Scent sense of a woman proves three times better

Everything you have heard about first impressions is true, according to a study carried out by three transition-year students at St Joseph's College, Summerhill, Athlone.

"First impressions do count and we wanted to see people's views on the subject," explained Kate-Ann Harrington, who with Ciara Bruton and Gillain Stacey surveyed fellow students on the importance of first impressions.

They used a questionnaire and polled 50 students, asking what aspect of a person's appearance had the greatest impact on a first impression. The answers were somewhat contradictory, however, Ciara pointed out.

"They all said that the clothes you wear were least important but that your overall appearance was most important."

The brine shrimp, common in Irish coastal waters, is less concerned about how it might appear than what type of water it might encounter. Natasha Fortune (16), a fourth-year student at East Glendalough School in Co Wicklow, used the shrimp to screen a variety of water sources for toxicity.

She got dried shrimp eggs at the pet shop, hatched them and grew them on until they were about the size of a full stop on this page. She then put them into clean and polluted water sources to see how well they survived.

"I would see how many died for each type of water," she explained. "It was my idea. I wanted to do a project on small living animals."

Unfortunately for the brine shrimps, they did not fare well in most water from open sources such as streams. They proved very useful for warning of pollution in the water, but were not any help in indicating whether a treated supply was safe to drink.

Sorting out the boys from the girls on the basis of scent was the focus of a project by Noirin Plunkett of St Andrew's College, Dublin. She wanted to see whether test subjects could identify whether a scent was meant to be for a man or a woman.

There were 40 volunteers - 20 of each sex - and she quickly discovered that women had the edge when it came to nose power.

"The females were better at identifying scents" by a wide margin, she found. Six fragrances were used, three for men and three for women, and 30 per cent of females got them all correct, compared with just 10 per cent of males.