Three years ago Lubert Stryer, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, became intrigued with olfaction, thanks in part to two fellow scientists who uncovered a family of genes whose receptors for smell and taste are turned on at the base of the nose.

FORBES: Breaking a Sweat

Ambryx has gained exclusive licenses to libraries of smell-and taste-related receptors from Johns Hopkins University, Rockefeller University, Harvard and the University of California at San Diego.

FORBES: Breaking a Sweat

Columbia University's Richard Axel, whose work on mapping the genes and receptors of our sense of smell garnered the 2004 Nobel prize for physiology, said the kinds of experiments revealed this week would not resolve the debate - only a microscopic look at the receptors in the nose would finally show what is at work.

BBC: 'Quantum smell' idea gains ground

The idea holds that electrons in the receptors in our noses disappear on one side of a smell molecule and reappear on the other, leaving a little bit of energy behind in the process.

BBC: Perfume chemist

Most smell researchers think the way that we smell has to do only with the shapes of odour molecules matching those of receptors in our noses.

BBC: Perfume chemist

They also scavenge (detoxify) peoxynitrites and reverse part of their damage including partially restoring function to receptors involved in short-term memory, mood, sleep, smell, social recognition, alertness, and brain growth, increasing the transport of glucose reducing delusions and wandering, improving neurotransmissions by decreasing the hyperphosphorylation and tau proteins, and inhibiting the influx of calcium which kills neurons.

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