Newborns have a strong sense of smell

Heightened sense of smell during pregnancy is not yet well understood

Boosted smell powers and strong reactions to them are often reported beginning around the six-week mark of pregnancy. Researchers say hormonal changes likely play a role, but the change remains poorly understood.

Babies taste food in the womb via amniotic fluid, and it may influence future taste buds

Some estimates suggest that around Week 16 during pregnancy, a growing fetus can begin to taste amniotic fluid that contains flavors in the food that their mother consumed, due to taste bud formation. Scientists think those early flavor experiences may influence future taste preferences. Other scientific resources put that time much later, however—around Week 30.

Our sense of smell affects what foods taste like and how we perceive it

Scent stimulates our olfactory sensor neurons high in the nasal cavity, and the brain attaches labels to those scents. But when we eat, chemicals from the foods travel from our mouths and throat to those neurons. We have roughly 400 odor receptors, and they can be used to decipher more than 10,000 different odors (or more than one trillion by some calculations), including the nuances of different foods.

Touch is the first sense a fetus develops in the womb

During gestation, our sense of touch begins to develop around 8 weeks, starting with the development of sensory receptors in the face and, about a month later, in the palms and soles of the feet.

Smell is a robust memory cue for individuals with Alzheimer's disease

Odor is more effective than both visual and verbal cues for triggering autobiographical recall in Alzheimer's disease, according to 2021 research.

Roughly 15 of every 1,000 people in the US have smell disorders

Anosmia is a lack of a sense of smell. It can be present at birth, related to diseases including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and COVID-19, or have unknown causes.

Babies don't develop a circadian rhythm right away

Newborns don't develop circadian rhythm until they are a few months old, which helps to explain their erratic sleep schedules. When they're around three months old they begin to release melatonin, which influences sleep, and around the same time they develop more regular sleeping routines.

Mosquitoes even have olfactory receptors on their sperm

Male mosquitoes, which don't bite humans, have fewer olfactory receptors than females on their antennae—they don't need them to locate blood meals. But they do have this same type of receptor located in the tail of their sperm, thought to help bring egg and sperm together.

Carboxylic acids are one reason teens are smelly

Scientists compared the smells of babies and teenagers and identified some of the compounds that make teens smelly. Carboxylic acids present in teens, they wrote, seemed to give off an "earthy, musty, or cheesy" scent. This 2024 research could help inform future odor-control products.

Scientists are reconstructing ancient smells—including a 3,500-year-old ancient Egyptian mummy

Researchers explain how they have recreated the scent of ancient Egyptian mummies and enabled museum-goers to experience that scent on specialized cards. The exhibit will be at the Royal BC Museum in Canada in June 2026.

A pregnant woman's brain sheds gray matter, perhaps explaining 'baby brain'

The brain areas involved in processing information and emotions decrease by an average of almost 5% during pregnancy. Researchers discovered in a 2025 study that this mostly temporary change—the brain hadn't fully returned to its normal size six months after pregnancy—seems to be associated with self-reported improved bonding and less hostility toward the child postpartum.

Touch helps newborns regulate stress, gain weight, and feel less pain

Conclusions from this 2024 analysis from a team of Danish researchers included that touch interventions were particularly useful for newborns in regulating cortisol levels, helping newborns gain weight, and reducing pain. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Western babies often are missing a key gut microbe common elsewhere

Studies show infants in Europe and North America often lack Bifidobacterium infantis, a microbe widespread in babies in Africa and South Asia that helps digest breast milk and train the immune system. Researchers link the gap to antibiotics, formula use, and sanitized spaces.

Pediatricians look for a list of behaviors to signal typical hearing development

These markers of typical hearing development among infants and toddlers include turning head to sound sources within the first five months of life, babbling by about 11 months, and trying to imitate simple words by 17 months of age.

How does the body know where it is in space?

Close your eyes and touch your nose. How did you know where your nose was? How could you tell where your hand was? That's proprioception, the sense that keeps your brain apprised of the body's position and movement. This article explains how this sense works, what happens when people don't have it, and what we know about it.

