[jerf]

We have a long way to go before we are even remotely as good at nanotechnology as biology is.

I'd give decent odds we'll sooner grow a dog nose in isolation and interpret the neural signals directly than build a machine as good as a dog's nose. (And I'm not saying that's easy, either.)

[chucksmash]

The mental image of walking through, say, a security checkpoint that contains an artificially grown dog nose that sniffs you as you go by seems as good a writing prompt for dystopic fiction as you could ask for.

[kevinmchugh]

There was a British company which attempted to develop drug and bomb-detecting tools powered by bees. They would condition bees to associate the smell of a particular drug or explosive with receiving a morsel of food. Then load the bees into cartridges, put a dozen or so of the cartridges in a wand format and hand them to security staff at airports.

It doesn't appear to have gotten off the ground, I can't even find the name of the company any more.

[intrasight]

Progress is being made. Twenty years back, I worked for a company that put a bunch of live cells into microtiter plates and use computer vision to see how they were responding to environmental stimulus. One of the contracts was with the military to detect battlefield biohazards. I've not been involved in some time, but I assume that this tech has progressed in the last twenty years.

[caprese]

> but I assume that this tech has progressed in the last twenty years

or completely shelved and waiting for you to connect the multidisciplinary dots.

[intrasight]

>connect the multidisciplinary dots

That's what I had done 20 years ago. So one reason that I returned to software after doing graduate work in neuroscience was the frustration of keeping cells alive while you poke at them. These titre plates full of thousands of different cells pose a problem orders of magnitude more challenging. Perhaps now it would be easier - engineer cells with the properties you need using CRISPR/Cas9.

[intrasight]

Bear in mind that the sense of smell is different from the other four senses in that there isn't a separate sense organ in the nose. The Olfactory bulb is actually part of the central nervous system. So to "grow a nose" you really mean "grow a brain".

[gwerbret]

This is entirely incorrect. The nose has a surface called an olfactory epithelium, in which are buried the actual sensory apparatus. Olfactory receptor neurons in here respond to the odors themselves, and transmit the information to the olfactory bulb. The olfactory receptor neurons are essentially analogous to related structures for the other senses, such as sight (rods and cones) and hearing (hair cells).

[jerf]

I know progress has been made decoding the nerve impulses directly for vision and sound, to the point that we can engineer machines that generate the impulses (pretty much the hardest test there is), with Cochlear implants being standard, off-the-shelf medical tech now [1]. The eye equivalents are harder, but prototypes are being built. (I don't think they're off-the-shelf tech yet, though.)

I have not heard anything similar about the olfactory nerves. I suspect they're going to prove to be much messier. Perhaps not necessarily "complicated" in some sense, but messier. But it shouldn't be impossible.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant

[lostlogin]

It’s intersting how the sense can get damaged too. Imaging for the problem (anosmia) can be very interesting. https://www.mayoclinic.org/symptoms/loss-of-smell/basics/cau...

[intrasight]

I stand corrected. I shouldn't rely on 30 year old memories. This is interesting "There are approximately 1000 different genes that code for the ORs, making them the largest gene family." - wikipedia