An insect's sense of smell is vital to its survival. Only if it can trace even tiny amounts of odor molecules is it is able to find food sources, communicate with conspecifics, or avoid enemies. According to scientists at ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 27, 2014
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Queen ants spend most of their time having babies. To reign supreme in a colony, they exude a special scent, or pheromone, on the waxy surface of their body that suppresses ovary development in their sisters, rendering the ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 17, 2017
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Vanderbilt biologists have discovered that mosquito sperm have a "sense of smell" and that some of same chemicals that the mosquito can smell cause the sperm to swim harder.
Plants & Animals
Feb 3, 2014
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Biologists claim that humans can perceive and distinguish a trillion different odors, but little is known about the underlying chemical processes involved. Biochemists at The City College of New York have found an unexpected ...
Biochemistry
Sep 10, 2014
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Breaking a longstanding impasse in our understanding of olfaction, scientists at UC San Francisco (UCSF) have created the first molecular-level, 3D picture of how an odor molecule activates a human odorant receptor, a crucial ...
Biochemistry
Mar 15, 2023
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The mechanics of instinctive behavior are mysterious. Even something as simple as the question of how a mouse can use its powerful sense of smell to detect and evade predators, including species it has never met before, has ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 28, 2011
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When a mouse smells a cat, it instinctively avoids the feline or risks becoming dinner. How? A Northwestern University study involving olfactory receptors, which underlie the sense of smell, provides evidence that a single ...
Biotechnology
Apr 29, 2013
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Soil-dwelling nematodes depend on their sophisticated sense of smell for survival, able to distinguish between more than a thousand different scents—but the molecular mechanism behind their olfaction has baffled scientists ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 3, 2022
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Highly developed antennae containing different types of olfactory receptors allow insects to use minute amounts of odors for orientation towards resources like food, oviposition sites or mates. Scientists at the Max Planck ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 18, 2013
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(Phys.org) —What draws a mosquito to bite its host has long been studied from the perspective of the victim—uncovering which smells and chemicals lure the insect in. But researchers at Rockefeller's Laboratory of Neurogenetics ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 10, 2013
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