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What are the worlds of knowledge inside a bio-acoustic, spectrogram, a mathematical diagram, or an illustrated equation? 

 is a column in which scientists describe the power of drawings.

Dogs’ reputation as super smellers is overrated, while ours is underrated. Olfaction, or the sense of smell, is thought to be reduced in humans compared to other animals—but in fact there is little to support this notion. In truth, the evidence points to humans possessing a rather refined sense of smell compared to other mammals. I am often asked, as an olfactory scientist, if the reputation dogs have as superior smellers is true. This question, and the conventional wisdom behind it, has always puzzled me. It seems to me that if dogs had such a miraculously good sense of smell then they could perform their customary method of greeting—sticking their noses quite directly into the private parts of some other unknown dog—from a greater distance, like at least a foot or two.

There is actually a perfectly good reason for this friendly if invasive practice. Dogs, and other animals, are simply willing to put their noses where the odors are. The single greatest challenge to our sense of smell is that we stand upright—an anatomical fact that places our noses some five feet or so in the air. Odor molecules have some weight and tend to accumulate near the ground. This is why, when dogs catch some interesting scent, they put their noses directly on the ground to follow where the smell is coming from. When we humans meet a stranger, we may shake hands. Social decorum (thankfully) prevents us from sniffing each other’s armpits, where there is much more olfactory information to be found. Even canine breeds that have been bred for a more refined sense of smell and to detect some scents at greater distances, like bloodhounds, need to put their nose to the ground and will sniff very close to an object or trail.

If dogs had such a miraculously good sense of smell then they could perform their customary method of greeting—sticking their noses directly into the private parts of some other unknown dog—from a greater distance.

There is one other interesting example that demonstrates our refined sense of smell, and that is flavor. Not taste, which refers only to sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (or umami, as it was named in Japan). Flavor, on the other hand, is a blend of these tastes with smells, and is the result of an evolutionary adaptation specific to humans. An estimated 80–90% of flavor is determined by olfaction. When our jaws became shorter and our faces flatter, a change in the pharyngeal bones led to an opening between our oral cavity and our nasal organ. This conduit, known as the retronasal pathway, is how odor molecules released by chewing food find their way to the olfactory epithelium, the thin tissue at the very top of our nasal cavity where the cells that detect odors are located. When we eat, stimuli from food—odor molecules—and the nasal organ are in close proximity, facilitating the olfactory sense. Humans possess what is likely the most discriminating palette of any animal on the planet. Not to pick on our poor canine companions again, but as any dog owner knows, they will eat just about anything.

Our sense of smell, compared to our dogs’, is actually quite good. Scientists working in this area tend to place humans right about in the middle of the pack of terrestrial animals. Not as good as some, but not as bad as many.

But what exactly are we smelling? What are we detecting? Or more simply put, what is an odor? The answer is also not as simple as it seems.

Almost all odors are organic molecules, which means they are combinations, sometimes very complex combinations, of just three atoms: carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Occasionally among the fouler odors there may be a bit of nitrogen or sulphur, but that’s about it. You wouldn’t think just three to five atoms could be put together in so many varied ways, but theoretical models show that there are likely to be trillions of organic molecules. We ourselves are mostly made up of organic molecules, often quite large ones. DNA, RNA and proteins are all organic molecules with nothing but chains of these five atoms strung together, by the thousands, in incredibly complex ways. An entire branch of chemistry, organic chemistry, is devoted to molecules made up of these five atoms. Carbon is the linchpin of sorts because a single carbon atom is able to form bonds, stable connections, to as many as four other atoms, the most of any atom in the entire periodic table. An oxygen atom can form two bonds and a hydrogen atom just one. This is why organic chemistry is often called the chemistry of carbon—and why scientists looking for signs of extraterrestrial life elsewhere in our galaxy do so by searching for complex carbon chemistry.

