Nosing in on disease

Scientists have long known that sick people smell different from healthy people. The odors emitted by our breath, skin, and body fluids reflect complex changes in our metabolism and immune system, and a growing body of research points to the possibility of diagnosing diseases using smell.

Much of this research has focused on using animals—particularly dogs—to sniff out the differences between sick and healthy people. But the rapidly maturing technology of artificial odor sensors suggests we may soon see inexpensive and reliable odor-based diagnostic tools.

Britain’s National Health Service is underwriting a 3,000-patient clinical trial of an odor-detecting silicon chip from Owlstone, a Cambridge-based manufacturer of chemical sensors. The chip has layers of metals and gold electrodes that act as a chemical filter.

“You can program what you want to sniff out just by changing the software,” Owlstone co-founder Billy Boyle told The New York Times. “We can use the device for our own trials on colorectal cancer, but it can also be used by our partners to look for other things, like irritable bowel disease.”

Other researchers are teaching artificially intelligent sensors to improve their diagnosis of diseases by sniffing the combination of chemicals that make up a unique disease odor.

“We send all the signals to a computer, and it will translate the odor into a signature that connects it to the disease we exposed to it,” Hossam Haick, a chemical engineer at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, told the Times.

According to the newspaper, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Monell Chemical Senses Center are developing a DNA-based odor sensor that detects ovarian cancer in samples of blood plasma. Groups in Austria, Switzerland, and Japan are also developing odor sensors for medical diagnosis.

SpaceX internet?

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, wants to close the divide between those with access to broadband internet and those without. His solution: launch a constellation of thousands of internet satellites.

SpaceX’s vice president for “satellite government affairs,” Patricia Cooper, testified early in May before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. She revealed details about the company’s planned 4,425-satellite network it claims will provide global broadband internet to remote and underdeveloped parts of the world.

Cooper said SpaceX would begin launching prototypes to test the system as early as the end of this year, with the goal of launching the first phase of the constellation in 2019 and completing the entire system by 2024.

SpaceX’s constellation would operate in low Earth orbit between 690 and 823 miles above the Earth’s surface, creating a “mesh network” that could, in theory, provide high broadband speeds on par with fiber optic cable.

Cooper suggested that improved technology as well as reductions in space launch costs—due in part to the success of SpaceX’s reusable launch vehicle, the Falcon 9 booster—“are all driving an era where large constellations of satellites orbiting close to the Earth can provide … reliable, high-quality broadband service to areas of the United States and the world that have been underserved or not served at all.” —M.C.