George Preti’s lab is lined with fume cupboards, machinery for analysing gases, and freezers packed with saliva and sweat samples and even archived T-shirts worn by people during experiments into scents produced from our underarms while we’re stressed.
He waves the jar under my nose. It smells… bad. He smiles. “Dirty laundry? It’s from a Japanese group. They’ve isolated the smell from dirty laundry. How about this?” He removes the stopper from another jar. It smells… bad, but in a different way. “That’s 3M2H. It’s one of the principal components of human underarm odour!”
The lab technician grins from a bench where he’s busy preparing sample bottles for a series of new stress and fatigue experiments.
– “What the Nose Knows” by Emma Young for Mosaic (here) Via The Ed’s Up, a weekly newletter about science writing by Ed Yong. Photo by Alina Simone for a piece on boro for PRI’s the World (here):
This shirt features a meticulously re-stitched collar among other homemade repairs. Workwear carries secret clues about the history of its wearer if you know how to “read” the clothing…
