Word: odors
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President George Bush calls it "a responsibility imposed by our successes" in the cold war. Columnist Pete Hamill calls it the new world odor. Fleeing Kurds, burying their dead in mountain tent cities, call it misery...
Until last week. In a discovery that promises to open up a whole new field of olfactory science, two researchers at Columbia University announced they have isolated what they believe are the first known odor receptors -- individual genes that are active in the nose and nowhere else in the body. What is more, the molecules they found seem to be part of an extended family of smell genes -- perhaps the largest single family in the long strand of mammalian DNA. "We have identified a few hundred genes," says Richard Axel, a professor at Columbia's Howard Hughes Medical Institute...
...findings, published in the current issue of the journal Cell, suggest that the sense of smell may work very differently. When odor molecules drift among the millions of tiny cilia located high in the nasal cavity, they seem to slip into certain odor receptors like keys into locks. The fact that there are such a large number of different kinds of odor receptors suggests that much of the work of discriminating among smells is being carried out at a chemical level within the nose itself. Signals from these receptors are then transmitted to the olfactory bulb, the small region...
...motley convoy stops before the small town of Altun Kupri, 25 miles from Kirkuk, and everyone jumps out. A truck with a flat tire zooms by from the direction of the city carrying wounded. One can smell the odor of burned flesh as it passes. As the twilight gathers, Abdul Rahman Aju Ali, 54, a barrel- shaped man with fierce eyes, explains, "We will attack at night...
...Leno joked last week that Saddam Hussein's humiliation should be made complete by choosing him as the 1992 Democratic nominee. The fear of such ridicule -- and the bad odor Democrats attach to their has-runs -- are two reasons why no one is racing to set up phone banks in Davenport, Iowa. Says Democratic Party treasurer Bob Farmer: "The party has got into the habit of eating its nominees for lunch if they lose...