Sniftag: Tails told, friends made. This really is very lovely. It's a Nike iD for dogs and their owners combined with an introduction service under the pretence of building social networks of four-legged friends. Genius.
From one snif to another. New research on what makes dogs noses so brilliant:
DOGS' extraordinary ability to sniff out anything from cocaine to cancer turns out to owe much to the gunk inside their nose.
Dogs
have many more nerve cells in their nasal cavities than we do and a
wider variety of receptors to latch on to odour molecules. Now a team
led by Brent Craven of Pennsylvania State University in University Park
has shown that the complex network of snot-coated tubes in a dog's nose
also "pre-sorts" smells, which may make it easier for the brain to
identify them.
Before
odour molecules can reach smell receptors, they must get through a
layer of mucus - and some molecules are absorbed quicker than others.
To find out how this might affect smell perception, Craven's team used
MRI images of a dog's nasal airways to develop computer models of how
air travels along them. The team found that different molecules are
first picked up at different points in the airway network.
Until
now, research has focused on how receptors pick up different chemicals.
"We've shown that the sorting out of the different odorants before they
even get to the receptors is also important," says Craven. The team
presented its results this week at a meeting of the American Physical
Society's division of fluid dynamics in San Antonio, Texas.