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I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about why newborn baby's heads each smell distinct, why lemmings have a

reputation for blindly following others, and five illegal drugs

that you used to be able to buy as medicine.

That's satisfy some curiosity.

If there's one thing all new parents know, it's that newborn baby's heads smell amazing.

Now, for the first time, scientists have analyzed the chemical makeup of these odors,

and it's shedding light on the formation of

mother-infant relationships. Here's how they did it. First, scientists fitted five

newborn babies with special hats full of smell-trapping beads to collect odors

from their heads. Then they collected smells from vials of the mother's amniotic

fluid. The samples immediately yielded a groundbreaking tidbit.

A lot of scientists thought baby head smell came from amniotic fluid,

but this team's analysis showed that the chemicals present in the baby head odor are different.

What's more, the odors collected a few hours after birth

were much more distinct from one another

than the odors collected a few days after birth. This means that the smell

helps create a distinct bond with a parent right away. Things got even more interesting

when the researchers used the samples to see how easily adults could recognize a baby by smell alone.

They made some artificial odor mixtures based on the head and amniotic fluid samples

...