131–140 of 198 posts
This kind of tech should be developed as open-source projects, even for the firmware and hardware. A sufficiently advanced version of this, if widely deployed as proprietary blackboxes like smartphones are, would allow one consciousness to take over multiple bodies without their original owners knowing.
OK, I want to meet these guys. This writeup has several breathtaking (if you will) passages. Like: > "We found different scents by steering the beam over ~14 mm (20 degrees at 4 cm radius). The distance between freshness and burning was ~3.5 mm." > "The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent s…
As someone who was born without a sense of smell this is incredibly intriguing to me. I've always wondered if there's gonna be a time in my life where I'd be able to experience *any* kind of smell through some new scientific discovery. And maybe this is it. Could I shoot you guys a message when I make my way down to Caltech to try this out someday? :)
If you get in contact with the researchers, please let us know how it went.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was exactly my thought when reading the article and my personal experience with Covid. For a couple weeks, I perceived a persistent smell of something burning.
A smell of burning was how I suspected I had COVID the last time around. I was around some machines, I had to have someone else sniff around and let me know that nothing was actually burning.
In addition to this, I sometimes smell scents that do not exist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
I'd maybe make a hypothesis that a large portion of the space is "bad" smelling stuff: smoke or garbage. When people had covid-induced parosmia, it almost always seemed to be bad smelling stuff.
Super interesting! That would make sense, because a lot of the nose is presumably dedicated to smelling evolutionarily-relevant smells, most of which are "smells bad, avoid this". The method is very crude right now, but maybe with more fine-grained targetting we could better tune the smell profile.
It makes sense for unclassified to smell worse than good, and it'd probably be the biggest category by a long stretch.
(Pure speculation.)