Humans have a better sense of smell than you think

“Most people with a healthy sense of smell can smell almost anything that gets in the nose,” said John MacGann, an associate professor of neuroscience at Rutgers University. “In fact, there used to be whole field of trying to find odors that people couldn't smell.” Used to be, because thanks to our roughly 400 smell receptors, finding things humans couldn’t smell was a bit of a fool's errand. Humans, as McGann makes clear in a review paper published today in the journal Science, are actually quite phenomenal sniffers.

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