We use dogs to sniff for drugs even when the smell is masked or inside of things, they can identify and track a person by their unique smell, and dogs have also been able to smell all sorts of illnesses on people so it’s obviously something that would be incredibly useful but what’s the barrier stopping us from reliably making a versatile odor detector artificially?
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Sorry, didn’t read the flavor text first. Dogs have thousands upon thousands of each sensor, as well, which is why they’re so much better at detecting smells. It’s a surface area thing. They’ve got a lot more than we do. For the record, though, we do have very, very good single “odor” detectors. They just don’t also release the detected chemical after detection, so they are single use. The sensor eventually (rather rapidly) becomes saturated with the odor, in the same way that humans become “smell blind”, except we get over it and the artifical detectors don’t.
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