La, A., Q. Zhang and Z. Gao. 2014. Determining tolerance to odour annoyance in communities near hog operations. Canadian Biosystems Engineering/Le génie des biosystèmes au Canada 56: 6.1-6.11. Quantifying the impact of odour from livestock facilities has been a challenge to researchers and environmental regulators. Physical and sensory odour attributes are commonly used to define the odour impa...

BACKGROUND Exposure to food odours increases the appetite for congruent foods and decreases the appetite for incongruent foods. However, the effect of exposure to a variety of food odours, as often occurs in daily life, is unknown. OBJECTIVE Investigate how switching between sweet and savoury odours affects the appetite for sweet and savoury products. DESIGN Thirty women (age: 18-45y; BMI: ...

By choosing blood-carrying mosquitoes as prey, Evarcha culicivora, an East African salticid spider, specializes at feeding indirectly on vertebrate blood. It also has an exceptionally complex mate-choice system. An earlier study revealed that search-image use assists E. culicivora in finding prey and mates when restricted to using vision alone. Here we show that search-image use assists E. culi...

The Guideline on Odour in Ambient Air has been in use for many years for odour regulation in Germany. The main parameter that the odour regulation authority has to take into account is the odour frequency expressed as odour hours per year. In the guideline, limit values are given for the maximum odour frequency per year. These limit values are based on field investigations in which significant ...

Odours alter evaluations of concurrent visual stimuli. However, neural mechanisms underlying the effects of congruent and incongruent odours on facial expression perception are not clear. Moreover, the influence of emotional faces on odour perception is not established. We investigated the effects of one pleasant and one unpleasant odour paired with happy and disgusted faces, on subjective rati...

Odour from agricultural activities, such as the spreading of manure and the housing of animals, is increasingly being considered a nuisance in densely populated countries like the Netherlands. The objective of this research was to study the odour removal from pig house exhaust air by a biotrickling filter that had been implemented for ammonia abatement. At a regular pig production farm, the per...

Research Highlights  Concentration of odorous substances as surrogate for odour concentration/intensity  Comparison of conversion methods with various degrees of complexity  Model evaluation by seven VOCs: 23 binary mixtures and 5 mixtures of 7 substances  Model input: odour threshold concentration and the slope of the Weber-Fechner law  No further calibration by olfactometric measurements...

Animals' behaviour towards odours depends on both odour quality and odour intensity. While neuronal coding of odour quality is fairly well studied, how odour intensity is treated by olfactory systems is less clear. Here we study odour intensity processing at the behavioural level, using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. We trained flies by pairing a MEDIUM intensity of an odour with electr...

For odour regulation in Germany the Guideline on Odour in ambient Air GOAA has been in use for many years. The main parameter the odour regulation authority has to take into account is the odour frequency expressed as odour hours per year. In the Guideline limit values are given for the maximum odour frequency per year. These limit values are based on investigations in the field in which signif...