Smoke alarms may emit odor

My baby brother thinks I stink. I know this because he told me repeatedly last week. He kept sniffing my shirt in an effort to confirm this opinion. We were out in public at the time. He even demanded that his wife sniff me in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. She said I smelled like flowers and that my brother didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe that new soap I’ve been using doesn’t smell as good as I believed it did.
I thought about this exchange again when I read today’s newspaper. In it was an article about the Ig Nobel prizes. These are similar to the real Nobel Prizes but are given to scientists who do what at first seems off-beat and totally useless.
This year’s winners included some Japanese researchers who invented a new type of fire alarm. Instead of wailing like a banshee this fire alarm emits “essence of wasabi” that is strong enough to wake someone from sleep.
They tried hundreds of different stinky odors before settling on what I think of as Japanese horseradish. Can you imagine what the researchers smelled like at the end of the day? Perhaps I should send my baby brother over to Japan to sniff the scientists.
The wasabi plant is a member of the same family as cabbage, which can be extremely odoriferous when cooked, and regular horseradish, which can clear out my sinuses in a jiffy. As such, it has oodles of potential.
The active ingredient in wasabi is an irritant to the nose that is effective even when someone is asleep. It works a little like smelling salts do. Just as we associate a rotten egg smell with a gas leak, might we someday associate the smell of wasabi with a potential fire?
In a test of the new alarm one of the test subjects who was deaf woke up within 10 seconds of wasabi vapor being sprayed into his sleeping area. I wonder how he managed to get to sleep knowing that at some point he was to breathe in something nasty.
A while back my mother’s smoke alarm had to be replaced. We couldn’t get it to stop screeching even after we changed the batteries. We could hear it even though we were outside in her yard as far away from the house as we could get. My mother, who was inside the house, heard nothing. She isn’t totally deaf but the shrill tones of the smoke alarm are out of her range of hearing.
At the time we searched all the places we could find in hopes that we could find a smoke alarm with a flashing light to alert her. None of the regular stores had one. If they did have a light it was no brighter than a night light and wouldn’t have alerted her to anything, let alone woke her up from a deep sleep.
We did find some smoke alarms on the internet, but again, the lights were not bright enough to have done any good. This new odor emitting alarm seems promising. It probably won’t be on the market at an affordable cost any time soon. But at least there’s hope for the future.
There are three things to be learned from all this. One is that even though research may seem frivolous it can have great potential for good for a select few and their grateful families. Another is that something may smell wonderful to one person and rotten to another. And the third is that family will not hesitate to tell me that they think I stink.[[In-content Ad]]