Short people may be disadvantaged on the basketball court, in the workplace, and when trying to see over large crowds, but they just might be quicker in sensing the world around them—because, well, their signals don’t have to travel as far to get to their brains.
In effect, this means that tall people are living in the past, if only by a tenth of a second. This is all according to neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose essay entitled “Brain Time” suggests that “if the brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive.”
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What’s so enticing about those French fries cooking around the corner? New research from England finds that the aroma of fries is actually a complex combination of scents including butterscotch, cocoa, onion, flowers, cheese and, yes, ironing boards. Commissioned by—seriously—the Potato Council for National Chip Week, the researchers used an “aroma-meter” (technically a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer) to separate the aroma into its individual compounds, which were then analyzed and recorded.
A new aroma profile was not all the scientists found. The more the chips—ahem, “fries”—were cooked, the more complex they found the aroma to be: Twice-cooked fries often turned up three times the number of “aromatic notes” as batches cooked merely once. No word yet on whether this effect continues for subsequent fryings.
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We know that a woman can tell whether a man is attracted to her from the scent of his sweat. But the finer details of sexual odor have escaped us, until now: Swiss scientists say they’ve discovered that men’s sweat smells like cheese, while women smell like onions when they perspire.
Researchers from a Swiss company called Firmenich asked 24 men and 25 women to go in a sauna or pedal on an exercise bike for 15 minutes, to collect armpit sweat. The smells were then rated by “independent smell assessors.” (Wow, that must have been a fun job!) Of the two groups, the scientists agreed: Women had the more “unpleasant” smell.
The researchers also discovered why women’s sweat smelled like onions: The female sweat had ten times the level of an odorless sulfur-containing compound than men. It turns out that when this sulfur compound is mixed with bacteria under the arm, it creates a chemical called thiol—and this chemical is known for smelling like onions.
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