Dawn spacecraft on final approach to Ceres

The Dawn spacecraft, shown firing its ion propulsion engine in this artist’s illustration, is scheduled to begin orbiting th­­e dwarf planet Ceres on March 6.

JPL-Caltech/NASA

The finish line is in sight for the Dawn mission. After 7 1/2 years in space, including a 14-month stop at the asteroid Vesta, the spacecraft is about to pull up alongside the dwarf planet Ceres.

Around 7:20 a.m. Eastern time on March 6, Ceres’ gravity will take hold and start to pull the spacecraft in. The probe will not take any pictures because it’s approaching the dwarf planet from the night side. In six weeks, Dawn will enter a closer orbit and begin its 14-month mission to map Ceres, looking for clues about the birth of the solar system.

Insect aerobatics: how mantises control spin for targeted jumps

Not just on the dancefloor... the praying mantis can throw some crazy shapes in mid-air. Malcolm Burrows, Author provided

Praying mantises are notorious – both for their deadly striking behaviour that they use to capture prey and for the gruesome female habit of eating their partners after mating. But their speed, agility and accuracy at jumping has not been widely recognised – until now. New research in Current Biology shows that the mantis jump is something rather special.

Juvenile mantises have no wings, as these appear only in adults. In their natural habitat among the stems of plants or the branches of bushes and trees, juveniles have little option but to jump if they need to move to another branch. They reach their target with great accuracy and with great speed – less than a tenth of a second, or in the blink of an eye. How do they achieve this remarkable feat?

To answer this question we took high speed videos (1,000 frames per second, or 30 times faster than normal videos) of mantis jumps made from a horizontal platform toward a target of a vertical, black rod, so that we could slow down time and reveal what they were doing and how they were doing it.

Beady-eyed decisions for complex spins

We found that the mantises first scanned the target from their horizontal platform by making side to side movements of their head – seemingly eyeing up the vertical target to estimate distance. If the target was close they would reach out with their long front legs (which they use for capturing prey) and simply grasp it. If the target was deemed too far away it was simply ignored. At distances in between, they would jump toward the target and sail through the air to reach it with remarkable accuracy.

Before take-off the mantises curl their abdomen to adjust their centre of mass. This ensures that the propulsive forces generated by the middle and hind legs act just sufficiently away from the centre of mass to impart a spin on the body as it leaves the platform.

Once in the air the mantises precisely rotate three body parts – the front legs, the hind legs, and the abdomen – in different directions and in different combinations, all the time exchanging momentum between them and keeping the spin of the whole body at the correct rate to successfully reach and land on the target.

We can show that these mechanical mechanisms are responsible for the precision jump of the mantises in two ways. First, by building a model (that is, a mathematical model – not an artificial mantis) to simulate a natural jump, we asked what happens when there is no rotation of one body part – say the front legs. We found that the body then rotates about twice as fast and ends up misaligned to the target.

Second, by experimental manipulation we could interfere with the rotation of a body part during a natural jump. For example, we glued the abdomen so that it could not be curled as much, with the result that the mantises took off with less spin and once airborne headed straight for the target and crashed head first into it.

We conclude that praying mantises are using the complex interplay between the counter-rotation of three body parts to exchange momentum and thus to orient their body to land on a target. Amazingly, they are doing all this in the blink of a human eye.

Here’s looking at you. Author provided

The controlled trajectory of mantis jumps contrasts with many insects which spin in the air after they have jumped and as a consequence frequently crash land. The major concern of these other insects, however, is to move as quickly as possible away from a predator or other source of harm. For these insects the speed of escape is paramount and the importance of stability is downplayed. Indeed, this uncontrolled high-speed spinning may be an advantage in that it makes the trajectory of a jump difficult for a predator to predict, and thus improves the chances of survival.

Outside the insect lab, learning from the way mantises solve the problem of stability may aid the design of small jumping robots, where controlling spin continues to be a challenging problem.

To upgrade or not upgrade? That is the all-too-frequent question

'If I'm honest I just don't think this is Windows 10-compatible.' (with apols to Ritchie & Thompson) Peter Hamer, CC BY-SA

The question of whether or not to go for the upgrade or stick with the devil you know is an increasingly common contemporary dilemma; the lure of new features against the threat of potentially disabling a device that plays an important role in our lives.

