Living Smart

III SCIENCE & STEM EDUCATION 102 103 Time to smell the roses in race of life Dr. Melody LEUNG Lecturer II, Division of Life Science H umans are creatures who often judge whether a dish is attractive or a stranger is friendly simply by their own eyes. But our sense of smell is just as important. We all may have the experience of eating with a stuffy nose and found a dish to be tasteless or using our nose to check whether it has gone bad. Also, people tend to keep their distance from a person with an unpleasant odor, while special odors like gas can alert us to dangers of a leak. As the old Chinese adage goes, “My shack is better than an emperor’s bed.” What makes our own shack better? Our smell, together with the smell of our family members, and pets as well if any, makes it unique and reassuring. To understand how smell impacts people, researchers at the University of British Columbia, Canada, invited 96 couples for a study last year. Each man was asked to wear a T-shirt for 24 hours without using any scented product and then return it to the researchers in a sealed plastic bag. Each woman was then randomly assigned to sniff one of the T-shirts and sat for a mock interview, during which her saliva was collected and the amount of stress hormones levels was analyzed. The study found women who sniffed their partner’ s T-shirt and recognized the smell correctly, compared with those who sniffed a stranger’ s or a clean T-shirt, were more relaxed, and their stress hormones stayed at lower levels.