Odor molecules are on the simpler side of organic chemistry, typically consisting of between three and 50 atoms of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Even with this number of atoms, it is possible to construct many millions of complicated molecules. And your nose can detect and discriminate between several thousands of these molecules. One could make the case, in fact, that your nose is the best chemical detector on the planet.

The nose’s receptors are proteins embedded in the surface membrane of the cells that live in your nasal epithelium (that aforementioned tissue that lines the upper nasal cavity). They are called olfactory neurons because they are actually brain cells that have evolved to detect odors and send signals back to the rest of the brain. Each protein receptor has a differently shaped pocket that is capable of capturing differently shaped odor molecules—a kind of lock-and-key arrangement where the receptors are the locks and the odor molecules are the keys. If the key (odor) fits into the lock (receptor) then it will activate the olfactory neuron and send a signal to the brain that such and such a molecule must be in the area. It’s not quite that simple, because most of the things we smell are actually mixtures of many different molecules, but that’s pretty close to the general idea.

I doubt you would ever mistake a banana for a pear. This means that you can smell the difference of one carbon atom! 

When molecules activate many different receptors at once, complications arise. For example, coffee is known to contain 780 odorous molecules. Some of them will activate the same receptor because they have similar shapes or properties, but it is still likely that sniffing coffee grounds will activate a fair number of the receptors in your nose.

One might wonder how different two molecules have to be in order for our olfactory system to register their smells as distinct. The answer lies in the diagram above, which details one way chemists show the structure of a molecule. Each of the little balls represents an atom—gray for carbon, red for oxygen and white for hydrogen. They are connected by bars that represent the bonds between them. In this case, the two molecules consist of a chain of carbon atoms with some hydrogens attached to them and what is known as a “functional group” at one end where the red oxygens are. The functional group shown here is called an ester. Among the sorts of organic molecules that make up odors there are about 25 different types of functional groups. Esters are among the most common of odor molecules.

If you count the number of carbon atoms in the two chains (from the red oxygens to the left) you will see that one of them has six carbons attached to the ester group and the other has seven. In other words, they are identical except for this difference in one carbon atom. Now here’s the kicker. The 6-carbon molecule (known as hexyl acetate) smells like bananas, while the 7-carbon molecule (known as heptyl acetate) smells like pears. While both are fruity smells, I doubt you would ever mistake a banana for a pear. This means that you can smell the difference of one carbon atom! And you aren’t even a trained perfumer.

Our noses can make a discrimination that only the most sophisticated chemistry equipment can make—a single carbon atom in a chain of only six or seven atoms. Your remarkable nose performs many feats like this dozens of times a day: at every meal, when you enter a room, when you take a walk in the park or down a narrow street on garbage day in the summer. It tells you what to avoid and what to seek out, bringing sensual pleasure to many simple activities. And all this without requiring you to think much about it at all. Next time you’re at the grocery store, go to the fruit section and close your eyes. Smell the bananas and the pears, and impress yourself with the amazing power of your olfactory sense. ♦

Stuart Firestein is a neuroscientist studying the vertebrate olfactory receptor neuron.

A standard ball and stick model of two odorous chemicals composed of carbon (gray), oxygen (red), and hydrogen (white) atoms.

Picture This: Atoms of Aroma

It has now been more than 160 years since Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace laid the keystone of modern biology with the theory of evolution. But geology—Darwin’s original field of study—would wait almost another full century, until the 1950s, for the first light of its new dawn. As evolutionary theory revolutionized biology, the theory of plate tectonics brought geology into the modern era and did away with the comforting fiction of the eternal, unchanging Earth once and for all. From then on, everything—from the distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes around the globe to the heights of the Himalayas and parallel peaks and valleys of the American Basin and Range—could be explained as facets of the same underlying theory. The planet finally began to 

: the Earth’s outermost rocky layer, the lithosphere, is not a solid shell, but a jigsaw of rocky plates adrift over an ocean of hot rock with the consistency of silly putty. Where warm material rises from this viscous part of the mantle, plates tear apart, and new land forms as lava pours forth from the ruptured crust. Where plates collide, they thrust up new mountain ranges and drive cold, dense oceanic crust back down into the mantle. It is a ceaseless cycle of creation and destruction; every few hundred million years, each rock on the seafloor will have been replaced and the contours of the continents redrawn.

