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Identifying People By Odor As Effective As Fingerprinting
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.
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?
i need to know
It's on Idle because this idea was invented by Shampoo.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
the idea that fingerprints are unique is stupid, especially for anyone who is actually in law enforcement or forensics. you need 12 count it TWELVE different points of matching to even get a fingerprint submitted for evidence. so if this odor is just as effective that means its pretty much a scare tactic as much as "we got your fingerprints at the scene!" is
I wouldn't call it stupid, just incorrect when all possibilities are tried.
Aside from genetically-identical twins, there are a rare few known cases where people do have matching fingerprints (it's been awhile since I read the article but I seem to recall a resolution of around a thousand comparison points in one such case). However, with the incredibly low occurrence rate for this duplication, fingerprints still reign as the current top method for human identity verification (DNA matching takes alot more time and still isn't 100% accurate).
The article and summary are misleading, as well. This study was only performed on mice, not humans. There is additional doubt introduced from the lack of description of the experimental procedure. If the mice weren't separated long enough after the diet change, then a sufficient amount of the recognized scent may have remained for the other mice to make correct identifications.
The comment about dogs in the summary may be incorrect as well, but I don't really know. I have never read about any studies that tried to have a dog track a person from a previous scent marker after they've undergone a radical diet change and sufficient time for the body to remove the chemical traces of the old diet. They usually give dogs an item that someone has used recently in order to track them by scent.
I do know two things from my personal experiences as a person with a strong sense of smell:
1. In favor of the results that the articles puts forward as 'fact' - without perfumes, colognes, other scented body products or even any noticeable sweat; a woman definitely smells different than a man.
2. Disagreeing with the postulate from the results of the study - How best to put this delicately? The scent of certain subsets of people that stereotypically consume specific diets does indeed match scents from those diets when their scent becomes strong enough.
Of course, I'm not a canine, so regardless of my personal experience, there may indeed be elements of a person's scent that are as unique as their DNA. Actually, if a dog's sense of smell is advanced enough, their olfactory processing could be doing on-the-fly DNA matching. Though, I've never seen someone even postulate a study that could confirm that little bit of information.
I do agree with a couple of the other comments so far. This news has enough merit to be under a section other than Idle.
In Berlin, Germany during the cold war era, the Stasi (Big Brother Police) knew this! They could track individuals with smell. In fact they have a room FILLED with little jars of every citizens' personal smell! I've been there and seen the rooms. They had special dogs trained for this too. They would open the jar and let the dog smell some... then go out into the city and find this person, they had a good success rate too which is kind of surprising. They would even track people by spraying different pheromones on their target.