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.

Our sense of smell is gloriously specific. The mellow aroma of butter and flour rising from warm pie crust, the synthetic bite of fresh paint, the familiar odor of a new car—when we get a whiff of something, we know immediately what it is. But this natural delicacy of perception far exceeds our ability to tell how a given molecule, drawn on a blackboard and considered as an abstraction, will strike our noses.

— Computers can't smell yet, but they're learning. Read more at O.K., Computer, Tell Me What This Smells Like at The New Yorker.

“I think the fact that you’re seeing so much activity both in commercial and academic settings shows that we’re getting a lot closer,” said Cristina Davis, a biomedical engineer and professor at the University of California, Davis, who also is helping to develop an odor sensor to diagnose disease.

“My estimate is it’s a three- to five-year time frame” before such tools are available to clinicians, she added.

— The New York Times takes a look at the use of odor sensor technology in the diagnosis of disease. Read more in One Day, a Machine Will Smell Whether You’re Sick.