The Hello, welcome to the naked scientist with me Chris Smith and also with Dave Ansel.

This week we're decoding new ways to get children involved in computing

and finding out how the new breed of supercomputers

are helping scientists to solve the big questions.

Plus in the news, humans can distinguish

one trillion different smells.

And we talk to one of the scientists who's discovered gravitational waves left over from the Big Bang. And before we start the news, here's this week's scientific teaser.

Since we're discussing computing this week,

can you tell us who wrote the first ever

computer program. We'll give you the answer at the end of the program but if you have

any other questions or

you can comments or comments or feedback for the naked scientist. You can find it on Facebook at Facebook.com

slash the naked scientist or you can also tweet at naked scientists.

On to the news now and for decades scientists have claimed that humans can discriminate

only 10,000 different smells.

Now a new paper published this week in the journal Science suggests that this is a massive

myth and the number should not be 10,000 but at least a trillion. Leslie Vossil is from the Rockefeller

University in New York. Hello Leslie.

Hi how are you? Very well thank you. So where did we get this number of 10,000 from in the first place?

It came from an influential paper from 1927 where some psychologists were sort of mulling what the number should be and it came up with a theoretical number of a little over 6,000 and subsequently that was just rounded to 10,000 and it's had this

pervasive pall over the human confidence about how good our sense of smell is so

for almost a hundred years just felt that we're terrible

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