Geology waited a long time for its revolution. But if not for one map—and the remarkable woman who created it—earth science would have had to wait even longer still.

Oceanographer Marie Tharp’s 1957 map of the North Atlantic turned geology upside down by revealing the topography of the seafloor, which until then scientists had largely assumed was a flat, featureless abyss. Tharp’s survey is cut through by twin chains of drowned volcanoes that rise along the banks of a rift valley rivaling the Grand Canyon in width and depth, but that stretches from Greenland to the edge of the Antarctic. This is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a long mountain range and rift valley that we now understand as the violent border marches of the great tectonic plates on either side of the Atlantic.

Tharp’s first map revealed only one section of this underwater topography, which she and her colleagues discovered was just one part of a larger system of mid-ocean ridges encircling the globe. Between 1952 and 1977, Tharp and her colleague Bruce Heezen would go on to chart the entire seafloor, revealing this world-spanning ridge in its entirety for the first time and connecting it to rift valleys on land like the East African Rift. However, the 1957 North Atlantic section was enough, eventually, to convince geologists to entertain the possibility that the continents were 

—a controversial idea that for decades had been widely dismissed as scientific hocus pocus. The Plate Tectonic Revolution had begun.

The theory of plate tectonics brought geology into the modern era and did away with the comforting fiction of the eternal, unchanging Earth once and for all. 

The polymath skillset that made Tharp such a unique and important mapmaker was very much a product of her place and time. Had she been born a few decades later, she might have gone directly into science. She grew up following her father, a soil surveyor for the USDA, across the country and developed an early interest in geology. But in college, she studied fine arts; women were not welcome in technical fields. Intellectually restless, she flitted between majors and ended up graduating with degrees in English and Music and four minors, including one in geology. She also learned technical drawing. Tharp thought she’d ultimately become a teacher, like her mother. But in 1941, Japan bombed American ships at Pearl Harbor and the US declared war in return. With so many young men gone to fight in World War II, institutions that had previously shunned women suddenly competed to recruit them. The University of Michigan, which had previously only admitted men to its geology program, put up flyers at other colleges advertising a geology master’s degree program for women, and Tharp applied. She graduated in 1944 and earned another bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1948.

That year, she moved to New York and went looking for work. After the tedium of cleaning fossils dissuaded her from applying to jobs at the American Museum of Natural History, Tharp decided to try Columbia. Her math degree earned her an introduction to Maurice Ewing, a geophysicist and founder of Columbia’s fledgling Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. But it was her drafting skills that got her the job. Ewing—who colleagues at Lamont just called “Doc”—was gearing up to chart the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and he needed a cartographer.

A mysterious underwater rise had been discovered halfway across the North Atlantic in the 1850s when sailors aboard the 

 dropped cannon balls tied to ropes overboard to sound the depths. In 1872, the 

 expedition discovered a similar ridge in the South Atlantic. But for decades, that’s about all scientists knew. The only way we could chart the seafloor was by throwing heavy things downward. Everything that lay beneath a few miles of water might as well have been on the moon.

 met its icy end in the North Atlantic. This major world-historical event had the accidental effect of catapulting seafloor exploration into a new age. Just a few months after the disaster, English polymath and pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson filed a patent for a device that could detect underwater icebergs using sound pulses. Other engineers quickly followed suit and developed new and more powerful ways to “see” by listening. World War I submarine warfare drove acoustic research to new heights, and when peace returned, improved echo sounders were put to alternative use seeking routes for transatlantic telegraph cables—and, eventually, charting the depths. By the 1920s, researchers were increasingly convinced that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was real, and that it might run up and down the entire Atlantic—a fact that was eventually confirmed by the German 

 expedition, a scientific mission between 1925 and 1927. But despite this progress, by the 1950s no one had managed to translate these first echoes of the Earth’s drowned landscapes into a full picture.

