scottobear | 8994 - mon (Reply)

Relaxing nighttime plans for BHK and me the coming week or so ahead:

Yo-yo Girl Cop, The Number 23, and a few rousing games of Penguin Soccer, Martian Chess and Zamboni Wars over popcorn should set us right. Tucking into bed early so we can be up for tomorrow's Bluegrass Festival.

BHK has been excelling at boardgames lately, especially territory types like Othello(Reversi), Ponte del Diavolo , Just 4 Fun and as always, Pente(we both seem to prefer the 2 or 3-capture variant Keryo-Pente). I still am partial to Hexxagon, Hey-That's my Fish, and Carcassone H&G (She also is superb at those) - I'm really beginning to dig War of the Roses, which I wouldn't mind tweaking a bit into an Icehouse/treehouse game.

Speaking of games... Talisman is back? I wonder if they fixed some of the unbalancing aspects, or if they're remaining true to the original.

Virtually no homeless issues in North Beach... mainly because there's no support system here... however, I've noticed that there are many, many tent cities under the bridges in DC, especially near to the subway track zones. I had my first experience with a guy coming onto the subway, and doing the "may I have your attention, would someone please give me 25 cents so I can get a bus at the next stop?" - I hadn't seen that since riding the bus in Broward / Dade.

Trip to the doc implies some work to be done. Dentally, I need a mouthful of fillings. Elsewhere, I need to work on my weight, my allergies, my back and leg.

All things in time - Got a few fillings yesterday I need to do 2 or 3 more visits. the bridge and cracked tooth will be dealt with in January.

Random find. A solar-powered bible. Perfect for the Christian Castaway, I guess!

Oh, come on... now the smeller is blamed rather than the smelly? Stinky is in the nose of the sniffer? I'll leave out the almost obligatory sci-fi / gaming convention comment.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - When it comes to a man's body odour, the fragrance -- or stench -- is in the nose of the beholder, according to U.S. researchers who suggest a single gene may determine how people perceive body odour.

The study, published online on Sunday in the journal Nature, helps explain why the same sweaty man can smell like vanilla to some, like urine to others and for about a third of adults, have no smell at all.

"This is the first time that any human odorant receptor is associated with how we experience odours," Hiroaki Matsunami of Duke University in North Carolina said in a telephone interview.

Matsunami and colleagues at Duke and Rockefeller University in New York focused on the chemical androstenone, which is created when the body breaks down the male sex hormone testosterone.

Androstenone is in the sweat of men and women, but it is more highly concentrated in men. How one perceives its smell appears to have a lot to do with variations in one odour receptor gene called OR7D4.

"It is well known that people have different perceptions to androstenone. But people didn't know what was the basis of it," Matsunami said.

To find out, researchers in Matsunami's lab tested sweat chemicals on most of the 400 known odour receptors used by the nose to sniff out smells and chemicals.

They found the OR7D4 gene reacted strongly with the sex steroid androstenone. Next, they tested whether variations in this gene had an impact on how people perceived the smell of androstenone in male sweat.

They took blood samples and sequenced the DNA of 400 people who participated in a smell perception test done in Leslie Vosshall's lab at Rockefeller.

What they found is slight genetic variations determine whether androstenone has a pungent smell, a sweet, vanilla-like smell or no smell at all.

The role of androstenone is not well understood in humans, but in pigs it sends a powerful sex signal that puts sows in the mood for love.

"It facilitates the courtship behaviour in females," Matsunami said.

"There is some evidence published showing this chemical can modify the mood or hormone levels in humans," he said. "What we don't know is whether the receptor we found was in any way involved in this process."

He and colleagues will further study this aspect to understand how smelling these chemicals might affect human social and sexual behaviour.

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