For example, Apple iPhone users who were quick to upgrade their phones to iOS 8 got burned by bugs. In fact many cynics see “point-zero” software versions (eg, 8.0) as nothing short of testing releases, and wait for later minor updates (eg, 8.1) to iron out the problems.

But even this behaviour can’t explain how Microsoft’s venerable Windows XP operating system, introduced in 2001 and officially retired in 2014, has grown its market share against more recent versions.

Desktop operating system market share, Jan-Feb 2015. netmarketshare

The problem for software and hardware developers and technological giants such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google is that despite technology’s constant, rapid advancements many users are happy with what they’ve got. Unintentionally this makes these firms' task much harder.

Microsoft Windows is 32 years old – businesses have used Microsoft products and applications built to run on them for decades, and they expect backward compatibility. Developers want those using their products to stick with them as new versions come out, which means data created with older versions must be accessible by the latest version.

The update rat-race

While for home and business users the trade off is often between features or convenience and cost, for software companies the issue is the cost burden of supporting and updating not just the current but older versions too. This is why most will declare end-of-life on their products past a certain age. Commercial software developers want to sell you new versions, and developers of all kinds would prefer to be able to focus on improvements and new additions, not the needs of a shrinking group of users wedded to increasingly out-of-date software.

When Google announced it had stopped supporting Android versions prior to 4.3, it was making this point. There are already two more recent versions – 4.4 and 5.0 – and the costs of providing continued support and updates for old versions is a drain. On top of that, older versions may not support new technology or standards (for example for faster internet access technology, better sound or video). Backporting these features into older versions can be costly, time-consuming, and often impossible. Better to persuade handset manufacturers and consumers to upgrade.

Microsoft has this problem on an enormous scale, with its products running what is probably billions of computers and devices worldwide. There have been four subsequent versions (Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1) and Windows 10 will arrive soon, but 15 years old or not, Windows XP is still common despite its limitations, and appears in embedded systems such as cash machines and point-of-sale terminals.

For some organisations not upgrading may be a matter of cost, but for others it’s the risk of disruption to daily business operations – particularly if key applications built for one version of Windows won’t play nicely with another. Having the latest version may be “fun”, but when the business is on the line, it’s a case of if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

Well now, that sure sounds expensive. dragonicefire, CC BY-SA

A work-around for the upgrade cycle

If you’re content with what you have then the eternal upgrade cycle can be avoided for many years. But if cost is the issue then there are alternatives – free and low-cost alternatives that provide functionality without the hassle.

The obvious examples are free or open source operating systems such as Linux. Since the arrival of Ubuntu (a version of Linux) in 2004 it has also become more user-friendly rather than merely a tool for experts and server administrators. It’s possible to run Linux on much cheaper, less well-equipped computers than required for Windows or Mac OS X and still enjoy the benefits of the current technological generation.

It’s also possible to run really old software using desktop virtualisation – software that allows you to run one operating system within another, as if it were just another application. Alternatively many emulators imitate older operating systems or computers – DOSBox emulates DOS, the text-based precursor to Windows, and others emulate old Macintosh computers, 8-bit home computers, and all manner of video game consoles or arcade cabinets.

The update cycle can be a constant churn – driven by the bottom line of the companies involved rather than the utility and value offered to the customer. But as sure as night follows day, better hardware and software will come along and we all jump on. The question is, how long will you wait?

What cures may lie within Kew Gardens? Give it the financial freedom to find them

Kew is home to plants from across the globe. Diliff, CC BY-SA

To the casual visitor, the World Heritage Site that is the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew might appear to be merely a green and pleasant land, a tranquil oasis amid the hustle and bustle of London – but it is under threat. A new report by a committee of MPs calls for greater financial freedom for this venerable institution.

Beneath the peaceful, verdant veneer of manicured gardens and innovative architecture that houses botanical curiosities and vegetable wonders from around the globe, a bitter battle is being fought. At stake is no less a prize than the survival of Kew as a world-class botanical research organisation.

Founded in the 18th century, when Britain’s imperial ambitions were being realised, Kew was envisioned as an exhibition of the botanical riches of the British empire so that they could be studied, understood, and exploited, for the benefit of the mother country. But Kew is much more than our nation’s greenhouse. For all its rich history, its present-day activities are very much about our future as a species on this planet.

