Smells change us. Inhale the vapours of an apple pie or a bacon sandwich, and your body immediately starts getting ready for an incoming meal. You salivate. You start to produce more digestive enzymes. Your bloodstream courses with insulin, preparing your organs to absorb the nutrients that you’re about to consume.

But smells can have even more profound effects. Two teams of scientists have found that in worms and flies, the scent of pheromones from the opposite sex can speed up an individual’s ageing process and shorten its life. This happens even if no one has any sex.

While studying the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, Anne Brunet’s team from Stanford University noticed that males seemed to shorten the lives of the