Thursday, March 20, 2014

Humans can distinguish more than 1 trillion odors


Biology textbooks are riddled with passages relating how bad humans are at perceiving odors. As the oft-quoted statistic goes, humans can only perceive "10,000 odors" — a number that sits particularly well with some dog-lovers, who like to remind us that canines have 300 million odor receptors, while we only sport six million. But a new study published today in Science reveals that humans might not be as olfactorily-challenged as we once thought because, as it turns out, we can perceive more than one trillion odors — and that's the conservative estimate.


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