SoylentNews

Passing the Sniff Test

posted by martyb on Sunday April 21 2019, @05:43AM   
from the From-the-Land-Down-Under... dept.

hellcat writes:

Who "nose" what your neurobiology toolkit holds?

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic progressive neurological disorder that largely affects movement. There is currently no diagnostic test. Trivedi et al. collected sebum[*] samples from PD patients and unaffected volunteers to identify volatile metabolites that may serve as PD biomarkers. The research team included a woman with a sensitive sense of smell who reported to be able to detect PD by odor. In blinded studies, she identified the "musky" samples that belonged to the PD patients with high accuracy, which guided mass spectrometry to identify the volatile compounds that constituted a signature PD scent. These studies may pave the way for development of the first PD-specific diagnostic test.

ACS Cent. Sci. 10.1021/acscentsci.8b00879 (2019).
Article from Science in its entirety. 2019-04-12 page 143.

[*] Sebaceous gland on Wikipedia.

The news might be easier to take if it came from a dog.

---

Original Submission

• kids say funny things kids say funny things (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @01:16AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @01:16AM (#833214)

  This "smell test" reminds me of a close friend from high school. He would approve a variety of things with the phrase, "It smells good" -- this for things that didn't smell (or couldn't smell, like a good idea). We're still in touch and use that phrase from time to time, along with a grin.

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		1

• Sniff test / code smell (Score: 2) by martyb on Monday April 22 2019, @06:53AM

  by martyb (76) on Monday April 22 2019, @06:53AM (#833277) Journal

  I realize you were joking, but in software development there is such a concept as a sniff test or "code smell". Code that has been planned, designed, and thoughtfully crafted has a decidedly different structure and appearance from code created by a "cowboy coder" where things are just slapped together and hacked at until the code [seems to] work.

  --
  Wit is intellect, dancing.

  Parent