Electronic Noses Hold Out the Promise of Sniffing Out Criminals

There has been CCTV, finger printing and eye recognition. Now comes body odour profiling. In its ongoing efforts to nail the bad guys, the US Department of Homeland Security is investing heavily in the sniff test: “odourprint”.

Plans have quietly appeared on the American government website to announce some serious funding of a study looking at the potential of using people’s individual smell to identify criminals and to uncover when they are lying.

There are scientists who claim our smell is just as unique as our DNA, and the work to be funded will look into the chemical nature of the human scent as utilized by crime fighters in the form of the bloodhound. Dogs have clued the scientists into the possibilities of smell technology although their accuracy has been shown to be as low as 85%, with an untrained dog doing no better pure chance.

But now efforts and research is under way to make the scrutiny of smell more exact. Tests have shown that mothers can pick out their babies by smell alone, while humans can be shown to recognise each other through the tang of their armpit BO. The smell of a human has also been shown to vary by gender and by age - one recent study claimed that men smell like cheese while women smell of grapefruit or onions.

Source:
Electronic Noses Hold Out the Promise of Sniffing Out Criminals
buzzle.com