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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkin, this will just take a minute.

Shakespeare once said: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And that is true today as it was 400 years ago. What's different now, though, is their smell doesn't travel as far as it used to. Or so say scientists in a study that appears online in the journal Atmospheric¹ Environment, researchers at the University of Virginia made a mathematical model to show how the fragrance² of flowers floats through the air. They found the presence of pollution slows the scents⁴ down. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the sweet smell of roses might drift for three quarters of a mile. Now, downwind of a major city, a flower's delicate bouquet⁵ can't make it a full thousand feet. That's because the scent³ molecules⁶ produced by flowers are volatile⁷, they chemically react with ozone⁸ and other pollutants⁹, and ka-bloomy. No more eau d’springtime. The effect might pose a minor¹⁰ nuisance to modern poets, but it's a major problem for flowering plants and the insects that pollinate them, bumblebees find flowers by smelling them, less aroma¹¹ attracts fewer bees which ultimately means fewer flowers. So stop and smell the roses, if you're close enough.

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkin.