The Quest To Make A Bot That Can Smell As Well As A Dog
That year, biologists Linda Buck and Richard Axel published a seminal paper; they discovered about 1,000 genes that code for about 1,000 olfactory receptors in mice, and they showed that those receptors are the beginning of a mammal’s sense of smell. Each receptor, their research showed, is uniquely primed to react to a few different molecules, and our noses sense distinct odors when many receptors fire at the same time. Inspired by Buck and Axel, who won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for their work, Mershin and other scientists conceived of odors as simply lists of molecules.
Source: www.wired.com