In the study, six male and six female donors provided odour samples without fragrance, wearing their own fragrance, and wearing an assigned fragrance. Then 296 female and 131 male participants - average age mid-20s - were asked to choose, which ones were from the same individual. Psychology PhD researcher Caroline Allen, of the University of Stirling and lead author of the report, said participants matched a person's body odour with their chosen perfume "at above chance levels".

— Read more at Study links people's natural scent to chosen perfumes : Your favourite perfumes always smell like... you! at Daily Times.

Recent research found that a diminished sense of smell predicted frontal lobe damage in 231 soldiers who had suffered blast-related injuries on the battlefield. In the Department of Defense study led by Michael Xydakis of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, subjects with low scores on a smell test were three times as likely to show evidence of frontal lobe damage during brain imaging than those whose sense of smell was normal.

— Read more at Smell Tests Could One Day Reveal Head Trauma and Neurodegenerative Disease at Scientific American.

I should think we might fairly gauge the future of biological science, centuries ahead, by estimating the time it will take to reach a complete, comprehensive understanding of odor. It may not seem a profound enough problem to dominate all the life sciences, but it contains, piece by piece, all the mysteries. Smoke: tobacco burning, coal smoke, wood-fire smoke, leaf smoke. Most of all, leaf smoke. This is the only odor I can will back to consciousness just by thinking about it.

— Lewis Thomas, quoted in The Poetics of Smell as a Mode of Knowledge at BrainPickings. Hat tip to Becca!

Most humans perceive a given odor similarly. But the genes for the molecular machinery that humans use to detect scents are about 30 percent different in any two people, says neuroscientist Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. This variation means that nearly every person’s sense of smell is subtly different.

— Read more at Sense of smell is strictly personal, study suggests at ScienceNews.

Odors arrive in small packets—tiny bouquets of molecules—that are inhaled. Receptor cells inside the nose respond by producing a series of electrical spikes, which are communicated to the olfactory bulb in the brain, where the smell is decoded.

“It’s like Morse code,” said Upinder Bhalla, a professor of neurobiology at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, and lead supervisor of a recent study about the olfactory system that is the first to document the coding is linear. “The pattern and spacing of the clicks make different letters.”

— Read more at Scents of Smell Rooted in Math at The Wall Street Journal.