Diversity is a good thing in the never-ending effort to produce electronic noses that can compete with human and canine noses (and honey bee antennae) to smell out all kinds of important stuff: finding contraband like explosives and narcotics, watching over the maturation of a vintage wine, gauging blood glucose levels without a pin-prick…even detecting the telltale biochemical signature of a malignant tumor.
A team from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain and the University of Gävle in Sweden has rigged an array of 32 commercially available sensors that can sniff a bit of crushed fruit and tell if the source was an apple or a pear.