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How do we smell? - Rose Eveleth

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An adult human can distinguish up to 10,000 odors. You use your nose to figure out what to eat, what to buy and even when it’s time to take a shower. But how do the molecules in the air get translated into smells in your brain? Rose Eveleth charts the smelly journey through your olfactory epithelium and explains why scent can be so subjective.

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Meet The Creators

  • Educator Rose Eveleth
  • Director Igor Coric
  • Narrator Rose Eveleth
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by TED-Ed

Can you come up with ideas for how to make the human nose more powerful? Using what you know about how smell works, what would you do to increase our sense of smell?

Comments are closed on this discussion.

Avatar for Thach Nguyen Quoc
Lesson completed

Making our oldfactory epithelium bigger or for instance, maybe, we find out which neuron make we can smell odor A, B, C,...from that knowledge we can create something that can control the odors we want to smell more clear or something can absord odor for our nose.


Avatar for Tristanie Albert
Lesson completed

I would put more olfactory epithelium inside our noses.





Avatar for Horeyah Ali
Lesson completed

People should cover their nose while sneazing because that what gives u germs


Avatar for holabird science
Lesson completed

Nothing


Avatar for adrianna shewbridge
Lesson completed

Maybe if you don’t smell bad smells yiurvsmese if smell would be good


Avatar for hailey guerin
Lesson completed

You could create some type of mask to train the nose to be more stronger. It would put strong senses that would go through your nose to make it stronger.


Avatar for Angelina Anderson
Lesson completed

I would inject more into the olfactory epthilum and make the nose more powerful.

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