Medical research

Can you smell through your lungs?

It was always thought that olfactory receptors' sole bodily function was to smell, and could only be found inside a nose. But now a new study, published in Frontiers in Physiology, has found two olfactory receptors in human ...

Neuroscience

New role of adenosine in the regulation of REM sleep discovered

The regulation and function of sleep is one of the biggest black boxes of today's brain science. A new paper published online on August 2 in the journal Brain Structure & Function finds that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep ...

Neuroscience

Cannabinoid receptor activates spermatozoa

Biologists from Bochum and Bonn have detected a cannabinoid receptor in spermatozoa. Endogenous cannabinoids that occur in both the male and the female genital tract activate the spermatozoa: they trigger the so-called acrosome ...

Neuroscience

A 'time switch' in the brain improves sense of smell

When the brain processes olfactory stimuli, it differentiates between similar smells using subtly modulated signals. Brain examinations and behavioral studies in mice have now shown that neurons with inhibiting characteristics ...

Neuroscience

The relentless dynamism of the adult brain

Scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS were able to make real-time observations over a period of several months that reveal how new adult-born neurons are formed and evolve in the olfactory bulb of mice. They made ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Witnesses can catch criminals by smell

Move over sniffer dogs, people who witnessed a crime are able to identify criminals by their smell. Police lineups normally rely on sight, but nose-witnesses can be just as reliable as eye-witnesses, new research published ...

Neuroscience

Scientists discover a new protein crucial to normal forgetting

When Elvis released his first number-one country hit "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" in 1955, the song was more correct scientifically than he could have imagined. Humans need to forget as part of the brain's system for ...

Neuroscience

Fish courtship pheromone uses the brain's smell pathway

Research at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan has revealed that a molecule involved in fish reproduction activates the brain via the nose. The pheromone is released by female zebrafish and sensed by smell receptors ...

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