This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, work to preserve the golden lion tamarin

and unraveling the mysteries of the Y chromosome. But first, if you want to predict a color,

you can talk about wavelengths of light, right? Around 460 nanometers, it's going to look blue.

If you want to predict what something sounds like, you can talk

about frequencies, 261 hertz, that sounds like middle C. But is there a way to tell what something

is going to smell like? One way might be to look at a molecule and say, that should smell like

dirty socks, or this molecule

should smell like roses. Well, this week in the journal Science, researchers described

developing an AI model that if you give it the structure of a chemical compound, can predict

where it's likely to fall on a map of odors. for instance, is it more grassy, more meaty, more

floral? Dr. Joel Mainland is one of the authors of that report. He's a member of the Monel

Chemical Census Center and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience

at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me.

Nice to have you.

Okay.

Before we start on this new work, let's get a refresher on smell biology 101.

I was always taught that it's sort of a lock and a key situation in your nose with

smell molecules fitting into like lock receptors. Is that

right? Yeah. So I think that's a good analogy at the basic level and gets most of the things

we care about correct. We have a more subtle understanding of that now as people have developed

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