朋友之间“臭味相投”科学依据来了(上)

Science & technology

科技版块

human behaviour

人类行为

Smell you later, alligator

待会再闻闻你，短吻鳄

Friends is seems often have similiar body odours

朋友之间似乎经常有相似的体味

Dogs greet other dogs nose-first, as it were -- sniffing each other from fore to (especially) aft.

狗与其他狗打招呼时，可以说是用鼻子打招呼，尤其是从头到尾互相嗅闻。

People are not quite so open about the process of sniffing each other out.

人们对相互嗅探的过程并不是很开放。

But the size of the perfume industry suggests scent is important in human relations, too.

但香水行业的规模表明，气味在人际关系中也很重要。

There is also evidence that human beings can infer kinship, deduce emotional states and even detect disease via the sense of smell.

也有证据表明，人类可以通过嗅觉推断亲属关系、推断情绪状态，甚至可以检测疾病。

Now, Inbal Ravreby, Kobi Snitz and Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, have gone a step further.

现在，以色列魏兹曼科学研究所的Inbal RAVREBY、Kobi Snitz和Noam Sobel在这方面的研究更深入。

They think they have shown, admittedly in a fairly small sample of individuals, that friends actually smell alike.

他们认为，他们已经证明了，在相当小的个体样本中，朋友的气味实际上是相似的。

They have also shown that this is probably the case from the get-go, with people picking friends at least partly on the basis of body odour, rather than the body odours of people who become friends subsequently converging.

他们还表明，这种情况可能从一开始就存在，人们在选择朋友时至少有一部分是基于体味，而不是成为朋友之后合在一起的体味。

As they report in Science Advances, Dr Ravreby, Dr Snitz and Dr Sobel started their research by testing the odours of 20 pairs of established, non-romantic, same-sex friends.

根据他们在《科学进展》上的报告，Ravreby博士、Snitz博士和Sobel博士测试了20对确定的、不浪漫的同性朋友的气味。

To do this they employed an electronic nose (e-nose) and two groups of specially recruited human “smellers”.

为了做到这一点，他们使用了电子鼻和两组专门招募的人类“嗅觉”。

The e-nose used a set of metal-oxide gas sensors to assess t-shirts worn by participants.

电子鼻使用了一套金属氧化物气体传感器来评估参与者穿的t恤。

One group of human smellers were given pairs of these shirts and asked to rate how similar they smelt.

研究人员给了一组人类“嗅觉”们几件这样的衬衫，并让他们评价它们闻起来的相似程度。

Those in the other group were asked to rate the odours of individual t-shirts on five subjective dimensions: pleasantness, intensity, sexual attractiveness, competence and warmth.

另一组受试者被要求从五个主观维度对每件t恤的气味进行评分：愉悦、强烈、性吸引力、能力和温暖。

The e-nose results and the opinions of the second group of smellers were then subjected to a bit of multidimensional mathematical jiggery-pokery (think plotting the results on a graph, except that the graph paper has five dimensions), and they, too, emerged as simple, comparable numbers.

然后，电子鼻的结果和第二组“人类嗅觉”的意见进行了一些多维数学上的摆弄(想想把结果画在图表上，除了图表纸有五个维度)，它们以简单的、可比较的数字出现。

All three approaches yielded the same result.

这三种方法都产生了相同的结果。

The t-shirts of friends smelt more similar to each other than did the t-shirts of strangers.

相比陌生人的t恤，朋友的t恤闻起来更相似。

Friends, in other words, do indeed smell alike.

换句话说，朋友闻起来确实是一样的。

But why?

但是为什么呢？