![]() |
image source |
BBC News, July 2016
On the heels of another mention in the news of remote control insectobots, we
see a trend in artificial olfaction: explosives sniffing robots. If there's one
thing a robo-nose is good for, it's detecting dangerous things in our
environment. After all, this is a major purpose of olfaction. Actually, this
time they aren’t robot noses, they’re regular animals, but they’ve been
genetically engineered to have special olfactory appendages, or to be more
specific, they’ve been engineered to smell one thing really well.
Furthermore, and a point made in the article, humans can become super
sniffers for any smell as long as we’re trained to do it. I inadvertently made
myself super sensitive to mold after living in a basement apartment for seven
years, after said apartment was completely covered waist high in dripping
penicillium colonies, and I can now smell it in amounts way below what normal
people require.
*In fact, I’ll say this here –
mold is everywhere and I know because I smell it everywhere. Not the killer
kind, just the regular everyday mold-on-your bread kind. We already know it’s
everywhere, just like yeast is floating around us right now, no matter where we
are. But it comes in all different kinds, old mold, new mold, wet mold, dry
mold. Every building I go into I smell it somewhere, on certain days it’s
growing on trees and floating past your face, on certain people it’s pumping
out of the holes in their clothes, coming off of their hair or the dark parts
of their bodies, or the crevices of their cottonsuits; it’s everywhere. In
fact, last night I went to an outdoor bar/patio for drink;, it’s been raining
on and off for the past few days, and I could not get away from it – the smell
of mold, that is – I suspect it was coming from underneath the outdoor patio,
which has a tendency to be wet and dark, but later that night after I got home
I was bothered by a mold I don’t get every day – metal mold – not sure what
this is but I know what it smells like; I must have had my hand resting on
their (moldy metal) patio furniture all night I had to wash my hands a few
times before going to sleep. Anyway, I'm for hire. Although, it seems like my job is being taken over by robots and genetically engineered animals
No comments:
Post a Comment