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Weird Science smells its way out of awkward social situations

Conjugal visits, coregasms, and the right music for an organ transplant. It's …

You smell uncomfortable and accident prone: What do we rely on our sense of smell for? A new study attempts to find out by surveying a population of 32 individuals who were born without the ability to detect odors (in jargonese, that's "isolated congenital anosmia"). The answers: those without a functional nose tended to be involved in more household accidents, while experiencing "enhanced social insecurity." For the former, many have adopted coping strategies like asking others to determine whether a container of milk has gone bad.

I'm not sure prison is the right place to be testing gender theories: This is a case where an interesting and potentially useful finding is probably being a bit overinterpreted. Some researchers tracked the incidence of sexual violence in state prisons and found that it was lower in states that allowed their inmates conjugal visits. However, they've attempted to broaden that into some sort of grand conclusion about whether rape is a matter of gender-driven power struggles, which is probably stretching the relevance of the results past their breaking point.

Verdi after organ transplants, Enya for day-to-day life: This one had Weirdness written all over it, starting with the title: "Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells." Yes, some researchers have honestly subjected mice to a heart transplant, and then subjected them to either plain noise, opera, classical music, or Enya. The ones that got Verdi or Mozart handled their transplant better.

There are two things worth pointing out about this study. The first is that various forms of stress are known to alter immune function, and these mice appear to have gotten the music 24 hours a day for a week. So it's not out of the question that there would be some difference in immune response. The second thing is that, should you have a pretentious friend point to this as evidence of the superiority of opera, point out that a reduced immune response isn't considered a great thing if you haven't just had an organ transplant.

This sounds a bit more involved than the average runner's high: Apparently, it might be time to reinterpret some of the grunting you hear at the gym, as there is a population of women out there who sometimes experience what's being termed an "exercise induced orgasm." Generally, this came during a heavy abdominal workout (a pattern that's apparently earned them the term "coregasm"), although some have also had it while bicycling or hiking. The authors note that the women who get them say they don't generally involve any mental sexual imagery, raising questions about whether there's any necessary connection between the orgasm and sexual activity.

Channel Ars Technica