Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and their collaborators have shown that receptors in the noses of mice exposed to certain smells during life are different to genetically similar mice that lived without those smells. Published today in eLife, the study found it is this combination of genetics and experience that gives each individual a unique sense of smell.

— Read more at Genetics, environment combine to give everyone a unique sense of smell at Science Daily.

These measurements are among the first to quantify the perception of odor mixtures, said Ann-Sophie Barwich, a philosopher of science at Columbia University who specializes in olfaction. "Most scientific studies concern individual molecules because it's easier and much more controllable," she said. But it's well known that an aroma is greater than the sum of its parts. There's "this emergent property in the brain that they can combine and make up a potato chip even though individually, they smell like toast and rotten cabbage."

— Read more at Do You Smell What I Smell? (the subtitle: A new study with potato chips suggests we all perceive scents differently, but culture tells us to agree when naming them) at Inside Science.

But there is hope. New research by the University of Dresden’s Smell and Taste Clinic found that the part of the brain responsible for processing smell can grow with exercise, sort of how bench pressing pumps your pecs. Even those with just an average sense of smell can increase the size of their olfactory bulbs via a regimen of trying out four aromas, twice a day, for about 30 seconds each.

— Read more at How to Improve Your Sense of Smell—and Why You’d Want To at Bloomberg.

They also had participants in a different experiment take a whiff of a historic book from 1928, and were initially surprised to find that many of the people described it as “chocolate-y.” That ended up making sense, in a way, they said, because from a “chemical point of view,” coffee and cocoa contain “identical” compounds to those in decaying paper. Other descriptions included, “coffee,” “old,” “rotten socks,” and “mothballs.”

— Researchers at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage have developed an "Historic Book Odour Wheel". Read more at The Odor ‘Wheel’ Decoding the Smell of Old Books at Atlas Obscura.