In 1948, Ewing bestowed that enormous task to a young grad student named Bruce Heezen. Heezen needed someone who could transmute reams of echo sounder measurements into accurate diagrams of the seafloor topography, and Tharp quickly proved herself up to the job. Tharp was unable to accompany Heezen out to sea, as women were not allowed on research vessels. So, she stayed behind at Lamont, processing data. In 1952, she noticed something unexpected: a V-shaped indentation right at the center of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

A trained geologist, Tharp knew immediately what she was looking at. It was a rift valley—a dip in the Earth formed as its surface pulls apart.

At first, Heezen dismissed Tharp’s interpretation as impossible “girl talk.” If the Earth’s surface was pulling apart from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the continents on either side of the Atlantic would presumably be drifting apart—and continental drift was, at the time, tantamount to scientific heresy. But Tharp was confident she was right and Heezen came around eventually. In 1952, he had her begin work on a full map of the North Atlantic seafloor. In parallel, Heezen hired a graduate student to plot the epicenters of undersea earthquakes on a map of the same scale as Tharp’s. With the two maps layered over each other on a light table, the earthquake epicenters ran right down Tharp’s V-shaped valley. Further expeditions revealed that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge extended into the Indian Ocean and into the East African Rift on land, and Heezen concluded that the Atlantic ridge must be just one arm of an enormous, 40,000-mile rift system spanning the entire globe.

When Heezen first presented this result in 1956, he was met with a mix of enthusiasm and disdain. Years later, researchers were still arguing over whether the rift valley was real and if it was evidence for continental drift. Tharp let them fight. “I was so busy making maps, I let them argue,” 

. At the time, she was hard at work turning Heezen’s data into a physiographic map, which would show the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as if viewed from a low-flying plane. “I figured I’d show them a picture of where the rift valley was.” In 1957, she did just that. It took a little over a decade from there to work out the details of plate tectonic theory and for critics to finally come around. It took even longer for Tharp, a rare woman in science working in the deeply sexist 1950s, to receive credit for her contribution to the revolution.

Everything that lay beneath a few miles of water might as well have been on the moon.

Today, Tharp’s groundbreaking maps of the seafloor have attracted the attention they deserve—though I’m not sure that’s true for plate tectonics itself. When I studied geosciences at Caltech in the 2010s, it was not presented to me as any kind of revolution. In physics and biology courses, we took time to appreciate the history and significance of paradigm-shifting ideas like Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics and, of course, Darwin’s theory of evolution. I was taught about plate tectonics, but I can’t recall ever sitting through an enthusiastic lecture on the Plate Tectonics Revolution. I suspect this has to do with the startling newness of it all: while biologists have had more than a century and a half to work with evolution, plate tectonics has been accepted for less than 60 years.

It was only when I became interested in the origins of life and the possibility of finding it elsewhere in the universe that I started to understand the significance of Tharp’s discovery. I assumed, when I learned geology, that plate tectonics was simply what planets did. But in fact, Earth’s geology is downright weird—perhaps even one of a kind. No other world in our solar system has plate tectonics. And this one difference can explain so much about why our world is, in so many respects, a world apart.

Plate tectonics is why many of the rocks most common on Earth’s surface are vanishingly rare everywhere else. Granite, the most abundant component of Earth’s continents, is practically nonexistent in space; producing it involves melting and re-solidifying rock over and over again, which is hard to do without plate tectonics. That’s why researchers were so surprised when, in 2023, they discovered a patch of granite lurking on the Moon (we still aren't sure how it got there). Plate tectonics is why you’ll find white quartz sand on Earth but practically nowhere else, and why Mercury, Venus, and Mars don’t have continents.