Strong stuff. So, what does Kew do? What is it for? Is it just a “living museum”?

There are approximately 352,000 species of flowering plants in the world. We have little idea how useful the great majority might be, and many of them are endangered in the wild. Appropriately, a major part of Kew’s activities is recording plant diversity, understanding it as an invaluable natural resource from which we can all benefit, and helping to conserve it. But why?

Simply put, plants provide us with food (whether directly for vegetarians or indirectly via the plant-eating animals that we consume), fibres (for clothing), pharmaceuticals (to cure much of what ails us), and much more besides. Oh, and plants also provide that essential life-sustaining gas: oxygen.

Powerful in pink: the Madagascar Periwinkle has provided a treatment for leukaemia Devilal, CC BY-SA

It is an oft-repeated cliché that we don’t know where the next cure for cancer might come from. Well, we don’t, but it’s likely to be from plants, which have already provided us with effective treatments for leukaemia (from the Madagascar periwinkle), and for breast cancer (from the Pacific yew tree). And innovative solutions to the pressing problems of future climate change and food security are likely to be found amongst the botanical diversity of our planet.

Botany is serious business

So, plants (and fungi) are Kew’s business. And like all businesses it needs income to allow it to operate, and a plan of what it’s going to do with that money. Kew’s Science Strategy for 2015-2020 clearly shows it has vision and plans for the next several years at least.

In terms of funding, the recent parliamentary report was sparked by Kew’s announcement of a £5 million “hole” in its 2014/15 budget. Alongside its own income-generating activities, 45% of Kew’s total funding comes from public money distributed by the Department for Enivronment, Food & Rural Affairs. However, this amount is not guaranteed and has to be negotiated each year, and large portions of the money are tied to particular expenditure. This compares poorly to the Natural History Museum, 96% of whose government funding is unrestricted, meaning that the museum decides how best to deploy those sums.

If you have ever wondered whether a parliamentary committee has any independence from the influence of the ruling government, then you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that its main conclusion was that current government funding arrangements for Kew were a “recipe for failure”. In particular, there is an urgent need for Kew to be given more freedom in how it manages its budget, and to be given a better indication of funding in the longer term.

This is all well and good, but a new government might not implement the findings of the committee, and we might be facing another series of crisis talks concerning Kew’s funding in the very near future. But, let’s be optimistic, and hope that the next government – of whatever hue – is at least sufficiently green to put into effect the conclusions of this committee: to allow Kew to decide how best to spend its income and to secure its future funding.

In a world where our future as a species is more than ever tied up with our relationship to and exploitation of the planet’s botanical bounty, shouldn’t Kew be given the security of funding to maintain its world-class status, and the wherewithal to manage its own budget?

Time to disconnect: why the SIM card has had its day

Old school and old fashioned - time to drop the SIM. Yui Mok/PA

The small microchips known as “subscriber identity modules” or SIM cards that are required for mobile phones to log on to a phone network will soon be 25 years old. While mobile phones and network technology have progressed in leaps and bounds, SIM cards are still lodged in handsets.

And they’re vulnerable too – it was claimed recently that US and UK intelligence agencies stole potentially millions of SIM card security keys which would allow spies to track users and eavesdrop on calls.

Gemalto, the Dutch SIM card manufacturer that was reportedly the victim of an NSA and GCHQ attack, responded with assurances that little, if any, information was stolen. The firm stressed how important its products were to mobile phone security. But the reality is that SIM cards are now more of a drawback than a benefit.

A solution of their time

SIM cards were a useful feature when they came onto the market in 1991. At the time mobile phones were bulky devices, usually mounted in cars or carried on a shoulder strap. They were often rented along with a car. A SIM would help customers quickly and easily transfer their phone number and contacts from one phone to the next, without the need to type in long identifiers and access codes each time. Having to enter access codes into a phone that was essentially shared also meant users might forget to delete them before returning the device. Storing the login details in a removable personal plastic card elegantly solved this problem.

This is no pocket phone. projectmgmt

But the days of huge or rented car phones are gone, and today smartphones are lightweight, personal devices that we entrust with passwords to many sites and services – access to WiFi, email, social networks, app stores, and online shopping.

