tech
Engineers have built "electronic noses" that sense smells using arrays of chemical sensors rather than a biological nose. They are now used to sniff out spoiled food and even disease markers on a person's breath.
An electronic nose exposes an array of chemical sensors to tested air, each reacting slightly differently to specific gas molecules. Since different smells involve different molecule combinations, the overall pattern across sensors forms a kind of fingerprint, which software compares against known patterns to identify the smell.
Photographing captures visual appearance, not chemical composition, so it can't detect an odor with no visible feature. Weighing measures mass, unrelated to which molecules drift into the air.
Since diseases can subtly change breath chemistry, researchers have tried electronic noses as a non-invasive way to flag health problems, echoing what trained detection dogs are reported to sense by scent.
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