I’m not talking about just something to hold your glasses on to your face, but rather a device packed with a carefully woven maze of man-made chemical sensors that can detect and recognize odors.

Electronic noses – also known as eNoses — have been around for about a decade. They are instruments linked to analytical equipment such as gas chromatographs that would analyze air samples and report the intensity and quantity of an odor without the help of a human nose.

The older versions of the eNose could be trained or calibrated to identify a single specific aroma, such as a rose or skunk scent, and then electronically unleashed to ferret out that particular odor in different surroundings.

It has long been believed that the like or dislike of a specific odor is completely subjective, and can’t be quantified. But a group of Israeli scientists has done just that, according to this month’s Journal of Computational Biology.

The researchers, from Weizmann Institute of Science and the Edith Wolfson Medical Center, wanted to develop a nose that could detect and characterize a wide range of odors and could function as an environmental and safety monitors.

Using a device called a MOSES II eNose, with 16 metal-oxide and quartz sensors, they trained the “nose” to smell like a human or animal can and differentiate the aromas into pleasant and rally unpleasant.

Photo by All Word News.UK

“Because the nanopatch requires neither a trained practitioner to administer it nor refrigeration, it has enormous potential to cheaply deliver vaccines in developing nations,” said lead researcher Mark Kendall, a professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Being both painless and needle-free, Kendall said in a statement released by the university, the nanopatch offers hope for those with needle phobia, as well as the potential to improve the vaccination experience for young children.

Kendall told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the nanopatch is designed to place vaccines directly into the skin where a “rich body of immune cells are,”  unlike the needle, which injects vaccines into muscles with few immune cells. As a result, the vaccines delivered via nanopatch are more effective, he said.

The nanopatch targeted cells found in a narrow layer just beneath the skin surface. The patch was “much smaller than a postage stamp and comprised of several thousands of densely packed (nanosized) projections invisible to the human eye,” the professor said.

In tests on laboratory mice, Kendall and his team dry-coated influenza vaccine onto the projections, which are nanosized delivery points, and then applied the patches to the animals’ skin for two minutes, all it took for the full dosage to be delivered.

“Our result is 10 times better than the best results achieved by other delivery methods,” being developed elsewhere around the globe, he said.  “And by using far less vaccine we believe that the Nanopatch will enable the vaccination of many more people,” Kendall said.

“When compared to a needle and syringe a nanopatch is cheap to produce and it is easy to imagine a situation in which a government might provide vaccinations for a pandemic such as swine flu to be collected from a (pharmacist) or sent in the mail,” said the announcement.

“Our next step is to prove the effectiveness of nanopatches in human clinical trials,” he said.

Here’s a link to the version I wrote for AOLnewa.com.

These words did not come from President Obama, but rather were the conclusion of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and 12 leading civilian experts recruited to examine what the White House-run National Nanotechnology Initiative had accomplished since President Clinton created it a decade ago.

I dutifully reported that incestuous praise today on AOL News. It was only appropriate to give the federal nano gurus equal time, since last month I wrote eight stories on what many public health experts saw as dangerous shortcomings in the government’s programs to identify and regulate the safety of these wondrous atomic concoctions.

Here is a link to what I wrote today and another to the series of nano stories AOL posted last month.

The 71-page report by the scientific advisors said that unless the U.S. doubles the billions it’s spending on nano, China, South Korea and the European Union will wipe out America’s commercial edge, among other things.

Needless to say, the federal nano gang at the White House, NNI and elsewhere in the government is not happy with my reporting. They expressed their displeasure at length today in an Op-ed that AOL eagerly ran.

The White House advisors also shared their annoyance by issuing “talking points” to nano folks – in and out of the government – on how to respond to what I wrote.

Sensitive little group isn’t it?

Prof. Andrew Maynard

Personally, I think the world would be a bit better off if these policy makers focused more on determining whether nanoparticles are harmful or not before they urge everyone to fill the marketplace with them.

And, if all this isn’t enough to bore the hell out of everyone, here are more exciting views on this sparring match from one of the nation’s leading nano-safety proponents – Prof. Andrew Maynard.

Around the world, scientists are studying odor trying to determine a variety of possible applications.

For example, does each human have an odor print as uniquely distinctive as a fingerprint? Can it be quantified and catalogued so it can be used by law enforcement or as evidence in court? The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is putting out bids for a study to determine if human odor signatures can serve as an indicator of deception.

Photo ABC.au

In the clinical arena, does body odor reflect the health of a person?

This is going to get a bit gross, but there are some medical researchers who insist they can identify certain disease patterns by differences in the smell of stool, vomit and bodily gases.

Scientists already have identified odors in human breath and skin associated with diabetes, cancer, and other diseases, reports Ivan Amato, a senior correspondent for the American Chemical Society’s Chemical & Engineering magazine.

Researchers at several medical centers are pursuing the link between a person’s body odor and anxiety. This is not as far-fetched as you might believe. Remember, there are specially trained service dogs that can alert their owner to an approaching seizure.

