Whether bulbous, Roman, or pug, the nose gets all the credit. But the actual star of smell is an unassuming patch of tissue, several centimeters square, tucked up inside each nasal cavity. After a whiff of a peach or a lilac, this tissue captures the volatile chemicals traveling into each nostril. The chemicals bind to receptors on the tissue’s millions of neurons, the neurons relay the information to the brain, and voilà—you know that the peach is ripe and the lilacs are in bloom.
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People can recognize some 10,000 different scents. But instead of having 10,000 different receptors, the tissue called the olfactory epithelium does the job with roughly 1,000. Each receptor binds to more than one odor molecule, while each odor molecule binds to more than one receptor. “It’s the overall pattern of the response of all the receptors that the brain interprets as a smell,” says chemist Kenneth S. Suslick of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.