Have you ever wished that your iPhone could bring you the smell of coffee, curry or steak?

No? Well, there’s a gadget for that.

Japanese company Scentee has invented a spherical iPhone attachment that can squirt out aromas ranging from flowery to savory. Each scent comes in a separate cartridge, which you can change out by opening up the device. And to power it up, all you have to do is plug it into you phone’s headphone jack.

In the words of Scentee’s CEO Koki Tsubouchi: “The iPod made music portable. We want to do that for scent.”

If you’re in the mood for food smells, Scentee has an app called Hana Yakiniku, which roughly translates to “nose grilled meat,” programmed with three scents: short ribs, grilled beef and buttered potatoes.

In a promotional video, the message seems to be that the smell of meat and potatoes may be an appealing substitute for actual meat and potatoes.

The video shows a slender woman sniffing grilled beef as she chows down on plain lettuce, and a cash-strapped student happily deluded (through smell) into believing his white rice is topped with short ribs.

This marketing of imaginary meat is a bit strange, frankly. Clearly anyone who can afford this app, and an iPhone for that matter, is sufficiently nourished. And perhaps someone seriously in need of protein would not find it so amusing.

Tsubouchi insists the app is supposed to be fun, even silly. Look no further than the giant dismembered nose and promo copy describing the product as “revolutionary new deliciousness that mankind finally managed to develop after 7 million years of continuous evolution.”

Still, we were curious — could the smell of meat actually satisfy cravings for it? Smell, of course, is very closely connected to taste. According to Marcia Pelchat, sensory psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, our tongues are able to distinguish between sweet, savory, bitter and tart. But “smell provides a lot of the variety in flavor,” she tells us.

It’s no surprise, then, that food manufactures have long beeninterested in using smell to manipulate our sense of taste. But to truly trick your mind into thinking you’re eating beef, you would have to chomp on something that at least feels like meat. “I think you need the texture and the whole context,” says Pelchat. Lettuce won’t work, but fake meat might — which means this could be a good app for vegetarians with withdrawal cravings.

You’ll be able to test it out for yourself in late November, when Scentee makes its U.S. debut. The Japanese will be able to purchase it a bit earlier — by mid-November. The device will retail at about $35, with the scent cartridges for $5 each.

Tsubouchi says his company is in talks with American food manufacturers, who are interested in developing advertisements that entice your nose as well as your eyes.

The company is also releasing a series of apps that link the scents to your phone’s alarm clock, text messages and social media alerts. So you’ll be able to wake up every morning and literally smell the roses

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Dendrites, the branch-like projections of neurons, were once thought to be passive wiring in the brain. But now researchers at the Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have shown that these dendrites do more than relay information from one neuron to the next. They actively process information, multiplying the brain’s computing power.

“Suddenly, it’s as if the processing power of the brain is much greater than we had originally thought,” said Spencer Smith, PhD, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine.

His team’s findings, published October 27 in the journalNature, could change the way scientists think about long-standing scientific models of how neural circuitry functions in the brain, while also helping researchers better understand neurological disorders.

“Imagine you’re reverse engineering a piece of alien technology, and what you thought was simple wiring turns out to be transistors that compute information,” Smith said. “That’s what this finding is like. The implications are exciting to think about.”

Axons are where neurons conventionally generate electrical spikes, but many of the same molecules that support axonal spikes are also present in the dendrites. Previous research using dissected brain tissue had demonstrated that dendrites can use those molecules to generate electrical spikes themselves, but it was unclear whether normal brain activity involved those dendritic spikes. For example, could dendritic spikes be involved in how we see?

The answer, Smith’s team found, is yes. Dendrites effectively act as mini-neural computers, actively processing neuronal input signals themselves.

Directly demonstrating this required a series of intricate experiments that took years and spanned two continents, beginning in senior author Michael Hausser’s lab at University College London, and being completed after Smith and Ikuko Smith, PhD, DVM, set up their own lab at the Univ. of North Carolina. They used patch-clamp electrophysiology to attach a microscopic glass pipette electrode, filled with a physiological solution, to a neuronal dendrite in the brain of a mouse. The idea was to directly “listen” in on the electrical signaling process.

“Attaching the pipette to a dendrite is tremendously technically challenging,” Smith said. “You can’t approach the dendrite from any direction. And you can’t see the dendrite. So you have to do this blind. It’s like fishing if all you can see is the electrical trace of a fish.” And you can’t use bait. “You just go for it and see if you can hit a dendrite,” he said. “Most of the time you can’t.”

But Smith built his own two-photon microscope system to make things easier.

Once the pipette was attached to a dendrite, Smith’s team took electrical recordings from individual dendrites within the brains of anesthetized and awake mice. As the mice viewed visual stimuli on a computer screen, the researchers saw an unusual pattern of electrical signals – bursts of spikes – in the dendrite.

Smith’s team then found that the dendritic spikes occurred selectively, depending on the visual stimulus, indicating that the dendrites processed information about what the animal was seeing.

To provide visual evidence of their finding, Smith’s team filled neurons with calcium dye, which provided an optical readout of spiking. This revealed that dendrites fired spikes while other parts of the neuron did not, meaning that the spikes were the result of local processing within the dendrites.

Study co-author Tiago Branco, PhD, created a biophysical, mathematical model of neurons and found that known mechanisms could support the dendritic spiking recorded electrically, further validating the interpretation of the data.

“All the data pointed to the same conclusion,” Smith said. “The dendrites are not passive integrators of sensory-driven input; they seem to be a computational unit as well.”

His team plans to explore what this newly discovered dendritic role may play in brain circuitry and particularly in conditions like Timothy syndrome, in which the integration of dendritic signals may go awry.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Abbott Laboratories’ MitraClip medical device, used to stop heart valve leakage in patients deemed unable to endure valve repair through open heart surgery, the company said on Friday.

The MitraClip treats mitral regurgitation, a condition in which the mitral valve of the heart does not close properly, causing blood leakage that can lead to stroke, heart attack or even death.

It has estimated the disorder affects about one in 10 people aged 75 and older.

Those with the condition who are too frail for open heart surgery are typically treated with medicines and have high rates of heart failure and rehospitalizations.

“We think longer term in the U.S., (MitraClip) could be a $500 million product,” said RBC Capital Markets analyst Glenn Novarro. “This approval is sooner than we thought. It’s a pleasant surprise.”

Novarro said the timing of the FDA green light was excellent as it came just ahead of a major U.S. medical meeting for interventional cardiologists where Abbott will be able to showcase the device.

A panel of advisers to the FDA in March voted 5-3 to recommend approval of the implantable heart device. Some panel members questioned whether MitraClip would be effective.

The MitraClip was approved in Europe in 2008 under a system in which medical devices often reach the market several years ahead of the United States.

International sales are running at about $30 million a quarter, with sales growth at about 50 percent over 2012, Abbott said.

U.S. sales are likely to grow slowly at first as the company seeks reimbursement for the device, primarily from the Medicare healthcare program, and as more physicians are trained in its use. The MitraClip is implanted using a minimally invasive procedure in which it is threaded by catheter through a vein into place in the heart to stop the leak.

There are currently 50 centers in the United States that have experience with the device through clinical trials. That number is expected to double over the next year, John Capek, Abbott’s head of medical devices, said in an interview.

There are 20,000 to 30,000 patients in the United States who would likely qualify for MitraClip implantation, Capek said.

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