The Mystery of Smell

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If scientists can reverse engineer what's going on in a dog's nose, they could use a robot nose. But this is where the whole mystery of smell starts to be a big problem. We don't really know why one thing smells one way and why other things smell a different way. The idea has always been for the dog to translate what he knows with his nose to an electronic device.

Believe it or not, scientists still don't know how the sense of smell works. But they're looking at how powerful it is - dogs can actually sniff out cancer and many other diseases - and they're trying to figure out how to reverse engineer it. In fact, one MIT scientist may have built a robot nose ... without completely understanding how his invention works.

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