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.
I have something like this too. I first noticed it at boarding school aged 13/14. My peers put it to the test - I could identify with 100% accuracy who was on their period. Not sure this 'power' as ever been useful though. Air fresheners, scented candles all make me feel sick and agitated. However I LOVE the smell of petrol. More recently and worryingly I have noticed the distinct smell of sick people. My father had a weird smell the last time I saw him and it worried me... He has just been diagnosed with COPD.
(incidentally I used to code, now I am a private chef).
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?
My mother, my brother and I all have this smell ability to some degree. I remember when I was a child, my mother could diagnose me with strep by smell. (She would also take me to the doctor.)
None of us in the family can tolerate things like fresh paint, dry cleaner establishments, nail polish, and other chemical smells. My mother tended to avoid the "better living through chemistry" cleaning products popular in the 70's and 80's because they bothered her a lot. I, unfortunately, have developed extreme chemical sensitivity, so I'm on the extreme end of this.
FWIW, nobody on this side of my family has ever gotten cancer (knock on wood). I often wonder if our profound awareness of toxins is also protective, in that we completely avoid things that others would be comfortable working with on a daily basis.
I've been able to smell infections (which makes sense, the immune response of an infection would mis with your whole microbiome). That's pretty different from smelling Parkinson's.
That's diametrically opposite to the latest research coming out [1].
There seems to be a "gut-brain axis" at work, to the point where some are starting to think the gut is the starting point.
We're seeing an increasing number of disorders -- psoriasis [2], lupus, schizophrenia, among others -- where there's an underlying connection to the gut microbiome and to inflammation in general caused by "pathobionts" [3].
I worked in Biotech for a while and spent years working with various cell lines i.e cancer. Cancer has a distinct smell. I was out shopping one day and the scent hit me, I turned around and next to me was an elderly man in a wheelchair. I am definitely a super smeller. After developing chronic migraines I'm now very sensitive to scent, every product I use has to be unscented and I have to avoid crowded areas due to the risk of setting a migraine off. It's the super power I wish I didn't have.
I’m curious - as you are in research - can you give a few more details? How can it have a distinct smell? That would mean patients or cells are exposing some material, right?
I use Whole Foods 365 fragrance free body wash, shampoo and conditioner. For a moisturizer I use Alba very emollient original unscented, for face I use Body Merry, night cream along with Cosmetica pure hyaluronic acid serum and the blue unscented type of chapstick. For a leave in conditioner I use my kids Little Twig unscented conditioner. They also sometimes use the Equate kids 3 in 1 unscented body wash/shampoo/conditioner. For deodorant I use a small bit of Secret unscented, it has a masking fragrance which is noticeable to me but the least offensive unscented deodorant I've found, and I've tried a lot of products. I also like the Alba leave in conditioner and styling cream which are unscented but possibly discontinued. I hope this helps!
Not sure which country you are in but my girlfriend has problems so I've checked the options in the UK a fair bit. There a quite a few products labelled 'sensitive' and unperfumed in the shops here eg. shampoo, washing liquid and so on which are mostly good. Some other products I've failed on eg. bio washing liquid, toilet cleaner.
The thought of her ability potentially leading to advances in disease diagnosis is a humbling reminder of how complex the human body really is. And that there is still more to know.
My favorite thing about articles about super smellers/tasters/whatever is how whenever they show up, everyone in the comments also has this rare ability.
I see some comments talking about human pheromones and I just wanted to point out that there really isn’t any strong evidence (yet) that human pheromones exist.
“It is emphasized that no bioassay-guided study has led to the isolation of true human pheromones, a step that will elucidate specific functions to human chemical signals.” [1]
When I first heard about this years ago, I knew exactly what the scent was, because I'd noticed it on my grandfather years before. I don't think I have a particularly great sense of smell - in fact, from a childhood of secondhand smoke and oddly narrow sinus passages / allergies, I've always felt like my nose didn't really work. But, the smell of people with Parkinson's is very distinct and I've noticed it on people since. Likewise, the last time I was at my grandmother's house, I noticed very distinctly that the smell was no longer there as it was one of the few times I'd been back at her house since grandpa passed away. Parkinsons / Lewy body / Althzeimers are all fascinating yet horrifying for what they do to people and I'm thankful there are people researching and seeking remedies.
I know that I can smell when I am coming down with a cold or similiar - from inside my nose and others. I would call it a sour curdling, "sick" smell. I have noticed it in some other people as well.
