High-Fidelity Tuning of Olfactory Mixture Distances in the Perceptual Space of Smell Through a Community Effort https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.13.694160v1

Cool new post-doctoral position in my lab on the area of human social chemosignaling. What role does odor and olfaction play in shaping social behavior? (Here also is a 10-minute video about this new line of work in the Human Nature Lab: humannaturelab.net/making-of/so... .) Please share.

Scientists at Firmenich buff.ly/jq1TyYa and now Givaudan buff.ly/u2gP5Ow report several olfactory receptors that appear to map cleanly onto specific odor notes (earthy, grapefruit, woody, etc.). 🧪

New preprint from the very talented Bob Pellegrino! 🧪

Analysis of over 21,000 individuals identifies seven new genetic regions linked to odor perception, with some effects differing between men and women and connections to Alzheimer's risk. doi.org/g9vn4j

In May we launched the DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025. The leaderboard round closed yesterday and 71 teams submitted predictions! Even if you missed the leaderboard phase, you can still submit a final model for the August 8th deadline.

With a contemporary smartphone, capturing, transmitting, and replicating sounds and visuals is a breeze, yet replicating scents remains elusive. If you want to change this, consider joining the 2025 DREAM Olfaction Challenge at www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn6.... @oldbap.bsky.social

After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health. My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology.

📢 TODAY’S THE DAY, PHILLY! 📢 We #standupforscience at 11 AM at City Hall! We’ve got a great lineup of speakers for you (North Apron) and opportunities for other advocacy activities (Dillworth Park). Hope to see you there!! #standupforsciencephilly

Check out our review comparing typical experimental to naturally-occurring odor concentrations. You might be surprised. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/1... Thanks to Matt and Betty for asking me to take part!

A long post about what’s happening to the science funding agencies in the US and why. As mentioned, this one just kept getting longer even as I kept stripping curse words from it. www.science.org/content/blog...

SOME GOOD NEWS ABOUT NIH FUNDING Closed sessions of institute and center Advisory Counsel meetings are now permitted. This is where grant applications are discussed and approved for potential funding. Open sessions where there are public presentations and discussions are still not allowed.

Alexander Fjaeldstad and I have a new chapter in the book Smell, Taste, Eat: The Role of the Chemical Senses in Eating Behaviour, edited by @LorenzoDStafford. Lots of great insights here. From our chapter, it’s clear that smell loss and its impact on ingestion remain vastly underexplored."

doi.org/10.1073/pnas... Olfaction in spiders. We found that the wall pore sensilla in spiders look similar from the outside to those of insects, but differ ultrastructurally in various ways. Independent evolution! 🧪

Our DeepNose paper is in arxiv. In it, we present an equivariant CNN which can predict human olfactory perception based on molecular shapes, including mixtures. Comments/suggestions are very welcome. arxiv.org/abs/2412.08747

A background in physics, and his own curiosity, have helped Dmitry Rinberg tackle the complexities of the neuroscience of smell. More on Rinberg sniffing out the mysteries of olfaction. By Lina Zeldovich www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sn...

The core figure, showing review counts from Publons data, indeed shows the intended effect but buries the lede: No one uses Publons anymore.

Important paper! www.biorxiv.org/content/bior... Im not sure the Discussion fully delineates its radical implications. No more... * Place cells * Grid cells, splitter cells, border cells * Mirror neurons * Reward neurons * Conflict cells (continued)

New paper in Nature showing how smell works in humans - no quantum woo involved, surprise surprise. Terrific stuff from Claire de March, Hiro Matsunami and others. Summarised here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

My lab is looking for a postdoc to record lots of neurons while mice sniff each other. Basically I think that will tell us something more interesting about sensory processing than blasting pineapple smell into their noses. You don’t have to be an olfactionist to apply. apply.interfolio.com/139308