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Researchers in Japan have developed an odor-detecting drone that uses antennae taken from insects.
The “insect drone” can autonomously find its way to the source of an odor.
The researchers hope that by expanding the range of the drone’s odor detection, and ultimately enabling it to detect the scent of humans, the device can be a useful tool for search and rescue missions at disaster sites.
— Read more in Odor-detecting drone uses moth antennae at Star Advertiser.
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Before Olofsson started his research, he “viewed the sense of smell as a simple passive system” in which airborne molecules attach to mucosa in the nasal cavity, setting off a biological chain reaction that leads to a smell sensation in the brain. Now, he realises, “olfactory processes start not in the nose but in the brain, even before the odour molecules reach their destination. Olfactory processes are shaped by expectations and experiences.”
— The Financial Times, on the new book The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell by Jonas Olofsson. Read more in The Forgotten Sense — why do we underestimate the power of smell?; hat tip to Kevin!
Florian Mormann, lead author on the study, told Salon in a video interview from Bonn that “the surprising finding to us was that we found cells that responded both to an odor and to the picture … of an object that is associated with the odor. For example, the smell of a banana, the picture of a banana and the written word ‘banana.’”
— Read more in In the brain, smell and sight are closer friends than we thought at Salon.
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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.
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The study authors fitted participants with wearable devices that tracked air flow in and out of their noses over 24 hours of normal activity. They followed 31 people with self-reported normal olfaction and 21 participants born without a sense of smell (known as “congenital anosmics”). They found that both smellers and non-smellers had similar breathing rates, but that, while awake, smellers’ respiratory patterns included an average of 240 additional inhalation peaks per hour, compared with non-smellers.
— Read more in People who can’t smell breathe differently at Popular Science.
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But the new device Zhou and her team designed tells a different story. It detects the beginning of a sniff using changes in nasal pressure and then triggers the release of two odors, with one slightly farther from the nose than the other.
More than 200 participants were exposed to the sequences of two chemical odors in a single sniff. [...]
Test subjects were able to discern different sequences with above-chance accuracy, even when the odors were delivered only 60 milliseconds apart. The results suggest that our sense of smell has a speed similar to that of color perception.
— Read more in Your brain can perceive subtle odor changes in a single sniff at Science News.