Flutterby™! : theory of smell

Smell has long been an enigma. One of the reasons I scoffed at that .com "digiscents" attempt was that... well... I've done a little reading and research on that topic, and it's nowhere near as easy as, say, color.

Nature has an article about a theory that posits the smell sesor mechanism may rely on quantum tunnelling:

This would explain why isotopes can smell different: their vibration frequencies are changed if the atoms are heavier. Turin's mechanism, says Marshall Stoneham of the UCL team, is more like swipe-card identification than a key fitting a lock.

via /..