After a recent study on the power of the human nose the number of odors that it can distinguish went up from 10,000 to 1 trillion. Scientist that study the nose and smells have always thought that this number was high, but there was never any tests that were being done to see what the number was. Scientists out of Rockefeller University in New York decided to test the human nose. They prepared scent mixtures containing between 10-30 different odors, and they tested them on humans to see which ones the people could tell apart. People had a hard time distinguishing odors that had more that 51% in common and with that calculation the scientist were able to discover that the human nose could tell apart roughly 1 trillion different smells.
The human nose has over 400 types of smell receptors and with this information on smells scientist might have a better understanding about the way the nose and brain work together to pick up smells. One problem with this is how does one organize smells, unlike colors and sound, smells are harder to characterize. But one scientist wants that she hopes this dispels the myth that humans have a bad scene of smell.
NOS Themes:
Science is collaborative- Different Universities worked together
Science is tentative- The information of scent is changing
Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-nose-can-detect-1-trillion-odors/
Interesting article. The sense of smell is often overlooked, but it is a very interesting process. We get a new set of smell receptors ever 28 days or so, so we essentially get a new nose every month. So, it makes sense that we have very sensitive noses when they get renewed fairly often. This article does make you wonder if it is possible to enhance the sense of smell to make it easier to distinguish smells, though.
ReplyDeleteWow, that is a lot of different smells! One thing I am curious about is how did they decide that humans could detect 1 trillion different smells with testing just 10-30 odors. Another interesting thing to find out would be if some people can detect more than others and have a more sensitive nose.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that humans can detect one million cells is absolutely fascinating, I'm very surprised at how they were able to test this without testing one million odors. Something else that could be studied is these same effects but for dogs. If there sense of smell is much more sensitive, perhaps we could learn more about people with smelling problems, and in turn learn more about our own senses. I've linked an article with a bit of research that describes just how miraculous a dogs sense of smell is.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-sense-of-smell.html