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Trying to create a whiff of an alien atmosphere—sunbaked sulfur and chalk NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS ============================================================= Robot explorers have found Mars to be a world of sulfur, acids, magnesium, iron and chlorine compounds, all of which are sunbaked and wrapped in a carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere. But what would this complex and exotic brew smell like? It turns out that everyone—not just Mars explorers—might be able to find out, because there may be ways to recreate whiffs of the Red Planet here on Earth. One relatively recent innovation in the perfume business is "Headspace" technology. "It gathers the molecules, and then the sample is...

An elephant trampled a woman to death in India, only to return during her funeral to pull her body off a pyre and trample over her corpse again. The incident was said to have occurred in the eastern Indian state of Odisha on Thursday, and comes amid rising animal-human conflict in the country. Maya Murmu, 70, was targeted by a wild elephant that had strayed from a nearby wildlife sanctuary while collecting water in the district of Mayurbhanj. Despite being rushed to hospital, the elderly woman succumbed to her injuries in hospital and her body was placed on a funeral...

Sexual chemicals affect how we identify an androgynous figure. Women and men can sniff out the opposite sex via odorless pheromones, a new study suggests. The discovery adds another piece to the growing body of evidence that humans, much like the rest of the animal kingdom, know more from their noses than previously thought. "We know that for animals, chemosignals are actually the most used signals to communicate, whereas with humans, we think chemosensation is not really used," said study leader Wen Zhou, a psychologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. "But based on our experiences, they are...

Liz Gabor calls the odor “man sweat.” Though she’s loath to admit it, the aromatic scent makes her feel, as she calls it, a little frisky. “My friends think I’m crazy, but I think male sweat is kind of pleasant and, well, kind of hot,” says Gabor, 28, a customer service rep and happily married mother of two young girls. Gabor doesn’t have a honker that’s on the fritz. Rather, her penchant for “man sweat” is all in her genes, according to new research from Rockefeller and Duke Universities published this week in the journal Nature. Scientists have previously found...