The idea that the blind have a more acute sense of smell than the sighted is a myth, according to an ongoing study at the Université de Montréal. Vision loss doesn't enhance the sense of smell, researchers say, blind people just pay more attention to how they perceive smells.

"If you enter a room in which coffee is brewing, you will quickly look for the coffee machine. The blind person entering the same room will only have the smell of coffee as information," says Mathilde Beaulieu-Lefebvre, a graduate student at the Université de Montréal Department of Psychology. "That smell will therefore become very important for their spatial representation."

If you thought that rapid and potentially catastrophic climate change was all bad, think again. High in the Mackenzie Mountains in Canada, a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools is being revealed as warming temperatures melt patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years.

Ice patches are accumulations of annual snow that, until recently, remained frozen all year. For millennia, caribou seeking relief from summer heat and insects have made their way to ice patches where they bed down until cooler temperatures prevail. Hunters noticed caribou were, in effect, marooned on these ice islands and took advantage.

Consumption of 100 percent fruit juice is closely linked to improved nutrient intake and overall diet quality in children, according to the PR firm for the makers of apple juice.

Despite the fact that fruit juice is nutritionally very similar to soda, two new studies from the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center and Baylor College of Medicine clearly highlight the benefits of drinking 100 percent fruit juice, say the people who want to sell more juice.

A new study in Nature Geoscience suggests that as global temperatures increase, microbes in soil become less efficient over time at converting carbon in soil into carbon dioxide, a key contributor to climate warming.

The results contradict those of earlier studies that assume microbes will continue to spew ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the climate continues to warm. If microbial efficiency declines in a warmer world, carbon dioxide emissions will fall back to pre-warming levels, a pattern seen in field experiments. But if microbes manage to adapt to the warmth – for instance, through increased enzyme activity – emissions could intensify.

Scientists studying the DNA marker profiles between smokers and non-smokers have found several genetic variants that are associated with key smoking behaviors.

In a new Nature Genetics paper, the international research team reported that three genetic regions are associated with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, one with smoking initiation and one with smoking cessation.

The variants on chromosome 15 associated with heavy smoking lie within a region that contains nicotinic receptor genes, which other scientists have previously associated with nicotine dependence and lung cancer.

Physicists at Ohio University and the University of Hamburg in Germany have captured  the first images of atomic spin in action. 

The research indicates that scientists can observe and perhaps manipulate spin, a finding that may impact future development of nanoscale magnetic storage, quantum computers and spintronic devices.

The images have been published in a new Nature Nanotechnology study.