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Just kidding. But there is this announcement of the first
bionic eye implant. This can also be called a retinal prosthesis.
There's also cochlear prosthetics, for the hearing impaired. And
there's even people who can see with their tongues. (And don't forget the hand that feels.)
They all work by turning sensory stimulus, either photons
or sound waves, into electrical signals for the brain to understand, and using
whatever nerve fibers are available. These artificial sense organs are examples
of reverse-engineering - to know how something works so well that you can
detail its operations from beginning to end and everything in between.
It is generally understood that Science does not know
enough about olfactory perception to reverse-engineer it, and will not know for
a long time. The way aromatic molecules stimulate olfactory nerve receptors is
still under debate (shape vs. vibration), and what happens after that is even
less understood (although the popularity of deep learning neural nets might
change that, as they have a lot in common with the olfactory bulb). Smell
continues to be the most mysterious of our senses.
POST SCRIPT
Not to mention, smell is (I think) the only sense where
we can see evidence of evolution-in-action - people differ in the way they can
smell things down to the individual genetic profile, depending on genes that
are still in the process of change today. If you're reading this, you have a 2%
chance of one of your 'smelling genes' being junk. So you can't smell
asparagus-piss, or skunks, or semen, or sixty other possible candidates.
Therefore, to create an artificial 'olfactory prosthesis' is to undoubtedly
intervene in the trajectory of human evolution, in real-time.
read about our individual "smell fingerprints"
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