Skip to main content

I built a smell machine to protect dogs

[ad_1]


↑ Jennifer Day, biologist at the University of Washington at Seattle



Each year, poachers traffic thousands of tons of illegal wildlife products through the world’s biggest ports. Detector dogs like the ones I work with are among the most effective means of finding that contraband. Trained canines can sniff out minuscule amounts of ivory, rhino horn, tiger bone, and other illegal products with greater than 90 percent accuracy.


But these amazing canine workers will push themselves too hard if you let them. In searching cargo containers, trained animals can encounter toxic substances, dangerous machinery, and extreme heat. Some have even died on the job.



There is a way to make things safer (and more efficient): drawing air from shipping containers, running it through scent-trapping filters, and then giving that odor to sniffer dogs in a controlled environment. That way, customs officials can search inside a container without anyone actually opening it up. South African mine-­clearing company Mechem originally developed such devices in the 1990s in order to detect bombs, but small governmental wildlife departments can’t afford them. So my university’s Center for Conservation Biology teamed up with the World Wildlife Fund to make our own version from basic materials.



For the past year, we have been perfecting a 15-pound ­Ghostbuster​-style backpack. Inside, a lithium battery powers a leaf blower with an engine we reversed so it sucks in air. That blast travels through a hose to a removable canister—it attaches with bespoke 3D-​printed ­components—that contains the cotton scent-collection pad. I spear­­headed the design, and I remember going to the hardware store while very, very pregnant to look at leaf blowers and vacuums, putting my hands on them, and brainstorming.



Soon, we’ll start conducting small-scale trials, testing dogs with samples of shark ​fins. Once we determine how much odor they need to make a detection, we’ll train them on other materials. This has the potential to really revolutionize the way customs detects contraband.


As told to Mary Beth Griggs and Rachel Nuwer



This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.




[ad_2]

Written By Mary Beth Griggs, Rachel Nuwer

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

With Operation Popeye, the U.S. government made weather an instrument of war

[ad_1] It was a seasonably chilly afternoon in 1974 when Senators Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Clifford Case, a Republican from New Jersey, strode into the chambers of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a classified briefing. While the meeting was labeled “top secret,” the topic at hand was rather mundane: They were there to discuss the weather. More specifically, Pell, the chairman of the now-defunct subcommittee for Oceans and International Environment, and his colleague were about to learn the true extent of a secret five-year-old cloud seeding operation meant to lengthen the monsoon season in Vietnam, destabilize the enemy, and allow the United States to win the war. Though it cycled through several names in its history, "Operation Popeye" stuck. Its stated objectives—to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War—were never realized, the revelation that the U.S. government played God with weather-altering warfare changed history. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more