weizmann Institute studies are revealing a complex picture of cancer progression in which certain genes that drive tumor growth in the earlier stages get suppressed in later stages – taking a step back to move forward. Published in Oncogene, current research from the lab of Prof. Avri Ben-Ze’ev of the Department of Molecular Cell Biology suggests that the tumor cells at the invasive front of later-stage human colorectal cancer may take an even bigger step back: Some of their gene expression patterns are shared with those of healthy intestinal stem cells.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/placing-that-smell/
Apr 01, 2011...
(l-r) Drs. Hadas Lipid and Sagit Shushan, Prof. Noam Sobel, and Drs. Anton Plotkin and Elad Schneidman. Smelling good
Certain smells cause us pleasure or disgust — this might seem to be a matter of personal idiosyncrasy. But new research at the Weizmann Institute shows that odors can be rated on a scale of pleasantness, and this turns out to be an organizing principle for the way we experience smell. The findings, which appeared recently in Nature Neuroscience, reveal a correlation between the response of certain nerves to particular scents and the pleasantness of those scents. On the basis of this correlation, the researchers could tell by measuring the nerve responses whether a subject found a smell pleasant or unpleasant.
Jan 17, 2011...
Click here to watch the video from Voice of America.
A new study in Israel finds that a woman’s tears have a physical and psychological effect on men. The scientists involved in the study say they were surprised that tears lower a man’s sex drive. Some women here in Washington are surprised with the findings, too.
A woman’s tears not only invoke romance in Hollywood, Mamie Parker says she’s experienced first hand what her tears can do to a man. “If I cry they just seem to be more affectionate or touchy-feely and in some cases more sexy,” she said.
Mar 17, 2019...
Taking a deep breath in through the nose appears to help the human brain create a laser-like focus on visuospatial tasks, according to a new study by a team of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. This paper, “Human Non-Olfactory Cognition Phase-Locked with Inhalation,” was published March 11 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
As the title of this electroencephalography-based study suggests, the researchers found that breathing in through the nose—without the intention of sniffing a scent or catching a whiff of something based on the olfactory-based sense of smell—synchronized EEG brain activity on a wavelength that helped to optimize visuospatial acuity. In many situations, survival of the fittest requires a perfect blend of nasal inhalations, laser-like mental focus, and quick thinking.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/autism-and-the-smell-of-fear/
Nov 27, 2017...
Skydivers provided the smell of fear for investigating how autistic men react to odors
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—November 27, 2017— Autism typically involves the inability to read social cues. We most often associate this with visual difficulty in interpreting facial expression, but new research at the Weizmann Institute of Science suggests that the sense of smell may also play a central role in autism. As reported in Nature Neuroscience, Institute researchers show that people on the autism spectrum have different – and even opposite – reactions to odors produced by the human body. These odors are ones that we are unaware of smelling, but which are, nonetheless, a part of the nonverbal communication that takes place between people, and which have been shown to affect our moods and behavior. Their findings may provide a unique window on autism, including, possibly, on the underlying developmental malfunctions in the disorder.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/noses-agree-when-genes-see-eye-to-eye/
Jun 29, 2015... Two decades ago, Swiss researchers had women smell the tee shirts that various men had slept in for two nights. Turned out that if women liked the aroma of a particular shirt, the guy who’d worn it was likely to have genetically coded immunity that was unlike the woman’s. Well the effect isn't just limited to sweaty shirts. Turns out we all smell things a little differently – you pick up a note of cloves, say, where I smell something more soapy – and that too gives clues to our degree of genetic similarity.
Jan 15, 2017...
Credit: akindo via iStock
How do humans and other animals find their way from A to B? This apparently simple question has no easy answer. But after decades of extensive research, a picture of how the brain encodes space and enables us to navigate through it is beginning to emerge. Earlier, neuroscientists had found that the mammalian brain contains at least three different cell types, which cooperate to encode neural representations of an animal’s location and movements.
©2023 American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science