Fascinating. Cool that they try to teach a device to smell, but similarly interesting would be trying to find the origin of her smelling ability - is it genetic?
At the moment it isn't terribly important, there's no known intervention that stops the onset of symptoms and there's no treatment that does anything other than address the symptoms.
It's useful to identify it early, but for the most part the early symptoms are mild.
I suspect the only way to develop a method that stops the onset of symptoms is to detect the symptoms really early and figure out what to do from there.
Otherwise there is no way to distinguish between someone who never got cancer and someone who did but had the progression stop before it became a problem.
It is real - ironically realer than drug sniffing dogs because they can't use memory sniffing dogs until after they have probable cause since there is no law against high density storage. So they aren't (mis)trained as four legged probable cause generators who respond more to police signaling than actual location.
It's nice that you attach a screenshot, but I got the same message, and I don't even have an ad-blocker, just the default tracking protection in Firefox. (I don't even care about tracking itself, just the fact that most of it slows down my computer significantly for entirely useless JavaScript computations and slowdowns, so, it's got to go.)
In February last year, I was diagnosed of PARKINSON DISEASE. I started out taking only Azilect, then Mirapex and sinemet as the disease progressed but didn’t help much. In July, I started on PARKINSON DISEASE TREATMENT PROTOCOL from Herbal Health Point (ww w. herbalhealthpoint. c om). One month into the treatment, I made a significant recovery. After I completed the recommended treatment, almost all my symptoms were gone, wonderful improvement with my movement and tremors
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.
"Ayurvedic physicians (5th/6th century BCE) first noted the sweet taste of diabetic urine, and called the condition madhumeha ("honey urine")." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_diabetes
A more palatable way to diagnose diabetes is to check if your urine attracts ants and flies.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/pissky
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our culture and schooling doesn't encourage the development of the subtle senses.
It's another example of what's lost working virtually.
It's not an advantage knowing why the person smells the way they do. Just what to do.
https://businessinsider.com/women-more-attractive-during-ovu...
There are very strong relationships between couples and known smell genetics. (I think being different is good?)
It's an interesting question how deodorant has changed our genes.
The cherry on top of your out-of-this-world comment. Do you know and/or keep track of some of your friends' cycles ?
(incidentally I used to code, now I am a private chef).
Love eggs for breakfast, though, so it's a tough life.
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.
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.
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.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> ... 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. ...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telempath
How do you tell someone they should use more deodorant without upsetting them?
Is there anything you can do to reduce your sensitivity to bad odors when at the gym? (Serious question. Not a problem I've looked into before.)
Surgeons use peppermint concentrate.
None of us in the family can tolerate things like fresh paint, dry cleaner establishments, nail polish, and other chemical smells. My mother tended to avoid the "better living through chemistry" cleaning products popular in the 70's and 80's because they bothered her a lot. I, unfortunately, have developed extreme chemical sensitivity, so I'm on the extreme end of this.
FWIW, nobody on this side of my family has ever gotten cancer (knock on wood). I often wonder if our profound awareness of toxins is also protective, in that we completely avoid things that others would be comfortable working with on a daily basis.
There seems to be a "gut-brain axis" at work, to the point where some are starting to think the gut is the starting point.
We're seeing an increasing number of disorders -- psoriasis [2], lupus, schizophrenia, among others -- where there's an underlying connection to the gut microbiome and to inflammation in general caused by "pathobionts" [3].
[1] https://parkinsonsnewstoday.com/2019/02/12/understanding-gut...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738081X1...
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3426444/
I don’t know if it was the cancer I smelled or messed up chemistry due to the cancer. But the smell made me feel deep dread.
Related from earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19528250
The thought of her ability potentially leading to advances in disease diagnosis is a humbling reminder of how complex the human body really is. And that there is still more to know.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/dec/26/g...
They also train them to find land mines.
https://www.apopo.org/en
https://www.apopo.org/en/latest/2018/04/The-woman-who-smells...
“It is emphasized that no bioassay-guided study has led to the isolation of true human pheromones, a step that will elucidate specific functions to human chemical signals.” [1]
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15470677
Or is it sufficient to be a "subconscious smell," signaling or otherwise?
It's useful to identify it early, but for the most part the early symptoms are mild.
Otherwise there is no way to distinguish between someone who never got cancer and someone who did but had the progression stop before it became a problem.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/porn-sniffing-dog-helpe...
https://imgur.com/EFKp8Wa