美国纽约和洛杉矶等地最近流行一种新的交友方式：闻睡衣，找朋友。据悉，这种特别的交友方式是由加州一位女性首创的。她在不同城市举办的这种交友聚会叫做“费洛蒙派对”，所有参与者均需提交一件自己近期穿过的睡衣。组织方将这些睡衣按性别分类并编号后放在聚会现场，参与者用鼻子感受这些睡衣上的气味，然后选出自己最中意的一件。组织方会对每位参与者及其选择的睡衣进行拍照，然后将照片贴在墙上，这样睡衣的主人就可以现身，跟喜欢自己气味的那个人相识了。这种交友方式看似奇特，其实是有一定科学依据的。之前有研究发现，一个人喜欢哪种气味是由掌管免疫系统的一组基因决定的。人类的嗅觉器官能够识别很细微的基因差异，而人们更喜欢那些与自己基因构成有差别的气味。

The get-togethers - which have been held in New York and Los Angeles and are planned for other cities - ask guests to submit a slept-in T-shirt that will be smelled by other participants.

Sniff your way to love? Singles who attend so-called pheromone parties haven't ruled it out.

The get-togethers - which have been held in New York and Los Angeles and are planned for other cities - ask guests to submit a slept-in T-shirt that will be smelled by other participants.

Then, voila! You can pick your partner based on scent, or so the theory goes.

The parties started as an experiment in matchmaking by a California woman weary of online dating, but it turns out they also have a root in science. Researchers have shown that humans can use scent to sort out genetic combinations that could lead to weaker offspring.

At an art gallery in Los Angeles on a recent night, partygoers huddled around several tables covered with plastic freezer bags stuffed with shirts and an index card bearing a number. Once they found one they liked, a photographer snapped a picture of them holding the bag and projected it onto a wall so the shirt's rightful owner could step forward and meet his or her odor's admirer.

Judith Prays, a Web developer, said she came up with the idea for pheromone parties after she failed to find a match online. Prays said she'd date men for a month or so before things soured until she started seeing a man who wasn't what she was looking for and wound up in a two-year relationship.

What she remembered was his smell.

"Even when he smelled objectively bad, I thought he smelled really good," the 25-year-old said. "And so I thought, OK, maybe I should be dating based on smell?"

At first, it was an experiment. Prays invited 40 friends to a party in New York and asked them to sleep in a T-shirt for three nights, put it in a plastic bag and freeze it, then bring it to the party. Bags were coded with blue cards for men and pink for women and numbered so the shirts' owners could pinpoint their admirers.

The night was a hit, Prays said, adding that half a dozen couples hooked up and one pair formed a relationship. Since then, she has held similar parties in New York and Los Angeles and is planning others for Atlanta and San Francisco.

Research studies using similar T-shirt experiments have shown that whose smell a person prefers is dictated by a set of genes that influence our immune response - which researchers say is nature's way of preventing inbreeding and preserving genetic adaptations developed over time.

"Humans can pick up this incredibly small chemical difference with their noses," said Martha McClintock, founder of the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago. "It is like an initial screen."

In one such study, McClintock and her colleagues had participants sniff inside a covered box without knowing that in some cases they were smelling worn T-shirts. What they found was people preferred the odors of those who had different genetic makeups from their own, but not radically different.

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(Agencies)

Vocabulary:

pheromone: 费洛蒙，一种由动物体分泌出来且具有挥发性的化学物质，它可使同种动物在不同个体之间，透过嗅觉的作用而传递讯息，产生行为或生理上的变化。

（中国日报网英语点津 Helen 编辑）