Blindfolded people could identify objects by touch alone a week after encountering them

These touch memories are more complex and durable than previously thought. In research published in 2018, blindfolded volunteers touched over 150 household objects for about 10 seconds each, and afterward correctly identified the objects more than 90 percent of the time when presented with the object and a similar one. Participants still knew most of the objects a week later with about 85 percent accuracy. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Grieving primate mothers will carry dead infant for long after death—and others will comfort her

An examination of infant corpse carrying practices among non-human primate mothers found that 40 species of primate mothers will carry around their dead infant for days, weeks, or even months. In some cases, a grieving primate's group members would provide grieving support—hugging or staying close to mothers who experienced a loss.

Explore how the placenta acts as lungs, kidneys, and more in the womb

This temporary organ, formed from maternal and embryonic tissue, ultimately attaches to a fetus via the umbilical cord. It transports nutrients, oxygen, antibodies, and more from the mother to the developing fetus. It also carries carbon dioxide and waste away from the fetus. The placenta—which forms only during pregnancy—is expelled during childbirth, or it needs to be removed to prevent toxic maternal infections and extreme blood loss.

Some animals may speak because of duplicated connections in the brain

Neuroscience suggests that connections responsible for motion made during embryonic brain development—such as those connecting hearing and movement pathways that allow reactive motion when started—are duplicated and connected to the larynx in some animals. This allows some mammals and song-learning birds to speak, provided they have the necessary physiological structures.

Danish moms have a built-in support group through the healthcare system

Local Danish health departments put these groups together, assigning mothers into small support groups comprised of mothers in roughly the same area who gave birth around the same time. The purpose of the groups is to create a supportive network of new parents who can benefit from one another's experiences. The group's mothers decide how often to meet and what to discuss.

Nasal hairs, called vibrissae, help protect the body from particulate matter and other dirt

The nose structure plays a key role in filtering air before it enters our lungs and makes sure that the air temperature and humidity are also suitable for the body.

Dogs' disease-sniffing skills were first identified in 1989

This capability, reported in the medical journal The Lancet, was discovered when a dog reportedly detected cancer in its handler. The dog repeatedly focused on a spot on the owner's leg where a malignant melanoma lesion was later found, helping lead to an early diagnosis.

The cosmic microwave background is the faded light of when the universe glowed orange

About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for atoms to form, releasing a burst of orange-hued thermal radiation that has since redshifted into microwaves we now detect as the CMB. No matter where you point a detector in space, the CMB signal is always there.

Like fingerprints, brain anatomy is unique too

Researchers have discovered that a combination of experiences and genetic factors shape the anatomy of the human brain. They found even quick experiences affect the brain’s genetic makeup, which—over time—means every person develops a completely unique brain anatomy. While brain imaging could be used to identify individuals, it remains much more expensive than fingerprinting for now. Read to found out more about this study from the University of Zurich.

Works of art on motherhood at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City contains one of the world's most prestigious collections, and this page draws together classic and contemporary works created around the theme of motherhood.

Researchers believe the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and plans for the future during dream states

Tattoos remain visible on your skin thanks to immune cells called macrophages

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

Fear or disgust related to clusters of holes and cracks, called trypophobia, may stem from evolutionary processes to help us avoid pathogens.

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

The syncytiotrophoblast is the outer layer of the placenta and the largest human cell, spanning an area about twice that of a king-sized bedsheet.

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

Poison ivy is in the same family as mangoes, cashews, and pistachios—and they all produce oily urushiol in their raw, unprocessed state—but they are typically prepared in ways to avoid causing human discomfort.

Explore the animals that populate the depths of the ocean, from fish and coral in the first few hundred feet, all the way down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

While the sun's gravity keeps the planets in orbit, their gravity also pulls on the sun, causing it and everything else in the solar system to orbit around a mutual balance point called the barycenter—the true center of the solar system.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is 'Afghan Girl' (1984) by Steve McCurry, yet the subject Sharbat Gula went much of her life without being identified or benefitting from the image's success.

About 2,000 US babies are born annually without some portion of their limbs, potentially leading to a lifetime of pricey prosthetics.

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

Objects can be 3D printed with light by projecting 2D computerized tomography (CT) scans onto rotating cylinders of resin, which solidify upon exposure.