Dell laptop buyers make a stink over cat smell

NEW YORK (AP) — A noxious feline odor has some Dell customers caterwauling.

People who own Dell Latitude 6430u laptops are complaining that their pricey new computers are emitting a smell similar to cat urine. Some of them said on the company's online customer forums that the odor seems to be coming from the keyboard or palm rest.

The Round Rock, Texas, company originally advised buyers through its forums to try cleaning their keyboards with a soft cloth or compressed air, but the smell persisted.

"The machine is great, but it smells as if it was assembled near a tomcat's litter box," wrote a customer using the handle "three west" on a Dell forum back in June. "It is truly awful!"

On Wednesday, another customer writing under the handle "passflips" said he felt terrible for repeatedly scolding his cat Jerry, because he thought the elderly cat kept spraying the computer. The poster also said he wasted money on veterinarian bills in an attempt to determine whether his cat had a medical problem.

Dell said Thursday that its investigation revealed strange scent is related to a manufacturing process, which the company has since fixed. But if your portable PC isn't purrfect, Dell recommends contacting the company's technical support team to have your laptop's palm rest assembly replaced.

Company spokesman David Frink said the odor isn't related to a "biological contamination" and doesn't present a health hazard. He added that newly assembled laptops that are currently in stores aren't affected.

The laptops in question are ultrabooks designed for business use. The base model starts at $900 on Dell's website, but Dell charges close to $1,300 for higher-end versions that include Windows 8 and Intel Core i5 processors.

While laptop users may find the smell of cat urine offensive, "cat's pee" is a term sometimes used by wine lovers to describe a wine's aroma.

And while the smell coming from the Dell computers is apparently unintentional, more than one group of engineers is working on "Smell-o-Vision" TV to engage viewers' olfactory senses. In addition, a host of recent smartphone add-ons make scents, too, including the Scentee, a Japanese smartphone attachment that plugs into a phone's earphone jack and dispenses scented vapors through dedicated cartridges.

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Heart of Lionheart smell sweet for the sky, scientists find

VERSAILLES, France (Reuters)-the heart of Lion heart was embalmed with daisy, Myrtle, mint and incense, scented so Santa kept hoping to accelerate King Richard of England's ascent into heaven.

French scientists have analyzed the body, preserved at the Cathedral of Rouen after the death of Richard I, known as Lionheart; they found was wrapped in linen, treated with mercury, herbs and reverence and pollen record holding confirmation of his death from a war wound in the spring of 1199, in Central France.

What Philippe Charlier, who published his Thursday, did not find the dirty dust is all that remains of the heart was no traces of toxin-bolt dulling tales that the Crusader king was struck by a poisoned crossbow. Medieval dirt and an infected wound probably caused her death, at the age of 41 years.

For English, fresh from rediscovering the ruins of 15th century descendant of Lionheart, namesake and Shakespearean villain Richard III under a municipal parking, the team results of Charlier may revive memories of a monarch who lives in popular culture as the away, but "good King Richard" in the tales of Robin Hood.

For the French, which Richard fought when he died, his reputation as a ruthless Warrior, against Muslims in the Holy Land, but also in Europe, can explain the care to preserve the heart of the King so expensively bound in medieval mind with embalming of Jesus after the crucifixion.

"He was rather criticized during the crusade when he was particularly cruel," Charlier, a youth television celebrity in France, told a press conference at Versailles.

"People started to talk about when he died, so very special attention was to be given to his body and especially his heart, with herbs and spices that were not chosen by accident.

"We know from historical records that those herbs and spices have been used to make time Richard the Lionheart would spend in Purgatory as brief and give him some kind of odor of sanctity.

"So this study is almost a scientific study of an artificial odor of sanctity, a man," added Charlier, dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the cemeteries" by French media for his high-profile analysis of relics and royal remains the last few years.

WITHOUT DOUBT

Unlike some of these discoveries, notably genetic analysis of bones found belong to Richard III or Charlier a analysis that concluded was that of Henri IV, great King of Renaissance France, no research was conducted in Rouen to determine if his heart was in fact that of Richard I.

The organ was first rediscovered during the work at the Cathedral in the 19th century, in a lead coffin dated to the 12th or 13th century bearing the inscription in Latin: "--jacet hic cor ricardi regis anglorum"-here is the heart of Richard King of England. Its provenance was not in doubt, Charlier said, noting a practice prevalent at the time of the actual division remains for burial in different sites.

Among his earlier works, Charlier, 35, has found that the relics of Joan of arc, in fact, came from an Egyptian Mummy and verified dried blood on a handkerchief was guillotined Louis XVI from DNA testing to link it to other royal remains.

In their book "scientific reports", University Hospital Charlier Raymond Poincaré and his team wrote that they found traces of linen, Crape Myrtle, Daisy, mint, incense, creosote, mercury and possibly.

Had no clearly identifiable human tissue but said Embalmers themselves were not necessarily guilt-rot may have been due to decay in the lead and always wet.

If they were successful in accelerating the process by which Richard entered the paradise is a matter of pure speculation.

Charlier, whose Twitter account describes his "patients" as "(soon), ... Henri IV, Richard the Lionheart, Louis XVI etc, "noted in the book that had ruled a Bishop from the 13th century:" Richard the Lionheart spent 33 years in Purgatory as Expiation for his sins and ascended into heaven just in March 1232. "

(Additional reporting by Vicky Buffery in Paris and Reuters Television at Versailles; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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