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On 8 October 2015, the web site IFLScience published a article reporting that the smell of a rare Hawaiian mushroom could cause women to have a spontaneous orgasms: IFLScience was not the first to report on this orgasmic fungus: since Holliday and Soule published their paper on it in 2001, dozens of news publications, websites, and blogs have written about this mushroom's alleged abilities to induce olfactory orgasms. It appears, however, that the only people who have not been writing about this titillating phenomenon are other scientists. Our research did not turn up any other scientific studies about this orgasm-inducing and unnamed Dictyophora species, and the one extant study is itself a bit flimsy. Holliday and Soule conducted a smell test in 2001 involving 16 women and 20 men. Six women from that group reportedly experienced spontaneous (but not earth-shattering) orgasms while smelling the fungus, and the other 10 (who received smaller doses) experienced an increase in heart rate. What caused the spontaneous orgasms? Halliday speculated that the fetid odor of the mushrooms may have had hormonelike compounds present that had some similarity to human neurotransmitters released during sexual encounters: While Holliday's study is certainly intriguing, it's somewhat short of representing a rigorous scientific standard: it's a single, decades-old study that was conducted with a very small sample group and published in a minor journal, one which has not since been replicated or vetted by other researchers in the scientific community. On 14 February 2016, Discover published a first-person account of the search for the mysterious fungus. According to the author of the piece, the results were (in a word) underwhelming.
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