Part A

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Today we live in a world of abundant knowledge. No matter how informed and educated an individual you are, science always has something more to offer to those interested. Here are three different stories from three different fields of science.

A nose for history: academics recreate lost smells from the past

Dung, snuff, fish and old leather: these may turn out to be the ingredients required for time travel. Academics who are restoring the lost smells of European history want aromas like these to be introduced to a wide range of museums and tourist landmarks.

Working under the banner Odeuropa, a group of chemists and historians have spent more than two years isolating and reproducing key scents associated with significant moments and locations. Smell, they argue, has been unfairly ignored in academic attempts to understand the past, especially considering its impact on daily life.

“There has been a hierarchy of the senses in science and in historical study. We want to see a multisensory approach,” said Cecilia Bembibre, a lecturer in sustainable heritage at University College London (UCL). “There has been an idea that smell was a less than noble human sense, and that it was somehow less objective, less educated and even less trustworthy.”

The wider project, funded by a €2.8m grant from the EU’s Horizon programme in 2020, aims to establish the science of olfactory history by drawing on visual and written evidence to put together the key smells generated by outdated trades, habits and diets. Dr Marieke van Erp, a project manager on the Odeuropa experiment, will liaise between the different disciplines to create a multidimensional, digital, searchable representation of our olfactory heritage.

She explained that much of the work has focused on teaching computers to recognise images that relate to smells, for example a sketch of someone holding their nose. By exposing digital search tools to a succession of similar images, researchers can create an algorithm that recognises gestures in other illustrations.

Eventually this work will allow the collection of an encyclopedia of historic smells, a side element of the project being led by Dr William Tullett at Anglia Ruskin. These smells will explain changing world environments, as well as giving an insight into the lives of those involved. Olfactory cues, the researchers argue, should also be saved for posterity, not just visual, physical and written ones.

Happily, not all lost smells are nasty ones. Odeuropa is also researching the smell of incense and its historical and cultural significance. “We really want to engage communities. There are ‘nose witnesses’ alive now who can help us recreate smells from their childhoods or from trades that no longer exist,” Bembibre said.

Asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs triggered global mega-tsunami

Jumble of rocks in far-flung locations help researchers work out how big and how far-reaching impact would have been.

Any dinosaur that survived the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66m years ago then faced a mega-tsunami that washed around the entire world and began as a mile-high wave, a study shows.

It is no surprise that a 14km-wide asteroid slamming into the Gulf of Mexico would generate one hell of a tsunami but this is the first time anyone has worked out how big and how far-reaching it would have been.

Using crater impact and global tsunami models, researchers show that within 10 minutes of impact a 1.5km-high wall of water was racing out of the Gulf of Mexico. Within 24 hours the shores of New Zealand – more than 10,000km away – were engulfed by towering 10-metre high waves and within 48 hours few coastlines remained untouched.

Their results, published in AGU Advances, are corroborated by the jumble of rocks washed up by the tsunami in far-flung locations. A 66m-year-old rock mashup along the eastern shores of New Zealand had originally been attributed to earthquake activity but is now thought to be tsunami debris.

The researchers estimate the tsunami was about 30,000 times more energetic than the Indian Ocean tsunami on 26 December 2004. “Any historically documented tsunamis pale in comparison with such global impact,” they write.

Communi-cat-ive: cats attentive to owner’s voice, research finds

Cats more responsive if owners speak to them like babies but less so if adult-to-adult tone used, study claims

Any cat owner knows that the correct way to get their pet’s attention is to sing “here, kitty kitty”, rather than utter a flat “come here cat”. Now research suggests cats may routinely tune into their owner’s tone of voice to detect when they are talking to them, rather than to other humans.

Most people automatically adopt a higher-pitched, sing-song tone when speaking to animals and human infants. Although previous research has suggested that such “baby-talk” is more likely to capture dogs’ attention, less was known about how cats react to being spoken to in this way.

To investigate, Charlotte de Mouzon and colleagues from Paris Nanterre University observed how 16 cats responded to hearing pre-recorded sentences spoken by their owner or a stranger, by recording changes in their behaviour, such as moving their ears or tails, suddenly stopping what they were doing, or their pupils dilating – any of which could indicate that a sound had caught their attention.

They found that the cats were largely unresponsive to hearing a stranger’s voice calling their name, but when their owner did it, 10 of the 16 cats displayed a constellation of behaviours suggesting increased attentiveness. Cats also showed more signs of interest when they heard their owner speaking sentences in a tone usually used to address their cat – but not when a stranger used this tone, or when their owner spoke the same sentence as if addressing a fellow adult human.