A QR code, an easier way of inputting usernames and passwords. brdall

The fact is that the SIM could have been replaced long ago with a simpler alternative: typing in a user identifier and password directly into the phone is an option – just as we do to access WiFi. QR codes – the square, 3D barcodes – are a more convenient alternative for smartphones with cameras, where an app could read the details encoded in the QR straight from the camera.

Modern cryptographic techniques mean that passwords no longer have to be very long. Password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) techniques exist that use passwords as simple as a five-digit PIN to create highly secure encrypted connections that even the supercomputers of eavesdropping intelligence agencies cannot break. And thanks to email and the web, network operators today have much better mechanisms for keeping in touch with their users to inform them which devices are authorised. None of these options were available when the SIM was conceived in the late 1980s.

Smartphone app stores like those from Apple and Google already make good use of modern authentication techniques. They could, today, be used to easily transfer all the functionality of a SIM into the phone using an app. All that’s needed is a new standard interface for mobile operating systems such as Android or iOS that would allow apps (software) to take over the functions of the SIM (hardware). Technically, a mobile network login is no more challenging than similar applications such as payment wallets, online banking, digital rights managed content, and so on.

Vested interests

Manufacturers are understandably against anything that would eliminate their business – an estimated 5.2 billion SIM cards were sold in 2014. Many network operators are also wedded to the SIM because it allows them to lock customers to their network, preventing easy access to competitors.

The size of SIM cards has shrunk. Justin Ormont, CC BY-SA

Modern SIMs are tiny, difficult to access, and easy to lose once taken out of the phone. In fact many users may not even know how to find or remove theirs, because it was inserted for them when they bought the phone. This inconvenience allows providers to charge high roaming fees when customers use their phone abroad, when using a local operator would be cheaper.

If the SIM were replaced with a password or extra software, users would be able to keep several pay-as-you-go subscriptions from different providers in their phone simultaneously, so they can easily switch to the most attractive rate depending on where they were. Apps that functioned as brokers could even negotiate which network to select based on best price automatically.

Another obstacle, besides the SIM itself, that hinders customers from easily switching between network providers is the cumbersome procedure required to transfer a telephone number. Currently you need to call your outgoing provider to request a Porting Authorization Code (PAC) to pass to your new provider. This process was designed to ease switching contracts every few years, rather than to help a phone switch between networks automatically several times a day.

But modern internet-based telephony has demonstrated that moving a telephone number between networks can be accomplished in seconds – the same needs to be implemented in mobile phone networks.

‘I don’t know, it says ENTER SIM CARD.’ Aaron Amat/Shutterstock

Given that the SIM card and phone-number transfer are barriers preventing customers from fully gaining the benefits of market competition, regulators should watch out that vested interests are not able to undermine efforts to provide alternatives.

The European Commission has long tried to improve mobile phone competition, mostly through price-control measures of roaming charges. Ditching the SIM would remove a major obstacle to competition, something that would likely generate market solutions to the problem of excess roaming charges without the need for further regulation from above.

Explainer: what is a superconductor?

Superconducting materials have strange and unusual properties including magnetic levitation. Shutterstock

Materials can be divided into two categories based on their ability to conduct electricity. Metals, such as copper and silver, allow electrons to move freely and carry with them electrical charge. Insulators, such as rubber or wood, hold on to their electrons tightly and will not allow an electrical current to flow.

In the early 20th century physicists developed new laboratory techniques to cool materials to temperatures near absolute zero (-273 °C), and began investigating how the ability to conduct electricity changes in such extreme conditions. In some simple elements such as mercury and lead they noticed something remarkable – below a certain temperature these materials could conduct electricity with no resistance. In the decades since this discovery scientists have found identical behaviour in thousands of compounds, from ceramics to carbon nanotubes.

We now think of this state of matter as neither a metal nor an insulator, but an exotic third category, called a superconductor. A superconductor conducts electricity perfectly, meaning an electrical current in a superconducting wire would continue to flow round in circles for billions of years, never degrading or dissipating.

Electrons in the fast lane

On a microscopic level the electrons in a superconductor behave very differently from those in a normal metal. Superconducting electrons pair together, allowing them to travel with ease from one end of a material to another. The effect is a bit like a priority commuter lane on a busy motorway. Solo electrons get stuck in traffic, bumping into other electrons and obstacles as they make their journey. Paired electrons on the other hand are given a priority pass to travel in the fast lane through a material, able to avoid congestion.

