美国科学60秒 SSS 2012-11-26
时间:2013-06-20 08:31:51
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(单词翻译)
This is Scientific American sixty seconds science. I am Karen Hopkin. This will take just a minute.
Your morning coffee. A baking pie. That turkey in the oven. There are some smells you just can’t get enough of. But mix them and other
scents2 all together and you get, well, nothing much.
According to a new study, a mash-up of 20 or 30 different odors gives you something
entirely3 nondescript: almost a non-smell, if you will. The finding appears in the
Proceedings4 of the National Academy of Sciences.
If you’ve ever taken physics, you might remember that combining colors of many different
wavelengths5 generates light that’s white. And blending sounds of many different frequencies produces white noise.
Well, researchers got to wondering whether there’s an equivalent phenomenon for olfaction: call it ‘white smell.’ So they whipped up various combinations of 80 distinct chemicals and had volunteers take a whiff. When the
olfactory6 ingredient list topped 30, one
cocktail7 smelled pretty much the same as any other, even when the mixtures didn’t have a single ingredient in common.
The
scent1 was not unpleasant. A professional perfumer called it “aromatic,” which is like saying that the light was, well, light. So enjoy the smells of the holiday season. But try not to
sniff8 too many at once.
Thanks for the minute for scientific American sixty seconds science. I am Karen Hopkin.
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