Scent

Have you ever wondered what all 1,000+ Pokémon smell like? Because we have. With the news of a weird AI smell-o-vision device called GameScent, we’ve rounded up a list of which game worlds we’re most curious to get a whiff of – for better or worse.

Scientists have discovered that the giant panda, long considered a bit of a loner, has a surprisingly active social life, communicating with friends and family in a way that's akin to sharing status updates on Facebook.

A new computer-trained scent model has done better than humans at identifying odors. In analyzing 500,000 potential odor molecules that had never before been synthesized, it also handily did work that would take 70 person-years to complete.

Our sense of smell seems to be the least understood. To help shed some light on the system, researchers at Rockefeller University have taken the first cryo-electron microscope images of an olfactory receptor at work in the simple system of an insect.

Although we've already heard about plants that mimic the smell of rotten meat in order to attract scavengers, botanists have now discovered that a certain plant focuses that concept – it mimics the smell of dead beetles, to draw in one type of fly.

No matter how good we humans have made something, chances are nature did it better. Rather than compete, scientists have now tapped into a natural sensor with the Smellicopter, a drone that uses an antenna from a live moth to sniff out its targets.

Our sense of smell is now being used to help sell the illusion of virtual reality with the FeelReal VR Mask, which not only wafts certain scents your way but can also simulate rain, heat and wind on your face.

​In real life, you don't just see and hear things – you also smell them. Therefore, given that virtual reality (VR) headsets are meant to replicate real-world experiences, shouldn't they provide odors along with sights and sounds? That's the idea behind the smelly new Vaqso VR system.

​Currently, in order to check if someone has malaria but isn't showing any symptoms yet, a blood sample has to be drawn and analyzed. Thanks to an ongoing research project, however, it may soon be possible to detect the disease on the spot within seconds – using sniffer dogs.

​Could scent-tracking sniffer dogs be out of a job? Well, perhaps eventually. Scientists from Japan's Kyushu University have developed a prototype robot that can detect and follow odors left on the ground, such as those deposited in footprints.

There is really no good way to be woken up from a comforting slumber, but the makers of the SensorWake Trio suggest the wafting scent of a cup of coffee or warm cookies will get your morning off to a better start.

​It's important for us to be able to detect odors such as those emitted by spoiled food. However, what if there were a low-cost "electronic nose" that was better at detecting those things, providing us with an earlier warning? That's what's being developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.