James' World 2

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At Oktyabrskaya metro station, in Moscow, a towering bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin glares along Krymsky Val Boulevard toward Gorky Park. Below Lenin’s feet, among the proletariat entourage, a sculpted woman stands with one arm raised in triumphant solidarity, her armpit exposed and victorious. I decide that this is a good omen. I am, after all, en route to a smell-dating event, where Russians will be judging the attractiveness of my armpit aroma.

Billions of dollars are spent every year trying to avoid this exact judgment. For many people, body odor is so unappealing that they mask it with perfumes, deodorants, and antiperspirants. But what if our obsession with blocking BO is interfering with important lines of communication, those helpful messages aromas send about anxiety, illness, or even romance? When we spray or roll on a product, could we be blocking our chances of finding love, of finding the person—or perhaps people—who might desire us even more because of our scent?

In this era of swiping left and right in the search for a tryst or a soul mate, smell dating operates on a more analog premise. Instead of swiping, the strategy is wiping: namely, one’s perspiration onto a cotton pad. The premise is straightforward: smell-dating contenders work up a sweat doing high-intensity exercise, their perspiration-rich cotton pads are collected and placed in anonymous containers, and everyone lines up to sniff through the smelly samples. Participants then secretly rate their top preferences and give their picks to organizers, who reveal the matches. Like on the dating app Tinder, a match occurs only when two individuals pick each other’s pong.

The only criterion for a romantic match is scent, which is about as logical as any other dating filter. I mean, who cares if you both share a love of taxidermy, say, or the novels of Haruki Murakami? You’ll eventually smell the body odor of your lover, and it’s probably going to be a make-or-break moment. Smell dating skips to the chase (or, more accurately, it entirely skips the chase) and uses body odor as the first elimination round for mate selection—or date selection, at any rate.

There would be several afternoon and evening smell-dating rounds in the city’s most bustling green space, Gorky Park, as part of a larger science-and-technology festival that takes place over a weekend in May. Random people wandering around the park, science nerds attending the festival, and those attracted to the event after seeing it advertised in local media would all participate—or at least that’s what Olga Vlad, the event organizer, told me. This being Russia, people who match up at the smell-dating event would be given exclusive entrance bracelets to a nearby VIP lounge tent so that couples could get to know each other over free, all-you-can-drink vodka cocktails.

A tall German woman with impossibly straight hair and a friendly smile adds my name to the list, hands me some wet wipes, and instructs me to remove the deodorant in my armpits and any other perfumed products I might have put on today.

About forty people are milling around. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Sofya, wearing a blue bomber jacket and a headband composed of tiny red rosebuds, is surveying the crowd. I ask whether she has ever been attracted to someone on the basis of body odor. “Yes, that’s the only way I choose a partner. I prefer that, when my partner wears no deodorant, that he smells okay. I have been repelled by a man’s body odor.” Sofya gives me a significant look that I don’t know how to interpret.

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People generally don’t confuse the sounds of singing and talking. That may seem obvious. But it’s actually quite impressive—particularly when you consider that we are usually confident that we can discern between the two even when we encounter a language or musical genre that we’ve never heard before. How exactly does the human brain so effortlessly and instantaneously make such judgments?

Scientists have a relatively rich understanding of how the sounds of speech are transformed into sentences, and how musical sounds move us emotionally. When sound hits our ear, for example, what’s actually happening is that sound wavesare activating the auditory nerve within a part of the inner ear called the cochlea. That, in turn, transmits signals to the brain. These signals travel the so-called auditory pathway to first reach the subregion for processing all kinds of sounds, and then to dedicated music or language subregions. Depending on where the signal ends up, a person comprehends the sound as meaningful information and can distinguish an aria from a spoken sentence.

That’s the broad-strokes story of auditory processing. But it remains surprisingly unclear how exactly our perceptual system differentiates these sounds within the auditory pathway. Certainly, there are clues: music and speech waveforms have distinct pitches (tones sounding high or low), timbres (qualities of sound), phonemes (speech sound units), and melodies. But the brain’s auditory pathway does not process all of those elements at once. Consider the analogy of sending a letter in the mail from, say, New York City to London or Taipei. Although the letter’s contents provide a detailed explanation of its purpose, the envelope must include some basic information to indicate its destination. Similarly, even though speech and music are packed with rich information, our brain needs some basic cues to rapidly determine which regions to engage.

