“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” says T.S Eliot. So much reality is forced upon us by the enormity of our manmade global warming that it’s very hard to bear. The world’s leading climate scientists and policy makers are letting themselves say publicly what they’ve long said off-camera: Even the very existence of the human race is threatened. “OPTIMISM FACES GRAVE REALITIES AT CLIMATE SUMMIT” is the all-caps boldface lead headline on the December 1, 2014 New York Times. The second paragraph of the article, setting up the UN’s 20th annual climate summit, held in Lima Peru, reports that uncontrolled global warming could make the world “uninhabitable for humans.”

  World Science Festival alum, Leslie Vosshall, is featured in today’s New York Times. She discusses the neuroscientific relationship between scent and arousal, and the perfume industry’s never-ending quest to bottle sex appeal. In general, fragrances considered sexy are based on musk, an odor taken from a sac beneath the abdominal skin of the male musk deer or, more often, created synthetically. “Musk ends up being a really good proxy for sex because everyone agrees it has an animal undertone,” said Dr. Vosshall, who is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in New York. Eau Flirt doesn’t contain synthetics, but it uses ingredients like pumpkin, lavender and licorice, shown to increase penile blood flow. Researchers at the Chicago foundation asked men attached to a plethysmograph, a device measuring changes in volume in various parts of the body, to sniff 30 odors. All of the smells aroused them, with the combination of lavender and pumpkin pie having the greatest effect (increasing blood flow 40 percent), followed by doughnuts and black licorice (a 31.5 percent blood-flow increase). Leslie was part of the WSF11 panel Scents and Sensibilities: The Invisible Language of Smell, which explored the emerging science of smell …