Superconductors have already found applications outside the laboratory in technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). MRI machines use superconductors to generate a large magnetic field that gives doctors a non-invasive way to image the inside of a patient’s body. Superconducting magnets also made possible the recent detection of the Higgs Boson at CERN, by bending and focusing beams of colliding particles.

Superconductors are used in medical Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Jan Ainali, CC BY

One interesting and potentially useful property of superconductors arises when they are placed near a strong magnet. The magnetic field causes electrical currents to spontaneously flow on the surface of a superconductor, which then give rise to their own, counteracting, magnetic field. The effect is that the superconductor dramatically levitates above the magnet, suspended in the air by an invisible magnetic force.

What prevents more widespread use of these materials is the fact that the superconductors we know about operate only at very low temperatures. In the simple elements for instance superconductivity dies out at just 10 Kelvin, or -263 °C. In more complicated compounds, such as yttrium barium copper oxide (YBa₂Cu₃O₇), superconductivity may persist to higher temperatures, up to 100 Kelvin (-173 °C). While this is an improvement on the simple elements, it is still much colder than the coldest winter night in Antarctica.

Scientists dream of finding a material where superconductive properties can be used at room temperature, but it’s a challenging task. Turning up the temperature tends to destroy the glue that binds the electrons into superconducting pairs, which then returns a material back to its boring metallic state. One of the great challenges in the field arises from the fact that we don’t yet understand very much about this glue, except in a few limited cases.

From superatom to superconductor

New research from the University of Southern California has taken a novel step towards improving our understanding of how superconductivity arises. Rather than study superconductivity in bulk materials like wires, Vitaly Kresin and his coworkers have managed to isolate and examine small clumps of a few dozen aluminium atoms at a time. These tiny clusters of atoms can act like a “superatom”, sharing electrons in a way that mimics a single, giant atom.

What is surprising is that measurements of these clusters reveal what may be the signature of electron pairing persisting all the way up to 100 kelvin (-173 °C). This is still a frosty temperature of course, but it is 100 times higher than the superconducting temperature of a piece of aluminium wire. Why does a small handful of atoms superconduct at a much higher temperature than the millions of atoms that form a wire? Physicists have some ideas but the effect is largely unexplored, and it might prove an interesting way forward in the quest for superconductivity at higher temperatures.

The need for speed: MagLev trains in Japan use superconductivity to achieve ultra-high speeds. Shutterstock

Hoverboards anyone?

If physicists were able to achieve the goal of room temperature superconductivity in a material that was easy to fashion into wires, important new technologies would soon follow. For starters, devices which use electricity would become considerably more efficient and consume less power.

Transporting electricity over long distances would also become much easier, which is particularly useful for renewable energy applications – and some have proposed giant superconducting cables linking Europe with solar energy farms in North Africa.

The fact that superconductors will levitate above a strong magnet also creates possibilities for efficient, ultra-high speed trains that float above a magnetic track, much like Marty McFly’s hoverboard in Back to the Future. Japanese engineers have experimented with replacing the wheels of a train with large superconductors that hold the carriages a few centimetres above the track. The idea works in principle, but suffers from the fact that the trains need to carry expensive tanks of liquid helium with them in order to keep the superconductors cold.

Many superconducting technologies will probably remain on the drawing board, or too expensive to implement, unless a room temperature superconductor is discovered. It’s just possible however that the advances made by Kresin’s group might mark a milestone on this journey.

There’s no evidence human pheromones exist – no matter what you find for sale online

Whatever the adverts suggest, this isn't going to increase your animal magnetism. Thinglass/Shutterstock

The idea of human pheromones is intuitively appealing, conjuring up the idea of secret signals that make us irresistible to potential partners. But this connection of pheromones with sex may be the wrong way to look at the issue – because despite 45 years of study and various claims over the years there’s still not a lot of evidence that human pheromones exist at all.

The study of pheromones of all kinds is problematic – even the definition is controversial. The word comes from the Greek pherein (to transfer), and hormōn (to excite) and was defined by Karlson and Luscher in 1959 as:

Substances which are secreted by an individual and received by a second individual of the same species, in which they release a specific reaction, for instance a definite behaviour or developmental process.