The question for neuroscientists is therefore how the brain decides whether to send incoming sound to the language or music regions for detailed processing. My colleagues at New York University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico and I decided to investigate this mystery. In a study published this spring, we present evidence that a simple property of sound called amplitude modulation—which describes how rapidly the volume, or “amplitude,” of a series of sounds changes over time—is a key clue in the brain’s rapid acoustic judgments. And our findings hint at the distinct evolutionary roles that music and speech have had for the human species.

Past research had shown that the amplitude modulation rate of speech is highly consistent across languages, with a rate of four to five hertz, meaning four to five ups and downs in the sound wave per second. Meanwhile, the amplitude modulation rate of music is consistent across genres, at about 1 to 2 Hz. Put another way: when we talk, the volume of our voice changes much more rapidly in a given span of time than it does when we sing.

Given the cross-cultural consistency of this pattern in past research, we wondered whether it might reflect a universal biological signature that plays a critical role in how the brain distinguishes speech and music. To investigate amplitude modulation, we created special white noise audio clips in which we adjusted how rapidly or slowly volume and sound changed over time. We also adjusted how regularly such changes occurred—that is, whether the audio had a reliable rhythm or not. We used these white noise clips rather than realistic audio recordings to better control for the effects of amplitude modulation, as opposed to other aspects of sound, such as pitch or timbre, that might sway a listener’s interpretation.

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Liz Gabor calls the odor “man sweat.” And though she’s loath to admit it, the aromatic scent makes her feel, as she calls it, a little frisky. “My friends think I’m crazy, but I think male sweat is kind of pleasant and, well, kind of hot,” says Gabor, 28, a customer service rep and happily married mother of two young girls.

Gabor doesn’t have a honker that’s on the fritz. Rather, her penchant for “man sweat” is all in her genes, according to new research from Rockefeller and Duke Universities published this week in the journal Nature. Scientists have previously found an association between male sweat and female arousal, but this study is the first to find a gene that is linked to the ability to smell a specific chemical in the sweat. And that, they say, may be a revolution in the understanding of how our olfactory sense functions.

According to the Rockefeller and Duke researchers, about 70 percent of adult men and women have the genetic capacity to perceive a particular chemical called androstenone in male body odor. To them, the testosterone-laden substance can take on a pleasant bouquet similar to vanilla or other sweet or woodsy scents. Others who have a functional copy of the gene perceive androstenone as less than pleasurable, akin to the aromatic elixir of stale urine. About 30 percent of adult men and women can’t smell androstenone at all, leading researchers to suspect they might be missing the gene responsible for smelling the aroma.

To figure out exactly who could smell the manly-man scent of androstenone, researchers presented 400 participants with 66 different odors, including woodsy scents like pine, strong scents like garlic, and esoteric odors like methanethiol, a man-made scent that is similar to the smell of urine after a person has eaten asparagus.

DNA taken from blood samples was then analyzed, and those individuals who could smell androstenone were found to have genetic variations in a single odorant receptor called OR7D4. Whether they perceived androstenone as pleasant or foul smelling was due to two tiny changes in the gene, called single nucleotide polymorphisms, that made the odorant receptor stop functioning.

For researchers who are trying to unravel the complicated way people perceive certain aromas, finding a genetic link to at least one smell—male body odor—is akin to finding a Rosetta Stone. “There is a mystery as to how the nose works, well beyond the whole realm of male sweat,” says neuroscientist Charles J. Wysocki, Ph.D., a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and one of the world’s leading olfactory science researchers. “Quite frankly, I am jealous of them.”

While being able to smell androstenone may seem like an attribute that you can live without, the chemical may have some broader implications than making us scream “ewwww.” Or in the case of some women, “aaahhh.”

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Male sweat

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“She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27th September. An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end,” her sons Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin said in a statement. “She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren, who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.”

They wrote, “We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their care and unstinting kindness during her final days.”

