Q: Does smell weigh anything?

Yes, smells have weight, or mass. When you smell something, your noseis detecting a few, a very few, molecules floating around in the air. Thinkabout that next time you wake up and smell the coffee, or walk into the halland smell dinner in the kitchen, or walk into a bathroom and smell somethingelse. These molecules have mass and thereby weight, albeit a tiny amount.The key to your sense of smell is that your olfactory faculties--your nose,taste buds, and brain--are so very sensitive. Just a few micrograms(millionths of the weight of, say, a mosquito) of gasoline or french-fry oil in the air, and we're in business detecting chemicals.We humans can distinguish about 10,000 different smells.And we do it in just a few milliseconds.

Detecting Functional Groups:Smell

O H

OCH3

OH

H

O

vanillin

cinnamaldehyde

Detecting Enantiomers

R-(-)-carvoneSmells like spearmint

S-(+)-carvoneSmells like caraway

Naming Alcohols

• The parent hydrocarbon is the longest continuous chain containing the functional group.

• The parent hydrocarbon is numbered in the direction that gives the functional group suffix the lowest possible number.

• If there is a functional group suffix and a substituent, the functional group suffix gets the lowest possible number.

• If the same number for the functional group suffix is obtained in both directions, the chain is numbered in the direction that gives the substituent the lowest possible number.

• If there is more than one substituent, the substituents are cited in alphabetical order.