Alie Ward (host)

in the Journal of Surgical Radiologic Anatomy, confirms that, yes, there has been a long-standing debate on the presence and the functionality of the vomeronasal organ, also known, let's just call it a VNO, because it's hard to pronounce, or a Jacobson organ in adult humans.

And this paper...

for sinus surgeons, warns that if the VNO is a functional organ in humans, it would be important to preserve the organ during nasal surgery.

And there's apparently a little pit in the sinuses that could be like a portal to it.

But the paper concludes that the human VNO is probably a vestigial organ with a non-operational sensory function.

So it's okay if you accidentally hack it off in an operation.

But we do have a great episode with an ethnocynologist about the current and the ancient role of dogs in human life, as well as an eco-otorology episode about how dogs are better at detecting ecological samples than machines.

And in it, we discuss the Jacobson organ in dogs and why when your pup

smells or tastes something, it might make like a chomping puppet movement with its mouth to shove the air up into their vomeronasal organ.

In my home, when our goblin dog Grammy does this, when she tastes something new, we call this doing the thing.

She's doing the thing.

But back to romance though.

For more on the smell's role in romance, we have a Philomatology episode, too, about kissing with the famed biological anthropologist, Dr. Robin Dunbar, who told me that when you kiss, you're tasting a partner's immune system.

And the people you like tend to be people who have a different set of immune genes to the ones that you have.

And that episode delves into hundreds and thousands of years of evolutionary anthropological evidence.

But it happened to come out.

We released that one a week after the world shut down for COVID, which was just honestly such cruel fate.

But we'll link it in the show notes.

I know that they did some like sniff tests of like body odors that are different genetically from you or more attractive.

I mean...