The nose knows?…
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have discovered “olfactory white,” the nasal equivalent of white noise, Live Science reports:
Almost any given smell in the real world comes from a mixture of compounds. Humans are good at telling these mixtures apart (it’s hard to mix up the smell of coffee with the smell of roses, for example), but we’re bad at picking individual components out of those mixtures…
Mixing multiple wavelegths that span the human visual range equally makes white light; mixing multiple frequencies that span the range of human hearing equally makes the whooshing hum of white noise. Neurobiologist Noam Sobel from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and his colleagues wanted to find out whether a similar phenomenon happens with smelling…
Spoiler alert: it does. Find out how– and learn more about the most mysterious of our senses at Live Science. (And download the paper from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
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As we reach for our hankies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1858 that Philadelphia tinsmith John Landis Mason received the patent for Mason Jars. With it’s threaded mouth, metal lid, rubber gasket ring– and the hermetic seal that they can form– the Mason Jar quickly became a staple for food preservation (usually, and ironically, called “canning”). While they are still used to that end, they have more lately flourished as collectables.
A Mason Jar in use