The churn of the plates may even be the reason why our planet can host life. Many researchers believe that Earth could not have remained habitable over geologic time if not for plate tectonics; constantly recycling the crust regulates Earth’s carbon cycle over millions of years and prevents climate runaway. Our oceans’ fertility depends on nutrients that erode from the continents. Plate collisions likely raised the continents in the first place, and today they continuously thrust fresh rock up above the sea. Were the plates to halt, the continents would grind down over time to flat sheets, effectively ending erosion and starving the seas of nutrients. Of course, we don’t know if life on Earth would have been impossible without plate tectonics. The origin of life on Earth is still a hotly debated mystery—as is the onset of plate tectonics. Both happened so long ago that the rocks that might have borne witness to these pivotal events no longer exist.

We might be able to glimpse aspects of Earth’s lost past in the present time of other worlds. Researchers study Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io and its alien tectonics as a possible analogue of the early Earth, before its crust broke into plates. Looking further afield to exoplanets, one day we may discover more direct parallels to Earth. It’s early days for exoplanet geology. With the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers can now glean a few precious facts about the rocky surfaces of worlds orbiting a particular class of dim star. We can measure their temperatures and begin determining what covers the surfaces of other airless, “bare rock” exoplanets. One day, it might be possible to search for evidence of alien plate tectonics and ask whether habitable conditions depend on the phenomenon.

In a way, we’re still in the nineteenth century, dropping roped-up balls into the sea to find out where the water ends. Space telescopes purpose-built for hunting habitable worlds won't arrive for a few decades. But when they do, they will allow us to directly view light from Earth-like planets around sun-like stars for the first time. We will get our first pictures, however fuzzy, of alien earths. And as Marie Tharp’s incredible maps show, the right picture can be a revolution in itself. ♦

Elise Cutts is a science writer in Austria who distills complex science, math, and tech into words that spark wonder and curiosity. 

The first physiographic map of the Atlantic Ocean, 1957.

Picture This: A Tectonic Revolution

If you run a wet fingertip around the edge of a wine glass, the glass will ring with a pure, ethereal tone. Do this repeatedly, and you’ll always hear the same sound.

Why is this? Your eardrums are vibrating thanks to the push and pull of rhythmic sound waves, and the musical note you experience is determined by the frequency of their vibration—the number of back-and-forth cycles per second. The sound waves themselves have been generated by vibrations of the glass, set in motion by friction at the point of contact with your finger. As for the tone’s purity and predictability, they arise from a basic principle of physics: resonance. When objects ranging from trampolines to buildings to guitar strings bounce, swing, or vibrate, they typically do so with a definite, predictable frequency; they are said to “resonate.” For the wine glass, resonance assures that the vibrational frequency and the resulting musical tone are steady and always the same.

American polymath Benjamin Franklin took advantage of this effect when he invented a musical instrument called the glass harmonica, consisting of a rotating iron shaft on which glass bowls of varying size are mounted. Each bowl, when touched by the player’s finger, reliably produces a unique note. Surely Franklin, who also famously demonstrated that lightning is related to static electricity, would have been delighted to learn that electricity originates in the flow of elementary particles—tiny, indivisible particulates of matter—and that these particles have properties rooted in the same principle that governs the sound of a wine glass.

Widespread in nature, resonance underlies the workings of clocks, musical instruments, and the cosmos. A pendulum, for instance, always swings at its resonance frequency, making it a dependable timekeeper. Pianos, marimbas, and Franklin’s armonica rely upon the stable frequencies of strings, bells, and glass bowls.

Remarkably, the universe itself resembles a musical instrument with its own pattern of resonant frequencies. Indeed, cosmic resonance is what creates the mountainous terrain seen in the image above. This graph presents data from the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, widely known as the LHC.