Hello everyone, and welcome back to SCISOC's fortnightly newsletter Prism! With the beginning of term having just started, SCISOC is getting back into the groove with some new events, which you can check out in our SCISOC Report! We've also decided to spotlight Nikola Tesla today, as well as how his contributions have shaped modern technology as we know it. Finally, in our coveted Fun Corner, we discuss the science and psychology behind body odour. Welcome back to uni, and SCISOC wishes you a hopefully productive and wonderful term!

Games Night

Tired of only playing online games with friends throughout COVID? Well, look no further because SCISOC is holding an IN-PERSON games night where you can bring your friends and play a variety of games as well as make new friends with students of all years! Come say hi to the SCISOC committee as well!

Check out our Facebook event here. See you there!

25th Thursday February | 5-7pm Colombo CATS Rooms

First Year Guide 2021
In case you missed out on collecting a physical copy of the First Year Guide at O-Week, we have put up the online version onto our website! Check it out here for useful information about getting starting with uni, Science majors, SCISOC and all things uni-related! You can also check out our other publications on our website at www.unswscisoc.org

Tesla, one of the most valuable companies in the world valued at $830 billion headed by the one and only Elon Musk. It mainly dwells in the development and production of electric vehicles and clean energy. It is a gargantuan and innovative company and so it would only make sense for it to be named after someone equally innovative; Nikola Tesla.

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor/scientist who dwelled in the study of electricity. He had extensive contributions in the design of the modern alternating current electric supply system which is predominantly used in all technological applications today. But his path to greatness was not an easy one. In the time of Tesla, popular inventor Thomas Edison was standardizing the use of his DC (direct current) for electric lighting across The United States. Around this time Edison was already a big name and was someone who would not easily be challenged. Yet, Tesla firmly believed that the future of electricity lay in the use of the AC rather than Edison’s popular DC.

Nikola Tesa

Thomas Edison

In steps George Westinghouse, an American Entrepreneur and inventor, who immediately recognized the brilliance of Tesla’s ideas as well as the opportunity to make big profits. He decided to champion the AC on behalf of Tesla and actively opposed the DC electricity industry created by Edison. Such an opposition lead to a series of events of both parties trying to get the better of each other, aptly named the “War of the Currents”. Edison stood to lose large amounts of business and money if AC became the standard, and so he actively tried to protest the use of AC by showing the dangers of using it, sometimes in inhumane ways. This unfortunately backfired, and Edison’s long crusade for the victory of DC eventually failed.

As history tells it, Westinghouse eventually came out on top due to the inherent advantages of using AC over DC, and it has widely shaped how technology has been developed to this day. What is interesting to note, is that Tesla was once an employee for Edison and suggested the idea of AC to Edison, who promptly rejected the idea, claiming it was “utterly impractical”. If only he knew that those words would eventually be his undoing.

Tesla would go on to work on many other electricity-based projects, namely wireless power transfer. He spent much of his later life trying to develop a system for wireless power transfer. However, funds eventually dried up and Tesla was forced to drop the project, never able to realise his goal. What’s crazy to think about is how we’ve not only achieved wireless power transfer, but its almost become commonplace in charging our phones wirelessly, and for that, we can all thank Tesla.

Body odour is, and always has been, an intrinsic part of being human. It’s not always a pleasant part of being human though, and especially not if when, as a self-conscious eleven-year-old who’s teetering on the edge of puberty, you get into the car with your mother after a long day at school only for her to stare at you, wrinkle her nose like she’s smelled something particularly foul (it’s you), and declare that it’s probably about time she tells you about deodorant.

Body odour isn’t just a thing that exists for our parents to scorn us over, however. If you’ve gotten to the stage in your life where you’re sitting somewhere reading this article, you’ve most likely already heard from somewhere that body odour’s a big contributing factor to how attractive others can perceive you as. It’s not a simple matter of ‘human stinky, ugly’ however.

In the journal Hormones and Behaviour, it’s discussed that there appeared to be a relationship between the hormone, androstadienone, and female arousal. Androstadienone is a type of hormone that gets secreted in a biological male’s sweat, and this hormone tends to trigger the region of our brain that is associated with social cognition, emotional processing and sexual behaviour. A researcher from the University of Liverpool, Tamsin Saxton, decided to test this theory by organising a speed-dating event. They would set up three different numbered stations, each led by a woman, and then have men rotate between these stations in three-minute intervals.

Before the event started however, the researchers would dab a cotton pad with a liquid on it into the crevice between the lip and nose on all three women. One woman would get a cotton pad with nothing but water. The second would get a cotton pad dipped in clove oil, and the last woman would get a cotton pad with a concentrated solution of androstadienone, mixed with a bit of clove oil in order to mask the scent. In most trials, the woman who received the cotton pad dipped in androstadienone ended up finding the men in the trial much more attractive than the other two women had, and between the two women who received non-hormone-soaked cotton pads, there didn’t seem to be much of a difference between their judgements.

However, just because the women in this experiment decided that the more androstadienone they could sniff, the more attractive their potential partners were, it doesn’t mean that you should stop wearing deodorant. In a series of studies conducted in the early 2010s, it was discovered that people who used cosmetic products had their body odour rated a lot more pleasant than those that decided to go au naturale.

In this same series of studies, the researchers decided to delve further into the psychology behind body odour by trialling the theory of whether or not you could determine somebody’s personality based on nothing but body odour. In this study, many natural body odours were collected (as perfumed body odours led to inaccurate results), and the smells were given to participants, both adults and children alike, for a sniff test. What followed was a general assessment of the type of personality the body odour’s owner most likely possessed. In a surprising twist, the participants were able to accurately identify cases where the body odour’s owner had a higher level of extraversion, neuroticism, and dominance at a rate higher than the researchers’ calculated chance rates.

All in all, body odour seems to be a big contributing factor in how people around you rate your attractiveness. You yourself may have realised that your partner’s (or ex partner/s) never seemed to have a body odour you despised, but rather, either you didn’t sense it or you found yourself gravitating towards their smell. However, this does beg a question somewhat similar to the chicken-egg conundrum; are you attracted to your partner because of their body odour, or do you like their body odour because you’re attracted to them? The biggest takeaway from today, however, is this: use deodorant. There’re no downsides, unless you count others making a primary judgement of your personality from your body scent alone a positive.

Did you know that you can find all our previous newsletters on our website? Check out unswscisoc.org and scroll to our Publications tab to check them out!

UNSW Science Society is proud to announce our continued partnership with GradReady through 2020. GradReady provides GAMSAT Preparation courses for anyone looking to pursue Medicine after they graduate.
This process starts earlier than you think, so if you’re studying medical science or just have that passion, check out what they have to offer!