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Identifying People By Odor As Effective As Fingerprinting

Posted by samzenpus on from the can-you-smell-me-now dept.

A study has found that everybody has a unique body odor, like their fingerprints, that could be used as an unique identifier. The study showed that a persons unique odor stayed the same even if they varied their diet with strong smelling foods such as garlic and spices. "These findings indicate that biologically-based odorprints, like fingerprints, could be a reliable way to identify individuals," said Monell chemist Jae Kwak. I would have thought that hundreds of years of dogs tracking people would have proved this, but it's nice to know that science has figured it out officially now.

9 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by Facegarden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why is this even Idle? This is actually somewhat interesting.... I hate Idle, Btw.
    -Taylor

    --
    Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
  2. Oh... by Facegarden · · Score: 1, Insightful

    And one more thing... Trying to make Idle legitimate by putting real articles on it too is lame. Put real articles where they belong, banish idle to hell.
    -Taylor

    --
    Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
    1. Re:Oh... by Skrapion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You people. First you complain that Idle isn't any good, and now you're complaining that it shouldn't be any good?

      --
      The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
    2. Re:Oh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Well, if idle has good articles what's the difference between Idle and not-Idle...?

      Possibly the fact that replying "I'm surprised at this result because when I eat chocolate or drink coffee my urine smells heavily of cacao beans" is a legitimate non-trollish response to this Idle post, whereas it would not be received the same way in most other stories.

      More straightforward, though, I think the anti-Idle sect is based largely on misguided dogma rather than the value of Idle or their anti-Idle viewpoint. "Idleispants" is a cool meme to hear from an attractive chick, but it's rather lame as an auto-response to all Idle articles - which is how it is used, generally. The fact that many recent "Ask Slashdot" articles about technical issues were ragged on as much as Idle articles just adds to my feelings that many /. users are simply stuck in very narrow views of what slashdot is supposed to be about - which, as far as I can tell, is consisting of a nerd-oriented version of Google News that often displays summaries that have poor grammar and spelling.

    3. Re:Oh... by Facegarden · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You people. First you complain that Idle isn't any good, and now you're complaining that it shouldn't be any good?

      No, I'm complaining that there is already a section for this article, it's called "Science", and that i feel people are artificially putting this in the wrong category to make it seem more legitimate.

      The idea behind the idle section is to have articles that are sort of pointless - that's just the point, i'm not ragging on it. Thing is, i don't like that idea, i think it's stupid.
      -Taylor

      --
      Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
    4. Re:Oh... by RulerOf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      While this article may be misplaced, I'd say that while regular /. stories are "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters," Idle /. could be considered "News for Nerds, Stuff that Doesn't Matter," but that you still might find interesting.

      --
      Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
  3. Dogs vs. Control groups by jonaskoelker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would have thought that hundreds of years of dogs tracking people would have proved this, but it's nice to know that science has figured it out officially now.

    .
    First of all, tracking is not identifying. Second of all, if two people have the same scent but non-overlapping movement paths, you can successfully track the one whose path you're on, so ability to track is not a very pure way of measuring smell-based distinguishability. Thirdly, dogs probably have vastly different ability levels for tracking by smell vs. tracking by fingerprint due to the two leaving different amounts of trail material. Fourthly throughout these years, have comparisons been made between smell-dogs and print-dogs? And fifthly, just because the market uses dogs to track on smell doesn't mean it's the best way to even track people: there may be market inertia factors and/or cost/benefit ratios that favor using smelling dogs.
    .
    Science has not figured out that hunting by smell works. They've found out that odors are better than fingerprints for identifying people. If it had gone the other way, should we all go and replace our dogs? No, they probably work best in practice, due to better hardware support for the odor-based tracking.

  4. Re:What about vodka? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Actually, she may be hypersensitive and she is certainly being polite (as the rest of your coworkers are.) The "odor" she's referring to is your *two* Axe products, she just being polite by saying booze instead of your stinking body sprays, because that crap reeks worse than anything, even an old drunk. Isn't it obvious? Forty-eight hours and two showers later it's not the alcohol she smells...

  5. Idle submission process by JavaTHut · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Does idle base its story submissions solely by how well the content matches up to whatever pictures they happen have lying around?