For decades, smell stood apart from the other senses. Scientists could point to orderly maps in the eye, the ear, and the skin, showing how sensory cells are arranged to capture information and how those patterns connect to the brain. Smell never fit that picture. The usual view held that odor receptors in the nose were only loosely sorted into broad zones, with a lot of randomness inside them. A new study in mice now argues that this picture was badly incomplete. Researchers led by Sandeep (Robert) Datta at Harvard Medical School report that the nose contains a detailed receptor map, one that places more than 1,000 smell receptor types in overlapping but distinct horizontal bands running from the top of the nose to the bottom. The work, published in Cell, suggests that smell may be organized more like vision, hearing, and touch than scientists had realized. “Olfaction is super-mysterious,” Datta, a professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, said in background material describing the findings. A microscope photo of a …