Artificial Nose Works By Color

Alien54 writes: "As reported here in the Science Daily News, chemists Kenneth Suslick and Neal Rakow at the University of Illinois have developed an artificial nose that is simple, fast and inexpensive - and works by visualizing odors. Called "smell-seeing" by its inventors, the technique is based on color changes that occur in an array of vapor-sensitive dyes known as metalloporphyrins - doughnut-shaped molecules that bind metal atoms. Metalloporphyrins are closely related to hemoglobin (the red pigment in blood) and chlorophyll (the green pigment in plants) Smell-seeing arrays have many potential uses, such as in the food and beverage industry to detect the presence of flavorings, additives or spoilage; in the perfume industry to identify counterfeit products; at customs checkpoints to detect banned plant materials, fruits and vegetables; and in the chemical workplace to detect and monitor poisons or toxins. The full text is available as a PDF file (but is recommended for chemistry geeks only)."

Add that to the machines that analyze the "aura" of heated air that surrounds our bodies, and you can get a stinkometer the likes of which has been heretofore confined to the dark recesses of deodorant company imaginations. Till then, it looks like a cool approach to the problem of identifying smells electronically for all kinds of other purposes.