News — Sniffing

Ginger, which is included in our Gin standards set, adds a spicy and, at higher concentrations, even hot note to gins. But researchers at the University of British Columbia have published a study demonstrating that ginger suppresses feelings of disgust. In a series of double-blind studies, volunteers were given either a ginger capsule or a placebo pill. For the first study, 242 participants were asked to rate how disgusted they felt when presented with a sequence of objectively disgusting photos, from rotten meat (moderately disgusting) to a man vomiting in a toilet (highly disgusting)…The results show that when a participant...

All joking aside, women  (in general) have more acute senses of smell than men. The reason for that, according to aroma research published in Brazil, is the number of neurons found in the brain’s olfactory bulb. Wedged down between the top of the nasal cavities and the bottom of the frontal lobe, the olfactory bulb is a computer, of sorts. It processes raw data from the nose into information the rest of the brain can use. Women’s olfactory bulbs are bigger than men’s — significantly bigger, as it happens. Women have almost twice as many of the cells that sort and categorize smell...