Page 24 - The Miracles of Smell and Taste
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              thing, from the Earth to the skies, with its perfection of design:

                   . . . Everything in the heavens and Earth belongs to Him. Everything is
                   obedient to Him, the Originator of the heavens and Earth. When He
                   decides on something, He just says to it, ‘Be!’ And it is. (Surat al-
                   Baqara: 116- 7)



                   The Nose’s Chemical Analysis Facility
                                                                 5
                   You breathe an average of 23,040 times each day. During this con-
              stantly repeated process, your nose adapts air for the lungs in the most
              appropriate manner. In doing so, it performs
              another very important task: It detects and        Olfactory bulb  Olfactory
                                                                             mucosa
              monitors odors. (Figure 3)
                   The total population of a sniff is a billion
              trillion molecules, nearly all of them normally
                                  6
              in the mix we call air. The scent particles, far
              too small to be seen with the naked eye, are          Air drawn into
                                                                     the nose
              contained within this enormous quantity of
              molecules. After you have breathed in, special
              turbinate bones in the nose direct a portion of
              that air to the scent-perceiving region. In this
              way, scent molecules arrive at a region in the
              upper part of the nasal cavity, some 7 centime-         Normal
                                                                     inhalation
              ters (2.756 inches) inside and above the nos-



                                               (Figure 3)
                  We breathe in and out through our noses all
                 day long. Our noses adapt the air that enters
                it to the lungs in the finest way and direct part     Normal
                of that air to the olfactory region, and thus we     exhalation
                           perceive smells at the same time.


                                    The Miracles of Smell and
                                             Taste
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