Explosives detector works 16 times better when it can ‘sniff’ like a dog
LA TimesDogs know how to follow their noses — and scientists are now taking the hint, too. Scientists have long looked to the dog’s nose as an olfactory marvel, thought to be on the order of 10,000 to 100,000 times better than our own. but there’s been a limited amount of work on what’s happening outside of the dog’s nose.” Searching for clues, the scientists 3-D-printed a dog snout modeled from a female Labrador retriever and put it in a schlieren imaging system, a device that uses the way that light moves through fluids of different temperatures and densities to actually watch what was happening to the air flow. Usually, this device would inhale continuously in 10-second intervals, but the scientists found that the sniffing nose was 16 times as good at detecting odors from 4 centimeters away as the device’s normal mode. “The dog is a smart sampling system,” Staymates said, “so I guess we’re just proposing that the next generation hopefully considers different ways of sampling the environment around them.” In the meantime, he and his colleagues will probably continue to learn from the dog’s nose —including its ability to smell in stereo.
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