A Polish study, published in the European Journal of Personality, suggests that we take into account a person’s smell when forming a first impression. “We express ourselves with how we smell”, author Agnieszka Sorokowska of the University of Wroclaw says.

During the study, 30 men and women were asked to wear white cotton t-shirts for three consecutive nights. They were also asked not to use fragrances, deodorants or soaps, and not to smoke or drink. Shirts from the “odour donors” were rated by 100 men and women, evaluating five personality traits. The judges’ ratings matched up with the self-assessment of the donors for three personality traits: extroversion, neuroticism and dominance.

Yes, it’s true. The iconic Eiffel Tower could be transformed into the world’s largest tree! Ginger, an engineering group specialising in ‘green’ architecture has been working on a US $96 million project for the last two years, planning to cover the 327 metre tall tower with 600,000 plants, as reported in the French newspaper Le Figaro. Architects and engineers have already built a prototype several metres tall to assess the effect of the additional 378 tonnes weight on the structure. The results of the tests are expected to be known soon. Seedlings would then be cultivated until June next year, which would be placed on the structure until January 2013. The plants would then continue to grow till January 2014 and be left there until their removal in July 2016. We can now look forward to a fresh green Eiffel Tower.

Mammoths became extinct 10,000 years ago, but a recent discovery of the well-preserved marrow inside the thigh bone of a woolly mammoth in Siberia has raised hopes that the species could be cloned. Scientists claim that the extinct woolly mammoth could be brought back to life in five years. The scientists work with Russia’s Sakha Republic’s Mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University. By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth’s marrow cells, embryos with mammoth DNA can be produced, according to the researchers.

A team at the University of Nottingham recently sent Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm, to the International Space Station. Why? To understand how astronauts would be affected by extended journeys, such as a two-year trip to Mars, the Daily Mail reports. Caenorhabditis elegans was deployed for the 200-mile journey because it shares more than 20,000 genes with humans and its muscles and central nervous system work in a similar way. When the survivors – worms only live for a few weeks – returned to Earth to be studied, the scientists found they displayed normal development movement, feeding patterns, and the capacity to reproduce.

Who could have thought that swearing could be a good thing? We did not for sure. But that is before we knew that swearing can actually help beat pain. Researchers at the United Kingdom’s (UK) Keele University have found that people who do not normally swear are able to tolerate pain for a longer period if they spit out a few expletives. According to the study, people who did not swear regularly could hold their hands in the ice water for 140 seconds when they swore, which was twice as long as when they chose to be politer.