Search
1mins
After three or four odors are blended together, even the best noses in the world have a difficult time distinguishing one original scent from another.
3mins
"There are some things that simply disgust us in a very, very instinctive, deep kind of way. And there are other things that we clearly learn to find either good […]
5mins
The cause of the so-called "Proustian experience" of recalling a vivid memory through taste is well documented, but its cause continues to confound scientists.
3mins
What’s remarkable about the olfactory system is that from the outside world to the highest level of brain tissue there are only two synapses.
1mins
Our olfactory system’s methods of molecular recognition provide a model for understanding all kinds of other receptors in our bodies.
4mins
Olfaction may be both the most primitive and the most sophisticated of our five senses.
2010 marks the first year that the U.S. will have a national strategy and implementation plan for combatting HIV/AIDS domestically.
5mins
A step-by-step explanation of how flavor makes it from our mouths to our brains, as well as a "shocking" interactive experiment for you to try at home.
2mins
Taste refers to our five sensitivities — sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami — while flavor is a "hedonic" sense involving smell, texture, and expectation.
27mins
A conversation with the chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences.
While online tools for personal finance management like Mint and Outright make it increasingly easier to keep track of our "digital money," there's something to be said for the dwindling […]
It’s human nature to try to understand something new by comparing it to something we already know. We always interpret the present based on past experience. But when we make […]
The special bond that often forms between people and both domesticated and wild animals maybe be, paradoxically, part of what makes us human, says Dave Munger.
The United States clearly is like other countries in some respects and unlike them in other respects. Exceptionalism thus isn't of much use as an analytic construct.
Good metaphors are expansive; they compare something we don’t understand, to something we do. You see in a new light both the object of interest and the substrate you rest it on.
A constant news cycle of horrific bullying stories has some parents frequently intervening in their children's social lives, but they may be dooming their kids in the process.
Ronald Reagan's tax simplification measures in the 1980s are to blame for America's high healthcare costs, says The Atlantic's Megan McArdle. Especially the employer tax credit.
What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?
As anyone who has walked through an Ikea knows, stores are increasingly designed to draw your interest into the depths of an ecstatic shopping experience.
People's predilections for promiscuity lie partially in their DNA, according to a new study. The researchers are careful to point out that transgressors are not off the hook.