Sending people to check out disaster zones is always a risk, so what if a robot equipped with an electronic nose, or e-nose, could track down a hazard by “smelling” for it?

This concept motivated a recent study in Science Advances, in which researchers built an e-nose that can not only detect odors at the same speed as a mouse’s olfactory system, but also distinguish between odors by the specific patterns they produce over time when interacting with the e-nose’s sensor.

— Read more in New "E-nose" Samples Odors 60 Times Per Second at IEEE Spectrum.