Maggie Smith was born Margaret Natalie Smith on Dec. 28, 1934, in Ilford, England, to Nathaniel and Margaret Smith. When she was 4, her family, including her older twin brothers Alistair and Ian, moved to Oxford, where Smith’s father worked as a public health pathologist at the university. Smith attended Oxford High School until she was 16, when she left to study acting at the Oxford Playhouse. 

The freckle-faced redhead began her career at the Playhouse in 1952, transforming for roles including Viola in “The Twelfth Night.” In 1956, she made her film and Broadway debuts, appearing as one of the party guests in the movie “Child in the House” and playing several roles in the review “New Faces of ’56” at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City.

“There was one very famous one, which was the one with Eartha Kitt. And I think everybody who was in it thought they were all going to be Eartha Kitt or be big stars,” Smith told NPR of starring in “New Faces.” “That didn’t happen, but it was a wake-up call to have one’s first professional job on Broadway, I must say.”

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History is a good thing. Type Alzheimer’s in the search box for all Alzheimer’s articles – Every article that has the word Alzheimer’s in it will be shown, there are a lot of Alzheimer’s articles on this website!

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Dementia has been around since antiquity, but scientists identified Alzheimer’s as a brain disease only a century ago. Clues to its biology emerged slowly, and the field struggled. But discoveries accelerated since the 1990s, through advances in numerous fields, including genomics, brain imaging and immunotherapies. Today, as scientists chase new diagnostics and therapies, the stakes remain high.

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Joelle Bolt

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Two-thirds of U.S. adults do not have a proper will and could potentially leave the remaining family with serious implications because of it.

Founding Partner of VanNess Law, Thomas VanNess, stresses the importance of maintaining control of distribution of one’s hard-earned assets by putting it in official writing.

“Take action. The best day to get a will is today. There’s no time like the present. So, I would encourage everyone to get a will. Go online, look up local attorneys. If you can’t afford an attorney, go on a do-it-yourself website. Anything is better than nothing. I think everyone should take control of who benefits from their hard work that you put in every single day. A will is a good starting point to be able to do that,” said VanNess.

Creating a will is essential for estate planning, guiding asset distribution after your passing. Appoint a power of attorney for financial decisions and set medical directives for your healthcare preferences. Make sure to regularly update your plans as life changes and consult a professional if necessary.

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Two-thirds of U.S. adults lack a will, risking family strife and loss of control

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Last year, when doctors told a patient that the headaches he was experiencing were due to a highly invasive brain tumor called a glioblastoma that could only be removed during a complex surgery, he had one very specific request.

He wanted the people who would be slicing the cancerous tissue out of his brain (from an area just to the left of the crown of his head) to make sure “to preserve a relevant aspect of his identity—his ability to play chess,” a paper in the journal Cortex reported this month.

The man, a then-45-year-old computer programmer, was identified only as “AB.” He had been playing the game as a hobby for 25 years and had achieved an Elo rating of 1,950, which is just one level below expert in the chess world.

AB made his request to conserve his chess skills to one of his surgeons, Andreu Gabarrós, head of neurosurgery at Bellvitge University Hospital in Spain, which is affiliated with the University of Barcelona. Gabarrós has a reputation for going out of his way for his patients, a commitment that sometimes carries over into his after-work activities. As leader of a band called Dorigen, he has recorded an album with 10 tracks—one choral number and nine solo songs. Each of the latter was composed for a different patient from whom he had removed a brain tumor while trying to protect areas needed to sing or play an instrument.

Upon hearing AB’s request, Gabarrós contacted his neuroscientist colleagues at the university in early March 2023. He asked if they could come up with a plan to map AB’s brain before and during the procedure, which would help his surgical team spare the brain tissue AB needed to return to his passion after recovery.

Two researchers at the university, part of a group led by cognitive neuroscientist Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells, began a mad dash in the ensuing weeks to develop a chess-preserving surgical protocol that Gabarrós’s team could use for the March 27 procedure. “We had a small amount of time to prepare everything,” Rodríguez-Fornells says.

The team combed the existing scientific literature on the topic and scanned AB’s brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to isolate the regions linked to his own individual chess performance. “I started checking what was in the literature to find how can we divide chess into cognitive processes that are more easy to evaluate during the surgery,” says Victor Cepero-Escribano, one of the researchers.

