Human nose can detect one trillion different scents

Posted Mar 21, 2014 7:26 am.

This article is more than 5 years old.

The nose does know!

A new study finds the human nose can distinguish at least one trillion different odours.

The previous estimate was that people could only detect 10,000 scents.

We have 400 olfactory receptors; a rabbit has 100-million and a dog has 220-million.

Humans are nonetheless capable of detecting certain substances in dilutions of less than one part in several billion parts of air.

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