女人靠鼻子选男友

Women may be better at sniffing out biologically relevant information from underarm sweat, a US study suggests.

美国一项研究显示，女性通过腋下气味识别生物性相关信息的能力很可能更强。

Researchers found it was difficult to mask underarm odour when a woman was doing thesmelling, but quite easy to do so when it was a man.

研究人员发现，用其它气味来蒙蔽女性对腋下气味的识别是比较困难的。相比之下，男性则更好蒙骗。

They speculate that a woman's highly attuned smell radar might help her select a mate.

研究人员由此猜测，女性敏锐的嗅觉可能有助于她们选择适合自己的伴侣。

The study, by Philadelphia's Monell Center, appears in Flavour and Fragrance Journal.

由费城蒙尼奥研究中心组织的这项研究成果已经在《香料与香味杂志》上发表。

In the study, women and men rated the strength of underarm odours, both alone and in conjunction with various fragrances.

参与试验的女性和男性分别用鼻子去闻两组腋下气味，一组是独立的腋下气味，另一组是腋下气味与其它多种香味混合而成的气味。

The fragrances were selected to test their ability to block underarm odour through a method known as olfactory cross-adaptation.

研究人员利用嗅觉交叉适应的方法来测试他们辨别腋下气味的能力。

This occurs when the nose adapts to one odour, and then also becomes less sensitive to a second odour.

采用这种测试方法是因为一旦鼻子对第一种气味适应之后，它对第二种气味的判断灵敏度就减弱了。

Sniffed alone, the underarm odours smelled equally strong to men and women.

当男女在闻独立腋下气味的时候，男女的辨别能力旗鼓相当。

But when fragrance was introduced, only two of 32 scents successfully blocked underarm odour when women were doing the smelling.

但是当腋下气味中混合了其它香味的时候，32种气味中只有两种腋下混合气味让女性无法成功识别。

In contrast, 19 fragrances significantly reduced the strength of underarm odour for men.

与之相比，19种腋下混合气味成功蒙骗了男性的鼻子。

Lead researcher Dr Charles Wysocki, a behavioural neuroscientist, said: