Elephants Are Super Sniffers:

Some animals have a superpower in their sense of smell. They explore, interpret and understand their world with such sensitivity that people have enlisted canines to help solve crime and detect cancer on the breath. Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology are now homing in on the secrets behind animals’ super sniffers to develop an artificial chemical sensor that could be used for a variety of tasks, from food safety to national security.

“We turned to animals to understand what nature has already figured out,” said Thomas Spencer, a doctoral candidate in David Hu’s lab at Georgia Tech. “We are applying the underlying principles that we learned about these mechanisms to design a better sensor.”

Spencer will present the group’s latest design for an electronic nose that concentrates odors for improved chemical sensing at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, which will take place Nov. 18-20 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Their work began inauspiciously at a competition to develop a sensor that could identify different varieties of cheese. Turning to nature to guide their work, they traveled to the Atlanta Zoo to compare the way different animals sniff, from mice to elephants.

This is Kelly the elephant searching for food above eye level using her trunk.
 
Image by Thomas Spencer, CC-BY