For years, Japanese retailer Felissimo has been giving us weird and wonderful cat-themed products we could never even dream of, including hand cream that smells like a cat’s paw, lip gloss that makes you feel like you’ve just kissed a cat’s nose, and fabric water filled with the fragrance of fluffy cat foreheads.

Now the creative team at Felissimo is continuing on their plight to capture the scent of an animal with a brand new item from their humorous You+More brand, which features the smell of a pet’s belly.

— Yep, they're scratch and sniff cards with the scent of cat and dog (Shiba Inu, to be exact) belly. Read more at Japanese company creates scratch and sniff cards that smell like the bellies of cats and dogs at RocketNews24. (And here is the cat paw hand cream at the Felissimo site.)

The first published case of the behavior was in a 1989 Lancet letter describing a border collie–Doberman mix who sniffed and bit so aggressively at a mole on her owner’s leg (even through her trousers) that the owner was moved to check with her doctor, who diagnosed a malignant melanoma. [...] In the decades since, studies have supported the claim that dogs can identify cancers by their smells, which are caused by the volatile organic chemicals in the waste products the cells release.

— Read more at How Dogs’ Sensitive Noses Could Change Cancer Diagnosis at Slate.

Biologists who study the malaria mosquito's 'nose' have found that it contains a secondary set of odor sensors that seem to be specially tuned to detect humans. The discovery could aid efforts to figure out how the insects target humans and develop a preference for them.

If you could peer into the mind of a female mosquito, you would find that her world is dominated by smell rather than sight or sound.

— Read more at For female mosquitoes, two sets of odor sensors are better than one at PhysOrg.

Tests on a type of cabbage species called field mustard, a close relative of oilseed rape, showed that when pollinated by bumblebees, the plants grew three inches taller than with hover flies in just nine generations.

They also flowered a day earlier and had double the fragrance. And when placed on ultraviolet light, they had more colours which bees can see.

— Another reason to worry about bees, in case you didn't have enough already. Read more at Bumblebees make flowers grow bigger and smell sweeter at The Telegraph.

The bat family [Emballonuridae], also called sac-winged bats, have bag-shaped glands in each wing that are open to the air. During courtship, males wave their wings in front of the females for a few seconds, dispersing the scent that comes out of these bags.

[...] The team discovered each animal emits an intense odor that broadcasts the chemical composition of what is known as their major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, genotype.

— Read more at Bats Use Body Odor to Sniff Out the Best Mates at Scientific American.