The most critical phase of AB’s chess brain preservation—and the one that turned out to be the most insightful—would have to wait until the surgery itself began. Surgeons performed a craniotomy, removing a piece of skull to expose a portion of AB’s left superior parietal lobe while he was awake. Next, they touched a live electrode to different spots on the surface of his cerebral cortex, asking him to answer questions and complete tasks in order to determine whether his cognitive abilities remained intact at the targeted spot, where the current shuts down or triggers a particular action.

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Editor’s Note: This CNN series is, or was, sponsored by the country it highlights. CNN retains full editorial control over subject matter, reporting, and frequency of the articles and videos within the sponsorship, in compliance with our policy.

On the northern edge of the Rub al-Khali, there are secrets buried in the sand.

The vast 250,000 square miles (650,000 square kilometer) desert on the Arabian Peninsula is known as “The Empty Quarter.” And to most, aside from waves of ocher dunes, it does look empty.

But not to artificial intelligence.

Researchers at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi have developed a high-tech solution to searching huge, arid areas for potential archaeological sites.

Traditionally, archaeologists use ground surveys to detect potential sites of interest, but that can be time-consuming and difficult in harsh terrains like the desert. In recent years, remote sensing using optical satellite images from places like Google Earth has gained popularity in searching large areas for unusual features — but in the desert, sand and dust storms often obscure the ground in these images, while dune patterns can make it difficult to detect potential sites.“We needed something to guide us and focus our research,” says Diana Francis, an atmospheric scientist and one of the lead researchers on the project.

The team created a machine learning algorithm to analyze images collected by synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a satellite imagery technique that uses radio waves to detect objects hidden beneath surfaces including vegetation, sand, soil, and ice.

Neither technology is new: SAR imagery has been in use since the 1980s, and machine learning has been gaining traction in archaeology. But the use of the two together is a novel application, says Francis, and to her knowledge, is a first in archaeology.

She trained the algorithm using data from a site already known to archaeologists: Saruq Al-Hadid, a settlement with evidence of 5,000 years of activity that is still being uncovered in the desert outside of Dubai.N

She trained the algorithm using data from a site already known to archaeologists: Saruq Al-Hadid, a settlement with evidence of 5,000 years of activity that is still being uncovered in the desert outside of Dubai.“Once it was trained, it gave us an indication of other potential areas (nearby) that are still not excavated,” says Francis.

She adds that the technology is precise to within 50 centimeters and can create 3D models of the expected structure that will give archaeologists a better idea of what’s buried below.

In collaboration with Dubai Culture, the government organization that manages the site, Francis and her team conducted a ground survey using a ground-penetrating radar, which “replicated what the satellite measured from space,” she says.

Now, Dubai Culture plans to excavate the newly identified areas — and Francis hopes the technique can uncover more buried archaeological treasures in the future.

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A satellite view of the Saruq al-Hadid site, showing the western zone that was under excavation (right) and the eastern zone which is not excavated yet. – Khalifa University/Ben Romdhane et al., 2023

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There is no gallery of hummingbird pictures with this post (sorry).

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Hummingbirds are not only quick and beautiful little birds but are also important pollinators that are beneficial to the health of your yard and garden. On top of being ecologically important, these territorial and lightning-fast iridescent birds are an absolute joy to watch. Because of this, many of us try to do certain things to attract more hummingbirds to our yards — whether that is by adding more red garden decorations, hanging up plenty of feeders, reducing noise levels, or planting more pollinator-friendly native flowers. However, one thing that most people don’t know about hummingbirds is that they love water but struggle to bathe in traditional bird baths which are too large and deep for them.

So, to bring more hummingbirds to your yard, you can add a bathing system that they can actually use — the best of which is a simple water mister. In fact, hummingbirds love bathing in misters, and they do so by flying back and forth through the mist and rubbing their small bodies on wet leaves to get clean. These misters can also help keep hummingbirds cool on hot summer days and wash away any sticky pollen from their beaks and feathers.

The best thing about adding a water mister to your garden (besides attracting more hummingbirds) is that it serves a dual purpose of also watering your plants. Plus, basic water misters are pretty affordable and easy to find. If you want to buy your mister in person, you can head to your local garden center. You can also find plenty of mister options that are specifically made for hummingbirds and other pollinators sold online.

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