By Bruce Bower
Respect the nose. Humans use it to tell apart an average of more than 1 trillion odors, a new study finds.
That estimate of smell’s reach vastly exceeds the roughly several million colors and 340,000 tones a typical person can distinguish, reports a team led by geneticist Leslie Vosshall of Rockefeller University in New York City. A decades-old claim that humans discriminate only about 10,000 odors had not been systematically tested until now, the scientists say in the March 21 Science.