This is awesome. I've always been a super 'smeller' and seem to be able to taste/smell very minute concentrations of bad stuff well before others. Being careful what I say, I also work in EMS and have been able to identify 'sick' patients, even just on walking in the room, often their smell of their 'sickness' gives them away - even when they're not showing a lot of outward signs.
Hopefully someday we'll have some kind of tricorder device that can identify disease processes by gas/scents/smells.
> Hopefully someday we'll have some kind of tricorder device that can identify disease processes by gas/scents/smells.
It can hasten the process of identifying these chemicals if people with such a sense of smell present themselves to researchers. To me that's the most important takeaway of this story. Unfortunately, most articles reporting on the story bury the lede as the fact that people can smell disease draws more attention than what they're smelling, and that researchers either didn't seriously consider there might be such a chemical indicator or didn't know where to start until they had access to a super smeller.
This sort of diagnostic approach isn't new. Once upon a time doctors would taste urine samples! It just fell out of favor because machine and chemical tests are more reliable and consistent. But if you're not drinking other people's pee on a regular basis, or running a large scale, shot gun experiment (like a super smeller spending decades learning scents), initial discovery of such markers can become more difficult.
There are countless recitations of the common practice of tasting for diabetes, but I can't find any example of other urine taste tests despite many sources stating it was used for other diseases and that urology wheels[1] encoded tastes and smells in addition to appearances. Have you found any?
The closest I could find was mention of smelling urine to determine pregnancy, which apparently was/is rather reliable. The next best was mention of the surgeon John Hunter discussing the taste of semen, though the author "assumes... [Hunter] was tasting his own". (I wouldn't assume that considering his interests and research. Google Books texts of Hunter's publications contained page after page of discussion about the genital fluids of male cadavers, but after his brief mention of the taste of semen from a live donor he never quite goes where you're fearfully hoping! I didn't get there in my skimming--so much preamble for stuff everybody learns in Zoology and Physiology 101--but I presume he ended up reporting many important discoveries about male reproductive tissues and processes.)
I wish Google Books was as awesome today as it was 10 years ago. They expose only a tiny fraction of the material they once provided, even for pre-20th century material that couldn't possibly be under copyright. :(
[1] I wonder if they were inspiration, perhaps indirectly, for the wine aroma wheel created by the chemist Ann Noble at UC Davis.
It’s funny that you cite only the ayurvedic name, since the scientific name, diabetes mellitus, has the exact same etymology: “mellite” is Latin and translates to “sweetened [with honey]”, and the disease was thus named in 1675 because of the patients’ urine’s sweet taste. That said, it’s definitely interesting that this isn’t a relatively recent discovery and was already known two thousand years before the modern naming.
I can identify when a woman is ovulating by the smell of something being exhaled on the breathe and excreted through the skin.
Only ever happens with close female friends, but I’ve identified the smell from regular standing conversation distance away with friends I haven’t seen for weeks and don’t otherwise know their cycle.
Oh, I have this "condition" or something similar, too. Not even with close friends but with strangers I pass in the supermarket. It doesn't happen often but it's very significant.
I think I somewhere read, but unrelated to ovulating, that this was made by nature to find suitable partners. Probably that natural smell is intensified by ovulating.
edit: And to be honest: I never told anyone before that I sometimes sense this different smell and I'm not sure I should. Women could probably feel uncomfortable and think their smell is somehow "bad" when others can sense it. Not sure.
You’re likely perceiving female pheromones. There have been studies that men can reliably detect fertile phases from sniffing worn shirts alone. I‘ve tried diving a bit into this topic after noticing something fruity (a good smell) in the middle of my cycle, which somehow intensified when being around my so. Interestingly it disappeared in the years I’ve been on hormonal contraception (stopped now due to a couple of more severe side effects, luckily I haven’t been on them for long).
Asking the women whether your perception is true would likely have led nowhere as most women are not aware of their fertile phases.
Search keyword seems to be ‚copulins‘, but the area appears a bit underexplored. Lots of companies trying to sell snake oil. Lots of urban legends about mind control. Some girls do try using their natural perfume to their advantage though.
The thing about compatibility you mention is more related to the immune system I think, and mutual.
I have a tendency to associate with alternative types who are aware of their cycle and are happy to talk about it, and have confirmed my observation by asking on multiple occasions.
Your female friends don’t complain to you when they’re on their periods? That seems like part of the line between “friend” and “just an acquaintance”, to me.
When I was a teenager I had a "super smell" sense which seems pretty ordinary compared to what others here are saying: I could detect whether a used glass of drink was mine by smelling the saliva in the glass (in fact I found it shocking that my friends couldn't). My friends mocked me, I suppressed my ability, and now I'm not sure if I can't smell it anymore or I simply don't care.
I'd occasionally notice taking the wrong used glass by the smell and even know who used it if it was someone close. Lots of pheromones and stuff, nothing unusual about it. I wouldn't say it's a bad smell, I just don't like using cups after my relatives, close friends, or well, other people. Drinking after single attractive ladies being mostly non-weird.
The sense does depend heavily on state of mind, and body, so sometimes I'd only notice when already drinking. Works better on people I know well.
The idea that our skin is permeable to smells seems really weird, but there have been a number of documented cases where pets seem to detect similar sicknesses in their owners.
Part of it is I don't think we realize how weird and sensitive smell is even for us. Imagine the world through the nose of a dog or bear.
For Parkinson's the odor comes from chemicals expressed by sebaceous glands.
I didn't know this until reading your comment. It does seem weird that the skin is so permeable, so I looked it up. At least in this case, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with permeable skin.
EDIT: It's mentioned in passing in the linked article: "For one experiment in Manchester, sebum samples were taken from the upper backs of test participants." Other sources are more clear about the relationship to sebaceous glands.
Well pointed, thank you. I did some looking and it seems the 'dog sniffing ovarian cancer through the belly' hasn't been reproduced in any controlled study yet (that i could find). Could just be via breath/skin secretions/etc.
Dogs can smell so tiny concentrations I'd be surprised to find out they could not smell ovarian cancer. Instead, the trick I imagine is to train them to care and alert a handler.
> ... The birds proved to have a remarkable ability to distinguish benign from malignant human breast histopathology after training with differential food reinforcement; even more importantly, the pigeons were able to generalize what they had learned when confronted with novel image sets. ...
> ... However, when given a different (and for humans quite difficult) task—namely, classification of suspicious mammographic densities (masses)—the pigeons proved to be capable only of image memorization and were unable to successfully generalize when shown novel examples. ...
My current guest is a super smeller. It's mildly annoying. She finds the scent of everything to be too strong, from a pizza box in the trash to the soap in the bathroom to the dirty laundry in the closet. She'll literally wake up in the middle of the night and ask if someone ate pizza because the smell is overwhelming her nose.
Spider Robinson's novel "Telempath" [1] concerns a world where someone released a virus that made everyone a super smeller, increasing human sense of smell hundreds of times.
So many people were not able to tolerate the smells of our civilization that the result was widespread rioting and mass insanity, pretty much bringing down civilization.
I am a "super" smeller and I hate it. Particularly annoying at the gym as I seems to be only one who can tell who didn't shower or is using deo. Those who smell really bad I can smell even if they already left. Very strong smells also tend to linger for the rest of the day even if the source is long gone.
How do you tell someone they should use more deodorant without upsetting them?
Hopefully someday we'll have some kind of tricorder device that can identify disease processes by gas/scents/smells.