The snag is that that while many researchers agree on the basic properties of pheromones, there is considerable debate over which olfactory (sense of smell) cues represent pheromones. For example, many species use odours to identify characteristics such as species, sex, relatedness and social status. Many researchers label these odours as pheromones; others feel that by the above definition they’re really just smells.

Similarly not all potential pheromones are secreted externally – some species of salamanders transfer chemical signals to another salamander by directly injecting them into the bloodstream. Some scientists believe that the response to a pheromone should provide an evolutionary advantage to both the sender and the receiver of the signal, and do so unconsciously.

So a lack of consensus on pheromones' definition has led to the over-use of this term. Instead many scientists instead use the term semiochemicals to refer to chemicals that transmit some form of specific message that can influence a recipient’s physiology and behaviour.

That’s right - just two dabs behind the antennae and they’re all over me L. Shyamal, CC BY-SA

Studying smells is hard

Given these problems why are researchers so interested in pheromones at all? Generally olfaction is one of the most crucial forms of communication in the animal world. Odours have the greatest potential range of any method of animal communication, can be transmitted in total darkness and around obstacles. Unlike signals to be seen or heard, odours also remain in the environment for extended periods, providing the opportunity to lay signals – such as when marking territory.

But studying human pheromones is problematic for a number of reasons beyond definition. Olfactory research can be extremely tricky to conduct: smells are invisible and hard to control, there is no real standardised system for labelling and evaluating odours, and a wealth of potentially confounding variables need to be controlled for. Also the problem is that humans can evaluate signals in a variety of quite divergent ways – it’s rare that we show simplistic stimulus–response reaction.

Four pheromone candidates

Four specific substances have been identified as possible human pheromones.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a strong focus on testosterone-derived androstenone and androstenol, possible pheromones in pigs also found in human armpits. A number of studies have investigated the effect of these substances on human behaviour, focusing on social interactions and the evaluation of sexual partners. Despite a general pattern for these substances to increase social contact between males and females, findings are extremely inconsistent.

In the 1990s the focus shifted to the similar androstadienone and oestratraenol, an oestrogen-derived substance produced in pregnant women. These were the compounds studied in several experiments that examined the vomeronasal organ (VNO) – a tubular structure located in the nasal cavity which, in some species, is involved in processing pheromones.

Several studies documented finding a VNO in more than 90% of human participants, and reported that stimulating the VNO with artificially-created “putative human pheromones” seemed to stimulate the recipients. This suggested the existence of human pheromones, as a functioning VNO would provide humans the ability to process pheromones.

‘Your powers of magnetic attraction be damned, I’m not kissing a man with nicer braids than mine.’ Frédéric Soulacroix

However, more recent studies cast doubt on this idea, with no evidence that the few VNOs identified in humans have any functional receptor cells to detect anything – the VNO isn’t actually connected to the brain. And those putative “synthetic human pheromones” provided to the studies that claimed to show evidence of their effect on the VNO? It’s been pointed out that they had been provided by EROX – a firm with a commercial interest in patenting and selling them. You’ll find EROX and scores of other firms selling similar products on the internet today.

Research into these four pheromone candidates suffers from all sorts of problems. The substances are used in concentrations between several and millions of times higher than they occur naturally in humans. Experiments tend to be beset with methodological and statistical issues, leading to a contradictory or inconclusive findings. Publication bias leaves it likely that only positive results are published, artificially increasing the amount of supposedly supportive evidence, and findings have often not been independently replicable.

In any case, even if these substances do effect human physiology and behaviour it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re pheromones – there are numerous odours from plants or from industrial chemicals that can produce a behavioural reaction in humans.

The way forward

Tristram Wyatt, in his recent paper for the Royal Society, suggests that we move away from the sexual focus on pheromones. Instead we should focus not just on the substance present but on the range of odours that humans are capable of producing from a variety of sites on the body.

Wyatt’s suggestion is the secretions from the areola of mothers' lactating breasts is a good place to start looking, as smell is very important to suckling behaviour in animals. Any baby, presented with the secretions of any mother, will respond with nipple-searching behaviour, even while asleep.

The search for human pheromones taps into our mysterious sense of smell and appeals to us on an emotional level. Of course, there are also strong commercial motivations to demonstrating their existence and the products that might follow. There is already a well-documented history of this occurring in the field of olfaction research – and these motivations inevitably muddy the water. We need to address these issues with a much more rigorous approach if the science is to progress.