Fear No Smell

Normal mice were drawn to smells of peanut butter and mouse urine; but couldn’t flee fast enough from the scents of rotting food, fox glands, and the urine of snow leopards.

But mice without these neurons showed less interest in the sweet smells and little aversion to spine-tingling ones, the team reports in Nature. The mice could still detect these smells, the researchers found, and could learn to hate the odours if researchers made the mice sick while delivering the 'nasty' smells.

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