Your Monday morning science lesson: Nsikan Akpan of NPR walks you through Cracking the Olfactory Code, an odor research project at the University of Colorado Boulder. They are working to teach robots to smell. You can read more at What a smell looks like at NPR.
Licensed smell investigator!
Recreational marijuana is legal in Colorado. But that doesn't mean residents want the air to smell like a pot rally...And that's where licensed smell investigator Ben Siller comes in. A member of Denver's Department of Environmental Health, he's trained to use an olfactometer to determine if people are breaking laws that protect the purity of Denver's air.
— Read more at Denver's Smell-O-Scope Targets Marijuana's Skunky Scent at NPR. Plus, read more about the Nasal Ranger Field Olfactometer here.
Smell of death
An electronic nose that can detect the "smell of death," helping searchers recover bodies from disaster areas and aiding crime scene investigators to determine the exact time of death, is one step closer to wafting from the pages of science-fiction into real life.
— From Scientists on scent of death-detecting electronic nose at Canada.com.
The electronic nose
The electronic nose, which is to be installed on the International Space Station in order to automatically monitor the station's air, can detect contaminants within a range of one to approximately 10,000 parts per million. In a series of experiments, the Brain Mapping Foundation used NASA's electronic nose to sniff brain cancer cells and cells in other organs. Their data demonstrates that the electronic nose can sense differences in odour from normal versus cancerous cells.
From NASA's Electronic Nose May Provide Neurosurgeons With A New Weapon Against Brain Cancer at Science Daily.
The scent of fear, part two
“Headspace” (a term borrowed from the beat generation, where it connoted psychological privacy) is the technical term for the area surrounding an object or person in which their odour can be analysed. But odour detection is not limited to the discovery of drugs and explosives. Scientists and electronic nose entrepreneurs claim headspace analysis can reveal everything from the substances people have been in contact with and their emotional state, to their personal identity and ethnic origin…