The Dog's Nose Tango

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Andreas Mershin is an excitable research scientist at MIT. DARPA, the research and development agency for the defense department, wanted to figure out this dog superpower. He thought he had to build something that decodes a smell based on its tiniest parts. But maybe that's not how smell works.

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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