Noses have their advantages. They're cute, they're versatile, and they're small enough to be carried around. Which may be why the artificial odor detectors that engineers have been building since the 1950s to try to mimic the olfactory abilities of our built-in sensors have taken so long to find their way to the market--and then, in most cases, have flopped.
But things are finally looking up for the electronic nose. Thanks to advances in chip technology and pattern-recognition techniques, increasingly tiny sniffers are beginning to live up to their moniker. Today e-noses are being tested for everything from disease detection to...
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