Monday, October 13, 2008

Israel conquista/Israel wins!

O israelense Rafi Haddad, pesquisador do departmento de neurobiologia, do famoso Instituto Weizmann de Ciência em Rehov - Israel, recebeu o prêmio Science Fragrance award deste ano. O trabalho deste pesquisador foi elaborado conjuntamente com David Harel e Noam Sobel, e gerou em torno da pesquisa sobre a possibilidade de o prazer do odor ser captado por um nariz eletrônico previamente treinado. Pois segundo ele, aspectos que regulam tanto a percepção olfativa quanto a neurológica podem ser captadas pelo nariz eletrônico.

Vale a pena conferir no site do Sense of Smell Institute ou a matéria no site do próprio Instituto, sobre o mapeamento das moléculas odorantes.

Rafi Haddad Receives 2008 Science of Fragrance Award

Rafi Haddad, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has received the 2008 Science of Fragrance award in recognition of his investigation “Predicting Odor Pleasantness with An Electronic Nose.” Haddad presented his research results at the July 2008 International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste in San Francisco. He was the lead researcher on the project along with David Harel and Noam Sobel.

Odor pleasantness is a primary dimension of olfactory perception, yet how much of this dimension is learned and how much is innate remains a topic of debate. Haddad theorized that the innate aspect of odor pleasantness should be rigidly mappable to odorant structure and set out to demonstrate this by training an electronic nose (eNose) to predict odor pleasantness. Haddad had done some previous work on prediciting olfactory receptor responses with an eNose (Haddad etal, 2008). The results of that work combined with the current project demonstrated that odor aspects governing both neural and perception olfactory responses can be captured in part by an eNose.
Article publish in the Sense of Smell Institute site.
Kol hakavod Rafi!

2 comments:

  1. I love articles like this! I guess when it comes to smells we dislike there is much more consensus since so much of what we perceive as malodorous makes evolutionary sense.. We don't want to eat something poisonous or rotting, so smells associated with rot, decay and poison are automatically rejected. But what we all find pleasant is so much more subjective... And complex!

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  2. I think you would love to read the book of Mandy Aftel. There is a chapter about odors and sex, amazing!
    Kissy

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