Just about everybody has been working on an "electronic nose" that can mimic the keen ability of dogs to sense and track specific scents. Basically, the e-nose is old news. The big challenges, frankly, have been reliability and "stand-off" (the ability to detect things at a distance). Until researchers can tackle those two big challenges, the original K-9 will trump the e-nose.

But the far-out researchers at DARPA appear to have a unique approach to the problem: they want to combine dog nose with machine in a new research effort. "The goal of the DARPA RealNose program is to build a nose constructed from actual olfactory receptors that further leverages the components of the canine olfactory system to create a breakthrough detection system with potential capabilities beyond that of a canine [ed.- emphasis added]," the broad agency announcement notes. "The key to the program concept is that by simulating the entire mammalian olfactory system (from air intake to pattern recognition), revolutionary detection capabilities will be created, demonstrating canine-comparable specificity, distance, and detection thresholds."

This will be a great addition to work on artificial nose snot (or maybe vice versa).

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