In the current issue of the magazine Amato writes that  each of the 6. 7 billion people on this globe of ours has a signature body odor – a fingerprint, if you will – and scientists are tracking down those odiferous arches, loops, and whorls in the “human odorprint.”

Not all of the scent research is new.

Amato writes about an exhibit at the Stasi Museum, in Berlin. It chronicles the practice of the former East German secret police organization of surreptitiously collecting odor samples—from specially designed seat cushions, for example—with the notion of using these stored odors to identify and track suspect citizens by way of sniffer dogs.

Kenneth Furton, a scientist from Florida International University is searching for machine-detectable patterns in the volatile chemicals emitted by people.  Amato writes about a study funded by the Netherlands’ National Police Agency, where Furton swabbed the hands of 60 individuals with specially cleaned pads and placed these inside glass vials.

Then, using cutting edge sampling techniques that can measure the vapors in the vials, the samples were run through a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which identified 63 compounds. By applying a pattern-recognition technique, the researchers reported that they could distinguish the individual from whom the swabs were taken.

Significant advances are in the pipeline, researchers say.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the assault Monday from his agency’s war room and called it the “first-ever coordinated strategy to address current and future impacts of climate change on America’s land, water, ocean, fish, wildlife, and cultural resources.”

The agency boss said that Americans are experiencing first-hand the impacts of climate change, from growing pressure on water supplies to more intense droughts and fires to rampant bark beetle infestations.

His justification for heading up the war is that his department manages one-fifth of our nation’s landmass and 1.7 billion acres on the Outer Continental Shelf.

In the order he signed yesterday, Salazar created a new Climate Change Response Council which will coordinate Interior’s response to the impacts of climate change within and among the Interior bureaus.

He also announced the formation of eight DOI regional Climate Change Response Centers which will help regional managers coordinate action on the ground and carefully examine regional concerns.

With over 67,000 employees and 280,000 volunteers located at approximately 2,400 sites, Salazar has a good sized army to throw into the battle.

The agency says it supplies drinking water to more than 31 million people and irrigation water to 140,000 farmers, manages wildlife from the Arctic to the Everglades, is responsible for over 500 tribal nations.

If you want more details on Salazar’s battle plan, here’s is a link to the order he just signed.

And, for more info on what Interior does, here’s another link.

illustration by bsc dec.au

But he and his colleagues cautioned that the disturbing possibility that DNA evidence can be faked has been overlooked.
Any undergrad with basic lab equipment and a bit of know-how can crank out “practically unlimited amounts” of artificial DNA, which can then be used to salt a real crime scene with someone else’s genetic profile, said Frumkin.

Does this mean that anguish and worry fill the offices of criminal prosecutors around the globe and in jails and prisons everywhere cheers and joy fill the cellblocks.
Well, maybe not.

According to papers in the UK and U.S., forensic specialists question whether the falsification is as easy as Frumkin claims.
The Daily Mail in London cited British experts who said that while the science was possible, it was highly unlikely any criminal would go to such lengths.

Dr. Gill Tully, of the British government-funded Forensic Science Service, told the newspaper: ‘’You would need a full molecular biology lab, thousands of pounds worth of equipment and a fully competent molecular biology scientist or technician.’’

Frumkin’s company, perhaps not coincidentally, sells a kit that he insists can distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones.

Here is a link to the abstract of Frumkin’s journal article and the much longer story by the Daily Mail.

Listeria monocytogenes bacterium

What prompted Colin Pouton and his colleagues in Melbourne, Australia, to consider using a poison to deliver medicines?

The scientists looked at what we all know: patients by far prefer pills and capsules to the pain and nuisance of injections.

But these pharmaceutical science whizzes knew that many medicines and vaccines couldn’t be given by mouth because they would be destroyed by stomach acid without being absorbed into the bloodstream.

So now enters listeria monocytogenes, the bacteria that brings us listeriosis. According to the Centers for Disease Control listeriosis seriously sickens an estimated 2,500 persons each year in the U.S. alone, 500 of whom die.

Of course, as with most food poisoning agents like salmonella and E.coli, for every case that’s reported or identified, there may be a dozen or more that are never tallied.

Nevertheless, it was the listeria bacteria that the scientists down under genetically engineered into live bacteria, which can survive the internal hazards and harsh conditions of the human digestive process and pass easily from the GI tract into the blood.

Prof. Colin Pouton

Instead of causing disease, the genetically engineered listeria monocytogenes can be loaded with medicine or vaccine and deliver that beneficial cargo by infecting cells. After entering cells, the bacteria burst and die, Pouton explains, leading to his use of “suicidal strain” to describe the microbes.

According to the current issue of ACS , testing on animals have confirmed that the work of Pouton and colleagues proves the new technique is a way to give patients medicine and vaccines in pills rather than injections. The findings suggest that the approach could potentially work in humans, the researchers say.