A scent of promise for artificial noses

The Boston Globe : For more than two decades, scientists have strived to build an artificial nose that can mimic what is sometimes called our most elusive sense. Now, with a growing slate of potential applications—detecting cancer in a breath, say, or identifying airborne toxins on the battlefield—the technology is advancing and efforts are proliferating.In North Grafton, a small startup company, CogniScent , is working on an electronic nose that resembles a yellow Dustbuster and sniffs out everything from molds to dangerous chemicals. At MIT, researchers are working on " RealNose ,” a Pentagon-funded project inspired by dog noses that aims to use actual biological parts—the smell receptors that recognize odor molecules. And, further afield, the Space Shuttle just returned to Earth carrying an " ENose ,” that spent about six months gathering scent data on the International Space Station.The work is beginning to pay off, in prototypes of devices that are showing their promise in lab experiments.